NEW YORK: Novelist and filmmaker William Peter Blatty, a former Jesuit school valedictorian who conjured a tale of demonic possession and gave millions the fright of their lives with the best-selling novel and Oscar-winning movie The Exorcist, has died. He was 89.
Blatty died Thursday at a hospital in Bethesda, Md., where he lived, his widow, Julie Alicia Blatty, told the Associated Press. The cause of death was multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer, she said.
Inspired by an incident in a Washington suburb that Blatty had read about while in college, The Exorcist was published in 1971, followed two years later by the film of the same name. Blatty’s story of a 12-year-old-girl inhabited by a satanic force spent more than a year on the New York Times fiction best-seller list and eventually sold more than 10 million copies. It reached a far wider audience through the movie version, directed by William Friedkin, produced and written by Blatty and starring Linda Blair as the young, bedeviled Regan.
“RIP William Peter Blatty, who wrote the great horror novel of our time,” Stephen King tweeted Friday. “So long, Old Bill.”
Even those who thought they had seen everything had never seen anything like the R-rated The Exorcist and its assault of vomit, blood, rotting teeth, ghastly eyes and whirlwind head-spinning — courtesy of makeup and special effects maestro Dick Smith. Fans didn’t care that Vincent Canby of the New York Times found it a “chunk of elegant occultist claptrap,” or that the set burned down during production. They stood for hours in freezing weather for the winter release and kept coming even as the movie, with its omnipresent soundtrack theme, Mike Oldfield’s chilly, tingly Tubular Bells, cast its own disturbing spell.
From around the world came reports of fainting, puking, epileptic fits, audience members charging the screen and waving rosary beads, and, in England, a boy committing murder and blaming The Exorcist. The Rev. Billy Graham would allege that the film’s very celluloid was evil.
Named the scariest movie of all time by Entertainment Weekly, The Exorcist topped $400 million worldwide at the box office, among the highest at the time for an R-rated picture. Oscar voters also offered rare respect for a horror film: The Exorcist was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and received two, for best sound and Blatty’s screenplay.
More recently, Fox announced it would revive the story as a TV series, starring Geena Davis.