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

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

illiam Peter Blatty is author of the novel The Exorcist, as well as the screenplay for the 1973 movie. He was in New York this week doing promotional work for the occasion of the Sept. 22 re-release of The Exorcist, which features an additional 12 minutes of footage. Said Blatty in this far-ranging interview, "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."

Kathryn Jean Lopez: Where did the idea for a re-release come from?

William Peter Blatty: I have wanted this version from the beginning. I have fought for it for 27 years. Except for the enhancements that have been added because we are now in the 21st century — this is the movie William Friedkin [the director] would have given us yesterday — other than that, this is what he showed me. I saw it — I swear to you — at 666 6th Avenue, to which, at the time, I attached no significance whatever. And I thought it had the chance of being called a masterpiece, I really did. It was 12-13 minutes longer than the version that was released. Friedkin went back to the studio in Burbank, and under whatever influences that were exerted upon him, he cut it down to two hours. He told me that he didn't think it was a hit and that no audience would pay for more than two hours.

Over the years, I have tried hard. I almost got the studio to go ahead and allow me to do it on my own, but that came to an end when I realized I can't do this on my own without calling Friedkin. It was not happening. So I called him and I said, "Billy, I'm about to do this. You should be doing this. Would you do it, please?" And he agreed. But no sooner had the movie and all the editing equipment arrived at his home, than he called a head of production and said, "Why are we doing this? I like the picture just the way it is."

Lopez: What changed his mind?

Blatty: Somehow, about a year ago, I was able to drag him into an editing room where we had collected every bit of excised footage for which we had track and sound and sat and watched it. And in the darkened room, time and again, I hear him murmur, "That's great." "That's great." "I don't remember shooting that." And when we left the building he gave me a hug and said, "After 26 years, I finally understand what you were trying to do with this movie." Now he is its champion. He called me one night to say yet again, This is an infinitely superior version. It should have been this way in the first place. There's just one thing, Bill, that I don't understand. And that's, why didn't you have me killed?"

He adores this version. He just is crazy about it. We were both wondering how would it have done if it had gone out that way. It's hard to imagine a greater success than it was, but my sense is that it would have done even better. It would have accessed a wider, more mature audience because it would have had a moral center. And the moral center allows you to not despise yourself for enjoying the shock that you are seeing on the screen. It's just a better movie. It's complete. It's more satisfying.

Lopez: From the vantage point of the screenwriter and the author of the novel, was the first version a bad movie in any way?

Blatty: No, it was a great movie. It moved the emotions. It was deeply disturbing. Some reviewer for a Santa Monica newspaper once wrote about another of my pictures that "It is disturbing, and that is the purpose of art, to disturb, to move the sensibilities, to give you a perspective." It was a great movie, but it was incomplete. It was half a movie. It went from shock to shock to shock, once it got started. It left you numb and reeling at the end. But it also left you wondering, What the hell happened? Friedkin and I, the day before we shot the Karras-out-the-window sequence — the only time we really collaborated doing the shooting, besides on the screenplay — was on how the shot should be put together so that there was no misunderstanding from the audience about what was happening, that it was Karras taking the demon out the window, as the demon was about to strangle the little girl.

Cut to about a month after the release of the movie. I am invited to dinner at the home of the president of Warner, Frank Wells, God rest his soul, now passed away, a lovely man. Frank and I were in his den having a drink, while our wives were in the kitchen, and I started to complain about the stupidity of the average audience of The Exorcist, for misapprehending what happened in that scene. And I went through the whole thing with him. We choreographed it shot for shot so that the leanest intelligence in the audience couldn't misinterpret what happened. But they do. They think the demon took care of Karras and the whole movie is a downer. And there was a silence. Frank put his drink down. He was an honest man. He said, Bill, that's what I thought happened. My only explanation over the years that satisfies me is that by then the audience has been numbed. They're not thinking anymore.

Anyway, that's why I've always wanted the original ending of the novel — because even though it doesn't explain anything, it gives you a feeling everything's okay. It gets to you viscerally, saying, it's all right.

Lopez: Do you think that the original, for the people who didn't have access to your explanations, glorified evil?

Blatty: That's a silly interpretation. How does it glorify evil?

Lopez: Because at the end they see Fr. Karras's eyes and think the demon won.

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.

Lopez: The 1949 exorcism case upon which The Exorcist was loosely based — there here have been stories claiming that it's not true, that it was not an exorcism. What is that all about?

Blatty: I didn't read the Brill's Content article though I was interviewed for it. I started to read the article that started it all in Strange magazine, and I got as far as the charge that the bed was on rollers and it would have been easy for the boy to manipulate the bed. I doubt the validity of that; are we to believe that this writer went to that home, presuming that the same bed is there 50 years later, and examined the bed? Give me a break! I took the magazine and flipped it in the garbage. The explanations are more absurd than simply the supernatural fact.

When I was a student at Georgetown, we would read in class the miracle of the loaves and fishes in the New Testament Studies course. Our resident atheist raised his hand and said, "Well, I've heard that everybody came there with a little bread tucked under their cloaks and a couple of fish each. And as soon as he said 'Let's eat,' out it all came." Why do people selectively trust stories in the Bible?

The invincibly ignorant materialist mind. The mechanistic clockwork universe of the 19th and part of the 20th century was clearly the biggest superstition of both those centuries. It's mad. They're telling us now that there are no such things as things. That there are only processes and that matter is only an illusion. That electrons can move from point a to point y without traversing the space in between. That a positron is an electron travelling backward in time. I mean, in a universe like this can you really have a word or concept like surprise?

Lopez: But aren't they teaching things like that at your alma mater, Georgetown, now? What's your relationship with Georgetown been since graduating?

Blatty: Oh, we do not speak. I started sending scathing faxes to Father O'Donovan about a year ago, which he never responded to. How can you criticize former basketball coach John Thompson because he wants to own a few slot machines in a Las Vegas airport, and keep your mouth shut about your pal Bill Clinton refusing to allow the passage of an anti-partial-birth-abortion bill. We know now that infants in the womb experience pain. And the infant — and he is an infant — is being horribly tortured and mutilated and killed. It boggles my mind. It makes me absolutely crazy. He is the president of the oldest Catholic university in America. He is a disgrace.

Lopez: Have you been paying attention to Georgetown since you graduated?

Blatty: It all started when they dropped Shakespeare and Chaucer in favor of lesbian literature and studies. That was the beginning of my awakening about Georgetown. It is so embarrassing to tell people I am a Georgetown graduate. It's just a sickening atmosphere there — where students can yell, Keep your rosaries off my ovaries.

Lopez: It's not the school you graduated from.

Blatty: It's not the world I graduated from.

Lopez: Many people have commented on the horrifying crucifix scene in the movie. Those who have read your book realize that there is an even worse scene — the description of the Black Mass. Why wasn't that in the movie?

Blatty: I never attempted to put that in. That would have been seen as pure titillation. There was some conversation at the party scene about the number of Black Masses were occurring in Paris. At that time, about 50,000 a year in the city of Paris alone. But I never attempted to put in details about what happens at a Black Mass. People could not take that on the screen. Not even today. But it was definitely the most horrifying part of the novel.

Lopez: Were you surprised that the crucifix scene made it into the final cut?

Blatty: Well, we did try to sanitize it as much as we could. We didn't show the crucifix penetrating. We kept it all at a discreet camera aperture. And that wasn't Linda Blair. And it was really just a box filled with sand. But nevertheless, it made us nervous. Linda Blair had no idea what was going on. She had not a clue. She would giggle after every take. We were nervous wrecks.

Lopez: Was there any conversation about making it an older teenager or an adult even?

Blatty: I have an admission to make. My idea — this is part of my road to absolute abasement if not humility — I wanted to use a midget. I couldn't imagine any child carrying out this performance. Neither could Mike Nichols when he turned it down. He was one of our list of seven top directors who turned it down.

Lopez: Could you have used an adult?

Blatty: The Exorcist would never have worked with an adult. I remember there was a novel with a young woman of 17 or 18 being possessed. It didn't work. It's the helplessness of the child that's essential in grabbing your emotions.

Lopez: How did your novel become a movie?

Blatty: Well, I didn't think that there was a movie in it. I signed the contract and I said I'll do my best to write one — I had to make a living. But I didn't think we would get a movie out of it to show in public theaters. I gave a producer named Paul Monash — Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid — the option, he bought the six-month option to produce the movie.

Lopez: Were you involved in the sequels?

Blatty: III — I directed The Exorcist III.

Lopez: Why weren't the sequels as successful?

Blatty: Well, II was an execrable movie. I read the script, it was smuggled out to me. At first I thought it was an elaborate joke. I read it once, I thought, this is insane, this is not going to be a movie. I called the producer. I said, you are not going to produce this. I read from the script I had in my hands to make sure that it was the script and he said "Yes, it was." I said, "You're mad. You are not going to produce this." He said, "Everybody here thinks it's a masterpiece."

Lopez: Did they need your permission?

Blatty: They had my permission, but I had no screenplay approval. They asked me at first to write it, but I said No, because I couldn't think of a story. It's over. Down the steps, that's it. I remember one executive saying, well, even if it is a disaster, it has got to make $60 million. Well, it didn't. It closed, as they say, about three nights after it opened. I don't know how you could look at it and not know that it was an absolute disaster. Richard Burton intoning lines like, "I've flown this route before on the back of a giant locust." Be still my heart.

Lopez: What happened to Exorcist III?

Blatty: Well, who came to see III? The mature audience had been turned off by Exorcist II. Who turned out for II? The universal acned brain. But there was not one drop of blood in the film. Not one moment of violence was ever shown on screen. All the murders, which were all decapitations and exsanguinations, were shown off screen. It made them crazy.

Lopez: What do you make of the genre The Exorcist spawned?

Blatty: There were direct rip-offs at the time. Most of them were quite dreadful. The only really good film in the genre was The Omen.

Lopez: Some have suggested that there is blasphemy in The Exorcist, in the movie. Or that it opened the door for blasphemy in future films. Do you agree at all?

Blatty: No, it's the opposite with The Exorcist. And I cannot be responsible for rip-offs. But I would be happy to see a continuation of a trend that suggests there is a transcendent force in the universe and that spirits exist — that we are something more than molecular structures. I embrace that.