Considered, by far, the most shocking horror film ever made, it brought in $484 million in its first year, which was fifty years ago, by the way, the equivalent of almost 4 billion dollars today and five times the amount that The Passion of the Christ made. Warner Bros highest grossing film in its genre, people lined up around every theater in America for hours to get in, a film that changed the way the world at large thought about the battle between God and the devil, between good and evil. Hollywood would churn out demonic possession movies year after year that followed Blatty’s model persistently keeping the idea of demonic possession of the most vulnerable among us fresh in the minds of the masses of each generation since. The newest specimen The Exorcist: Believer, inserted into The Exorcist canon of films, is probably the worst take ever.
What would possess William Peter Blatty, a self-reported Catholic, to write a novel like The Exorcist, penned in 1966 and published in 1971, to be in that headspace wanting to tell that story? Even Roman Polanski's 1967 adaptation of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, the woman swindled into having the devil’s baby, even Polanski, a known member of a satanic cult who has himself committed an unknown number of sinister acts, didn’t involve a little girl doing unspeakable things with a crucifix in front of an audience of millions of regular, everyday, unsuspecting Americans. Blatty, who has repeatedly claimed he was Catholic, his portrayal was so over the top shocking, blasphemous, and spiritually foul, that one has to wonder, what in the world was he thinking?
So, let’s look into that.
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