THE EXORCIST and the Films and Novels of William Peter Blatty

I'm a longtime fan of The Exorcist, book and movie, and am fascinated by its various, mostly inferior sequels and prequels. I also enjoy the writings and films of its author and producer, WP Blatty, whom I have met and spoken with at some length (though not nearly long enough for my satisfaction!) about his work. He is a very funny, philosophical and thoughtful man, and these qualities certainly come through in his writing and in the two films he has directed.

I invite you to post your own reviews, comments, observations and opinions about The Exorcist (book and film), Exorcist II: The Heretic, The Ninth Configuration (books and film), Exorcist III: Legion (book and film), and the two prequels, Dominion and The Beginning. You can also, if you like, discuss Blatty's other screenplays, which include the Blake Edwards films A Shot in the Dark, Darling Lili, Gunn, and his other, non-Exorcist novels, such as Elsewhere, Dimiter and Crazy.

To begin, I'm posting my somewhat lengthy review of the 1973 film, with a brief summary of its genesis, and some observations which in my experience do not typically make their way into critical or fan reviews.

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The Exorcist (1973) ? What can be said about this stunning, visceral, finely tuned and brilliantly crafted horror film that hasn't been said before? Perhaps not a lot, but I'll do my best. Directed by William Friedkin (The French Connection, Sorcerer), The Exorcist is an almost word-for-word rendition of the novel by WP Blatty, who produced and wrote the film as well. Blatty was a comedy screenwriter (A Shot in the Dark, numerous other Blake Edwards films) whose career stalled in the late 60s when farces and black comedies were no longer marketable. So he returned to novels, in which he had previously dabbled, and spent a year writing what would become a worldwide best-seller, The Exorcist.

The story is based on the broad strokes of a real 1949 case, involving a boy, which Blatty had read about while a student at Georgetown University. Originally intending to dramatize the actual case, Blatty was compelled to change his mind when he met with the priest who had led the exorcism ritual. The holy man asked, for the sake of the victim, that the writer not reveal any of the actual details of the case, including and especially the identity of the boy, who was now a grown man. So Blatty changed the boy to a girl and fictionalized the events, all the while adhering to the general outline, progression and outcome of the possession and the ensuing exorcism.

The writer?s first draft of a screenplay version contained a montage sequence at the beginning, which encapsulated the on-set of the girl, Regan?s, condition, and quickly led the viewer into the full stage of demonic possession. Friedkin disliked this truncation, and asked Blatty to follow more closely the gradual, methodical development of the case as detailed in the novel. The writer assented, and the result is one of the closest book-to-film adaptations in movie history. Apart from the obvious such as inner character monologues and day-to-day minutiae, very little has been changed or deleted from the movie. What?s missing are subtle enhancements and re-enforcements of what is already stated or hinted at elsewhere. It could be argued that the film version is a streamlined and therefore improved interpretation of the book.

The slow progression of Regan?s malady is almost a separate film unto itself; this hour-long movie could climax with the death of Burke Dennings, and we might think we had been watching an after-school special about mental illness and the improprieties of foul language. An extremely good after-school special, but there it is. Once the demon?s voice has been revealed, however, and Regan?s chubby-cheeked face has become hideously scarred and gangrenous, replete with Village

 

I'm glad you started this thread Merlin, and the timing is interesting because I am currently reading Blatty's newest book, Dimiter.

I'm a huge fan of Blatty's writing, and the Friedkin film, though not such a big fan of the various prequels and sequels.

When the 1973 film was released, I went and saw it, and here are the conditions under which I saw it. I had not read the book and in fact I'd never even heard of the book. I don't think I even knew what an exorcism was. A good friend of mine who was a devout Catholic had read a positive review in a religious publication and he'd heard it was a unique film. (For that time, it CERTAINLY was.) The movie had been out less than 10 days and the gigantic avalance of publicity on national TV and in newspapers and magazines about the Exorcist had not really hit critical mass yet. At least I hadn't seen any of it. (The book did sell 13 million (!) copies in the U.S. alone) so a lot of people were ready to see it.

So my buddy and I innocently went to the theatre with no expectations or preconceived notions whatsoever. We were simply going to watch a movie, no big deal.

We knew something was up when we got to the Village theatre on University Boulevard near Rice Stadium. There was a line around the block. A long line. I had never seen a line outside a theatre before. It was freezing and we had to wait outside for a long time. It was the only theatre in Houston showing the film. We barely got in for the first screening of the day, the theatre was sold out. Again, we had no idea at all what was coming.

The movie began and we were riveted. Not just us. The whole theatre. When Karras first visits Regan's bedroom when she's wearing demon make up, I suddenly noticed my finger nails were deeply imbedded in the arm rest of my chair. I turned to my friend and said, "I would get up and walk out of this theatre right now but I can't get out of the chair." He said pretty much the same thing.

When we left the theatre we were totally exhausted. We went to eat a meal at a restaurant and I think we talked for three hours about what we'd just seen. We hadn't even been out of shock long enough to completely process the film in our heads.

I saw the film many, many times during the next few months and that along with 2001, Jaws and Star Wars and the Godfather were the movies that solidified my fascination with and love of film.

The longer the movie played in theatres, the strong reaction subsided. People had heard so much about it they went in DARING the movie to scare them. But even then it had a power to it. I've watched it many times over the years, and I'm amazed that though it has dated a bit, in some scenes it hasn't lost any of it's power. Max Von Sydow is awesome. He plays a very old priest in it, but you'd never know he was merely in his 40s. Dick Smith's make up job was superb.

Blatty's screenplay, which won an Oscar, is a model of excellent film writing. It's interesting though, that that's not the one he originally submitted for production. He'd written one that was very elaborate and changed things a lot, but William Friedkin insisted he stick closely to the book and give him a script that was lean and mean.

By the way, William Friedkin's director's commentary on the DVD is the absolute best director's commentary I have ever heard, especially during the last act. He understands at that film at the subatomic level. And he certainly understood how to translate Blatty's book into a film the public might revile but still would pay an awful lot of money to watch. The sound work in that film is practically art and I can see why it won an Oscar.

When I read Blatty's book, I'd already seen the film a few times and expected the book to be just an average horror tale, very pulpy but it wasn't that at all. He's a masterful storyteller with a great literary style, IMHO. One could argue in some ways that the success of the Exorcist paved the way for acceptance of the debut shortly thereafter of Stephen King and his su

 

When I was 16, I was home alone for three days due to a canceled trip planned in conjunction with a family vacation. My parents deemed that I was old enough to stay on my own until they returned from New Hampshire. Like any ordinary 16-year-old, I stayed up late and watched TV. On the first night of my stay, I was flipping through channels and came upon a scene in which a mother pleaded with a Catholic priest for help in saving her daughter. I was captivated by the acting, so I decided to finish watching it. Naturally, that was The Exorcist. I couldn't sleep for the rest of the night, since I was profoundly disturbed and happened to be living in a house that my siblings and I still consider to be haunted based on our experiences there.

A few weeks later, I decided I wanted to get to the rest of the story, since I had only seen half of the film. My mother had been apalled to find out that I'd watched it all, so I bought two books with my babysitting money--Silence of the Lambs and The Exorcist.

I'm not sure which I prefer more. There is the elegant yet banal prose of the original novel contrasted with the vivid imagery of the movie. Personally, I have always preferred horror/supernatural fiction to be in written form. I have little to no visual imagination and it is much more terrifying for me to draw up a scene in my mind based on the prose than to see a director's rendering of it. As a result, I have read the book much more than I have seen the movie.

On the other hand, the power of the movie cannot and should not be denied. It is a fantastic adaptation that is very close to the book, even if it leaves out one of my favorite subplots of Karl, his daughter and the detective.

I think the appeal of great movies is that they can touch on parts of our psychology in more than one ways. For me, I am affected both as a believer in Christ and as a human who sees good and evil as absolute certainties irregardless of their parameters as set by religion. No matter a person's religious background, there is a fundamental terror that The Exorcist resurrects in everyone I have ever spoken to about the movie.

In a round-robin discussion called "In Pursuit of Pure Horror," (http://harpers.org/archive/1989/10/0059066) , leading horror writers of the time were called upon to discuss something very similar. In this discussion, they call up the infamy of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-tale Heart" and reflect on why it is considered to be terrifying. They then go on to propose ways in which that famous story would have to be adapted in order to actually evoke the horror that it originally produced in its time.

The Exorcist, on the other hand, deals with timeless issues of human frailty. It not only faces the reality of death but the power of evil, something that we all have experienced in one form or another.

So, there you have it, my slightly-less-erudite opinion of why I love The Exorcist.

 

And then there's that cornball sequel.

Exorcist II: The Heretic(1977) ? What can I say about this muddled, nonsensical, unconvincingly staged and poorly assembled wreck of a ?horror? film that hasn?t been said before? Perhaps not a lot, but I?ll do my best.

Neither Blatty nor Friedkin returned to their creative chairs; Blatty was interested in writing a sequel (which later became a novel, Legion, and finally a film, Exorcist III), but Friedkin declined the opportunity. Fill-in producer Richard Lederer conceived the sequel as "a low-budget rehash" of the first film, employing unused footage from the first movie. But hired director John Boorman (Deliverance, Zardoz, Excalibur) wanted something more "adventurous" -- a "metaphysical thriller" and "a film about journeys", "a riposte to the first picture" which could be "about goodness" rather than "about torturing a child".

The movie may be all of that, but it is also one of the worst films ever made. Any summation if its plot necessitates liberal usage of the phrase "for some reason". Several sequences involving a biofeedback machine to facilitate deep hypnosis are silly enough, until, unbelievably, a non-possessed Regan and an imaginary, possessed Regan-thing bookend a psychologist (played by Louise Fletcher) each with a hand on Fletcher's breast, each rubbing the area furiously and entangling their fingers as they seem to contend for her heart. It's probably the weirdest thing I've ever seen in a major Hollywood production, and destroys the movie's credibility, which never recovers despite the presence of fine actors Richard Burton and Max Von Sydow. A climax with thousands of pieces of foam rubber -- sorry, locusts -- filling up the Georgetown house where Regan was previously possessed, while a sexy, "succubus"-like Regan struggles on the bed with Burton, and the house crumbles around them all, is fascinatingly awful.

Critics called it "preposterous" and "absurd". Audiences laughed it off the screen and even rioted at various openings. What went wrong? Evidently Boorman and creative partner Rospo Pallenburg daily rewrote a "really good script" by playwright William Goodhart, until the original version was unrecognizable. It could not have helped matters that production was shut down for a month while Boorman recovered from a fever, that Fletcher and another actress had bad infections, or that technical problems plagued the cinematographers and editors. Most of the participants went on to produce wonderful work -- Boorman's next film, Excalibur, is in my personal Top 10 -- but somehow the best intentions of all involved resulted in a movie which caused honest-to-God riots, and garnered poor returns, abysmal reviews and a diminished public opinion of the actors.

Exorcist II: The Heretic was once infamous as the quasi-official "Second Worst Film Ever Made", but recently that opinion seems to have (bafflingly) softened. Perhaps Martin Scorcese's defense of the picture, bolstered by Pauline Kael's singularly favorable review, has influenced that process. The ideas at the core of the movie are certainly engaging, but the execution remains, to my perception at least, almost completely without merit in spire of the talent involved.

 

JWD and Ishtar, it's nice to see the Blatty fans join the party/crawl out of the woodwork. I'll post my early experiences discovering the movie and the novel tomorrow. Meanwhile, JWD, I'd be interested to read your thoughts on the author's more recent novels. I've only read The Exorcist and Legion. How does Dimiter compare?

 

I've recounted elsewhere that I was haunted as a child by visions of the "Regan-thing" (as Blatty prosaically calls the possessed girl) and her horrible, husky, sarcastic voice. I do not exaggerate when I say I lived in mortal terror of that face and vocal apparatus for some three years of my young life. When I once told Mr. Blatty that my mother allowed me to watch his co-creation on film at the age of about 8, he looked stricken, even apologetic, and said, "Oh, that was a mistake." When I explained that even at age 8 I was a budding horror fanatic, and that the film had been broadcast on CBS television and was therefore edited for content, the author remained contrite and said simply, "Still." He seemed to understand that, even stripped of the foul language and the graphic violence on national TV, that hideous, scarred face and malevolent voice were simply too much for a child to bear, psychologically speaking. His creation is purely, destructively, ferociously evil, and that cannot help but have a profound effect on the mind of a developing young person.

My father, who encouraged and shared my love of horror films from a young age, made fun of my fear of Regan. I can still hear him shrieking in a ludicrous falsetto: "Daddy! It's the Essorcist!" I tried to explain that "the Exorcist" was the least of my worries, since that word applies to either of the two priests who try to banish the demon. But he didn't understand that, nor did he "get" how I could watch other horror films with such delight, and talk with a gleam in my eye about prosthetic make-up effects, contact lenses and colored Karo syrup, all while dreading to sleep alone in the dark attic of his country house because... well, what if the Regan-thing was up there waiting for me? I knew it was irrational, but "she" paralyzed all logic in my little brain. Those day-glow eyes, those cracked lips and brown teeth, the deep gashes in her cheeks, and worst of all, that haunting voice, all conspired to rob me of my reason and replace it with abject fear.

I met my anxieties head-on starting at about the age of 10, when I took a paperback copy of the novel (with the purple cover and that weird, unfocused image of an anorexic[?] girl) off my mother's bookshelf and began to read passages from it. I found the conversations between Father Karras and the Regan-thing, which go on for pages at a time, to be far more substantial and fascinating than in the film. They drew me in and, in a strange way, helped me begin to "get over" my horror. By age 11 I had read the entire book and soon moved on to other horror novels -- Wolfen by Whitley Streiber, The Dead Zone by Stephen King. And in meeting that which so terrified me -- in confronting the phantasmagoria of my nightmares through days-long immersion in a slow arc of corruption, confrontation and triumph -- I gradually overcame my terror.

I conveyed all of this to Mr. Blatty in a letter which I sent him in 2000, not long after meeting him. He responded, in the single letter which I received from him, that he was gratified to have contributed to my youthful literacy, at the same time he was moved by my former state of unreasoning horror. "The Exorcist is not for children," he wrote (I'm paraphrasing here, as I've since lost the letter), "but since you seem to have snapped out of whatever trauma my work inflicted on you, I can only say: thanks for being a fan."

That I am, Mr. Blatty. That I am.

 

Meanwhile, JWD, I'd be interested to read your thoughts on the author's more recent novels. I've only read The Exorcist and Legion. How does Dimiter compare?

I've only just now started it, and I'm pretty busy for the next few weeks so I probably won't finish it as fast as I normally would. Whenever I do get done with it, I'll post my opinion.

 

Any idea where one can find that? I've read all the WPB that my local and university library has, but can't find Dimiter.