Whereas today most horror writers will go for cheap shock value, we can thankfully always take refuge in the novels of the past, and few show the depths to which the genre can aspire to better than The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. In the last few decades horror stories and movies have become so commonplace they have lost much of the charm and meaning which their scarce few ancestors used to bear. He later filed a canonical petition directly to the Vatican, receiving a response from an archbishop in 2014 who called it “a well-founded complaint.William Peter Blatty Establishes Religious Horror More things were wrought by Mama’s prayers than even Tennyson dreamed.” In 2012, Blatty sued his alma mater, Georgetown University, as he claimed it was failing to adhere to its Catholic identity. He remained a committed Catholic, writing of his mother in 2015: “My mother’s faith in God which radiated out from her like sunlight. “The Exorcist not only ended that career, it expunged all memory of its existence.”īlatty continued to write well into his eighties, releasing novels Elsewhere, Dimiter and Crazy in 20. “The sad truth is that nobody wants me to write comedy,” he said in an interview. In 1999, Blatty lamented that the Exorcist franchise had killed all appetite for his humour. A film sequel to his original, Exorcist II: The Heretic, had flopped at the box office six years before, and Blatty’s own sequel ignored it entirely, instead forming the basis for the next in the film series, The Exorcist III.

It was nominated for three Golden Globes in 1981 and won the best writing award against The Elephant Man, Ordinary People and Raging Bull.īlatty eventually returned to his Exorcist universe, writing a 1983 sequel called Legion. A meditation on God’s existence, the film was described as “the finest large-scale American surrealist film ever made” by Peter Travers in People magazine. He adapted, directed and produced a film version two years later. Photograph: Alamy Stock PhotoĪfter the success of the book and film of The Exorcist, Blatty reworked Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane! into a new book called The Ninth Configuration in 1978. Blatty, pictured with actors Linda Blair and Max Von Sydow at the 1973 Golden Globes ceremony.

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