RIP William Peter Blatty

Movies
1

Wasn’t sure where to put this, but ultimately decided on Movies.

Blatty has passed, age 89. He’s best known for having written the book and screenplay for The Exorcist, but before that he also did the screenplay for A Shot In The Dark, which is one of the funniest movies ever made. Which…yeah. Blatty was versatile.

I also have great affection for The Ninth Configuration. It feels like Blatty’s version of Smile, a white whale of a story he never quite nailed down. The book is riotously funny, the movie version (which I believe Blatty directed) has some amazing performances in it, and simply as an exercise in over-the-top “just go for it” writing and filmmaking, both are worth your time.

2

He also directed Exorcist 3, which wasn’t great, but it does have one of the best jump scares ever.

3

Yep. No one would confuse Blatty with being a great director, but his “don’t give a shit” attitude about his own direction choices is kind of awesome.

4

I have never seen The Exorcist 3 in its entirety but I did see that jump scene on YouTube and it looks incredibly silly. I can only assume there’s a great deal of context lost.

5

Exorcist 3 isn’t a good movie, but it has a weird fever dream quality that makes it worth seeing. Also, Richard Burton slumming! EDIT: Nevermind, that was Exorcist 2. Exorcist 3 was George C Scott slumming.

Jump scares are never scary out of context; the whole point of jump scares is that the context creates the horror, not the thing that jumps out. The thing that jumped out in the original jump scare was … a bus.

6

As do I, both the movie and the book.

7

I love The Exorcist 3 and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I’d forgotten he directed it! Wow.

I’d also forgotten (or perhaps never known… it’s sometimes difficult to make that distinction at 45) that he wrote A Shot in the Dark.

8

I remember this as Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane!

The bar fight is an awesome scene.

9

Just a word about how big The Exorcist (book and movie) were back in the day…

It was a very different time. There was no Stephen King - Exorcist the movie was 73, Carrie the book was 74. Horror wasn’t really part of truly mainstream pop culture at that point. “Horror movie” meant re-runs of old Universal horror movies on late night TV or low-budget flicks that only ran at drive-ins or grindhouses and only teenagers watched. There were the occasional exceptions that went mainstream - Psycho, Rosmary’s Baby - but for the most part, horror was left off to the side.

Same thing with big-budget special effects movies being blockbusters. Spending a bunch of money on special effects was viewed as a risky gamble, not a sure thing, especially after 2001 failed to be a true hit.

The Exorcist changed all that. Suddenly every average joe and their mother, people you never would have pegged as reading a genre book or watching a genre movie, were talking about a girl spinning her head and vomiting. Newspapers were writing articles about the makeup and special effects wizardry behind it. Late night comedians sprinkled Exorcist references into their routines.

A few year later Jaws and Star Wars would come along and make the big-budget, special-effects laden genre movie a Hollywood staple. But it was really The Exorcist that blazed that trail.