the elements, the more important each becomes. So we're dealing with two elements: a screen that's black and type, the name of the film." The only other elements besides the title that had to be at the beginning of the film were the studio's name, and Blatty's and Friedkin's. The latter two were not on the best of terms at the time, according to Perri (Blatty had sued Friedkin and the studio almost two months before the film's release to make sure his name was included in the opening credits), which affected how he styled their names in the credits: "[Legally], their names had to be the same size but where Bill Blatty has three names, of course they had to be the same size." Perri first showed Friedkin a version in which both of them had their names in two-line stacks, but later changed it so Friedkin's name was on one line, to distinguish him slightly. For the words themselves Perri chose to keep the Weiss Initials typeface that had been used on the cover of Blatty's novel. The consensus among the filmmakers was that the words had to be red. But choosing an exact shade took some more time. "When it's exposed against black it tends to, what's called, bloom. It swells, it glows, it's very hard to control. I had to do a lot of exposure tests just to get the right red that wouldn't bloom." Perri's input into the film's opening continued after those credits, as the music abruptly shifts to an ululating male voice and the scene to the archeological dig site in northern Iraq. Friedkin told him he wanted the film to begin with a sunrise, even though he had not filmed one while there on location. The closest shot he had was one filmed at midday, of the sun in an orange sky, with rising heat visible. "I suggested that we create an implied sunrise and that's what's in the film now", Perri says, "a very, very long fade in, like a 30-second fade in of the sun in the sky but in black and white. It very slowly dissolves into color" That image gave the film the sense of beginning it had lacked. The title design was carried over into prerelease marketing for The Exorcist. Perri designed a poster with the scene where Merrin seems to be confronting the Pazuzu statute entirely