De Bont was scalped by a lion at some point during the production. The animal — identified in some accounts as Cherries — attacked his head, and the wound required two hundred and twenty sutures. He recovered and returned to work. The fact that he returned to work, and that the production continued, and that the film was completed, reflects something about the commitment of the people who made it: whatever the cost in physical terms, they did not stop.
The production also, at various points, stopped involuntarily. The February 1978 flood — caused by a dam and berm failure on the property — was the most severe such stoppage. The water that came through the property destroyed sets, damaged equipment, and caused the escape of fifteen lions and tigers from their enclosures. The search and recovery effort required by the escape of that many large predators from a private property is not a small operation; finding and returning fifteen lions and tigers to their enclosures is the kind of work that requires considerable resources and considerable time. The production halted for approximately a year.
During the halt, the financial situation worsened. The original investors had already withdrawn. Marshall was funding the production with family assets. The cost of the flood damage — more than three million dollars — added to an already extended budget. When the production resumed, it did so with a different crew composition; some of the people who had been present before the flood chose not to return.
The total cost of eleven years of project development, five years of filming, and an uncertain amount of post-production work ended at approximately seventeen million dollars. The Exorcist’s profits, the family property, the investor capital that was drawn in and then withdrawn — all of it added up to seventeen million dollars for a film whose worldwide theatrical gross, when it was eventually distributed, was under two million.