As a cinematic genre, horror serves as a reflection and reproduction of a population’s anxieties, offering a site for analyzing particular formulations of terror in a given sociopolitical moment. William Friedkin’s 1973 film The Exorcist is one such object for analysis. Depicting the demonic possession of 12-year old Regan MacNeil in Georgetown, Washington D.C., the U.S. horror film follows her rapid psychological and moral deterioration, the demon’s influence on her home, and the eventual exorcism performed on her body by two Catholic priests. Though the film has been read through the lens of sexual and gender studies (Daniel Humphrey 2014), little scholarly attention has been given to the film’s opening scene: a 10-minute prologue identifying Iraq as the origin of the demonic presence. With such audiovisual components as the adhan and faceless crowds of veiled Arabs used as Orientalist signals, The Exorcist depicts a particular Muslim/Arab territory as the geographical source from which the monstrous emerges. This detail not only contextualizes the subsequent victimization of a white, U.S. gendered body, but simultaneously identifies an ethnoreligious origin for the film’s employment of sexual aberration and blasphemy as its tool of horror -- Regan’s possession marked by such moments as her use of sexually expletive language and desecration of a Virgin Mary statue. Grounded in media, feminist, and critical ethnic studies, my project analyzes the neglected connection between the Iraq prologue, its use in positioning the demon as Arab/Muslim, and its consequential image-production of the Middle East as a site of profane, sexual horror—a horror directed specifically towards the U.S. domestic body. I argue that the film builds upon the Orientalist imagination of the Arab/Muslim as sexually deviant (Arjana 2015), and reflects emergent gendered, sexual notions of Arab violence unique to the late 1960’s and early 1970’s international contexts. In conversation with the methods of cinema scholar Melani McAlister (2005), I read the film as being further influenced by popular U.S. conceptions of the Arab as a terrorist threat to the American domestic sphere, influenced by the televised broadcasts of such events as the 1972 Munich Massacre, dually defining the notion of ‘terror.’ Through the examination of this U.S. cinematic object, then, I examine The Exorcist as a site within which gendered, sexual, and ethnoreligious imaginings of the Middle East are particularly interpreted and reproduced – locating a horror for the 1970’s American voyeur.