NRO Weekend, September 16-17, 2000
The Exorcist, Unplugged
An interview with author William Peter Blatty.

By Kathryn Jean Lopez-----------------lopezk@ix.netcom.com

Blatty: Well, that's their problem. If you slow down the film, there's no question who won. Let me take you through it: "Come into me. Come into me." All of a sudden he reels back and we do something magical to his face. It's demonic. I mean it's green. He reached out to kill the kid. His hands are around her neck. At the last second he says No and his face is his own again and out the window he goes. How can you misinterpret that?

Do they say it's a downer because he dies? Hey — we're all going to die. That's what the Christian message is all about. It's about the Resurrection. Oh well.

Lopez: Do you think if The Exorcist made its appearance today for the first time it would be as successful as it was?

Blatty: Well, if you ask me had it come out ten years ago, I would have said I don't have any idea, except that it does have, because of its artistry, the direction, and the performances, a magical quality about it that has got to take hold of your emotions somehow, at all times. However, my answer would still be, I don't know.

But if you ask me about today, my guess is yes, because the pendulum has swung back. There is such a craving for faith and transcendence, something to hold on to, I think it would have had a great shot to do even better.

My wife thinks that this was all meant to be — that the American culture needs the message of The Exorcist today, and the full version. I hope that's true.

Lopez: Is it your experience that people simply don't get the movie?

Blatty: Yes. That's fostered by the culture of the teenager. If you go onto one of these chat rooms for The Exorcist — either on America Online or Warner Brothers, you'll find some adults there, they are always reminiscing about the day they saw it and what it did to their lives. Other than that, I call it the universal acned brain. That's what out there. All they want to talk about is what is the scariest. No, The Shining. No, The Omen. The Exorcist rules.

Lopez: Do you have any insights on why it is that the majority of the country believes in God, but they don't believe in the other — Satan?

Blatty: Well, I'm not sure I do. I've reflected on this a lot. Ultimately, I go to the Gospels and the exorcisms done by Christ. And if I am not mistaken, he always speaks of an unclean spirit. Not Old Scratch himself. And that's what I think it is. I prefer to think of possession as involving a disembodied intelligence and possibly there's someone who is dead who is acting malevolently. I personally started out thinking that the demon was the classic fallen angel. I'm not so inclined to believe that anymore. I don't know what it is, but it is intelligent, and it is disarming. And it behaves very poorly. But not in all historic cases. There are benign cases of possession. And one of them was studied by William James, the famous psychologist. He studied at great, great length. But I guess it is just as easy to refer to the invading spirit as a demon as it is to refer to it as schizophrenia, because we know no more about schizophrenia than we do about demons. It's as good a name as any.

As to whether or not it is the Prince of Darkness himself operating, my mind is always open to a belief that goes back to even as far as we have spoken traditions in history. In every part of the world in every culture, there is a story about, as with the Algonquin Indians, an evil magician, who spoils the work of the Creator, who comes in riding on the backs of turtles and introduces disease and death and so on. Well, something like that happened. We call it Original Sin or the Fall. Something is out of whack. This is not the way things are supposed to be. We recognize that. Whether or not it is an intelligence almost as powerful as God, I now find that a little hard to wrap my mind around. Demons, yes; Satan, I don't know. As I say, my mind is open to that possibility.

Lopez: What was your research like before you sat down to write the novel?

Blatty: I tried so hard to find someone who knew anyone who had ever performed an exorcism. I tried all my Church and Jesuit sources and could not come up with anyone, until I finally located the exorcist of the 1949 case. So where was most of my research done? In the Library of Congress. I got absolutely everything that's there, but there isn't a lot there. What is there, what helped persuade me even before I started corresponding with Father William Bowdern, the 1949 exorcist, was that it reached all the way back to ancient Egyptian chronicles in which there are accounts of possession and rituals of exorcism through today in each and every part of the world, and with a common symptomology. I had to give some credence that there is some authentic phenomenon; whether or not this case or that case is the real thing, I don't know. But, yeah, there is something going on. Definitely. The phenomenon in general is authentic.

But then, I located this exorcist, and his first letter was clear, he wanted to help me. He told me, "I think it would do a great deal of apostolic good for the details of this case to be widely known. I went to the Archbishop and he said no, that the family of the boy involved still insisted upon total secrecy, which of course in itself, helped persuade me that this was the real thing — these were not a bunch of kooks. And it was his last paragraph — he said that I can tell you one thing: The case that I was involved with, was the real thing. I had no doubt about it then, I have no doubts about it now.

It was only when I received that letter from this obviously rational, reticent, decent, common-sense person that I finally had what I felt was my one authentic case that gave me the energy now to plunge into the novel because now I fully believed. I was as doubtful as Karras.

Continue to Page 3 of
The Excorist, Unplugged.