The second novel in The Exorcist trilogy of books, William Peter Blatty’s The Ninth Configuration, penned in 1966 and was made into a film of the same name released in 1980 contains some compelling nods to a couple of Stanley Kubrick films. But, there's much more to this story than just that.
The Ninth Configuration is the story of an army psychiatric hospital located in an abandoned castle on a remote mountain that treats only high-ranking military personnel. Blatty wrote and directed, scripting the film as a dark absurdist comedy. Pazuzu, and a mix of religious and satanic statues, looking like the Denver Airport, are oddly part of the facility’s décor.
Colonel Hudson Kane, played by Stacy Keach, is a military psychiatrist who is brought in from a special unit with the task of determining if these high-ranking army vets fresh off the front lines are faking their insanity to get out of active duty. All of the patients are decorated army vets except one, Captain Billy Cutshaw, (played by Scott Wilson who plays Dr. Temple in Exorcist III), an astronaut who had a last-minute mental breakdown and was dragged screaming from the launch pad causing the Apollo mission to the moon to be aborted, and the same astronaut who Regan, in the first novel, prophesied would be killed in space.
The Ninth Configuration is full of many layers of philosophical meaning and esoteric symbols. Analyzing this film proved to reveal much more than meets the eye.
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