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William Peter Blatty (1928-) | |
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American screenwiter and novelist, who gained international fame with the theological horror tale EXORCIST (1971), in which a small girl is unaccountably possessed by the devil and turned into a repellent monster. The book was also filmed (1973) and together with a worldwide boom for the supernatural, it gained enormous commercial success. Blatty did not start as a horror writer, but a with comedies. His early works include the screenplay for A Shot in the Dark (1964), a hilarious Peter Sellers farce about the accident-prone Inspector Clouseau's investigations. "I remember very distinctly reading a funny ghost or terror story in Unknown by Robert Bloch. He started me on my writing career. I just fell apart with laughter, and I would call my friends and read the entire story to them. And I caught fire. I wanted to write something like that. And I started trying comedy, because it was the laughs that got me." (from Faces of Fear by Douglas E. Winter, 1990) William Peter Blatty was born in New York City, the son of Lebanese parents. His father left home when Blatty was six and in the space of the years the family lived at twenty-eight different addresses. Blatty's mother was deeply religious, which influenced his childhood and choice of schools. He attended a Catholic grammar school, St Stephen's in New York, Brooklyn Preparatory, a Jesuit High School, and Georgetown University, also a Jesuit school, receiving a bachelor's degree. Blatty studied English literature at the George Washington University. After receiving his M.A., he entered the U.S. Air Force in 1951 and was stationed in Beirut, Lebanon. During this time he started to write, and published his early articles in magazines, among others The Saturday Evening Post. After returning to the U.S. he worked as the director of publicity at the University of Southern California. As a novelist Blatty made his debut with WHICH WAY TO MECCA, JACK? (1959). His script for a Danny Kaye comedy, THE MAN FROM THE DINER'S CLUB, was produced four years later. It was directed by Frank Tashlin and told of a clerk who accidentally lets a credit card go to a notorious gangster. Blatty quickly became one of Hollywood's leading comedy screenwriters. In the mid-1960s Blatty started his cooperation with the film director Blake Edwards, writing such films as What Did You Do in the War, Daddy (1966), Gunn (1967), and Darling Lily (1970). In 1969, unable to find screenwriting work, Blatty rented a cabin in the woods near Lake Tahoe and began writing The Exorcist. Blatty has claimed in his autobiography I'LL TELL THEM I REMEMBER YOU (1973) that he could only complete the book because of anxiety over his mother's death. In the prologue Father Merrin discovers in Iraq an amulet of the Mesopotamian demon Pazuzu. In Georgetown Regan MacNeil starts to act strangely, and Father Damien Karras, a Jesuit priest and psychologist, fears that he is losing his faith. A friend of Chris MacNeil, Regan's mother, is found dead near the family's house and a homicide detective investigates the murder. Chris seeks Karras's help. Father Merrin performs the exorcism, but dies of a heart attack. Karras expels the demon from Regan by taking it into his own body and then killing himself. The book became in 1971 a worldwide bestseller, sold 13 million copies in the U.S. alone and paved the way for the rise of the horror-supernatural genre of the 1970s, with its famous representatives Peter Straub, Stephen King, Dean R. Koontz, Ira Levin and others. The inspiration for the book dated to 1949, when Blatty was at Georgetown University and read local newspaper accounts of an exorcism, involving a fourteen-year-old boy in Mount Rainer, Maryland. In 1970 the author, who had once considered becoming a Jesuit and entering the priesthood, started his research work for the novel. Ultimately it was based on an earlier case from 1928 and other historical cases dating back to the Bible. For some reason the writer Stephen King dismisses the book in Danse Macabre (1981): "... two novels of the Humorless, Thudding Tract School of horror writing are Damon, by C. Terry Cline, and The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty - Cline has since improved as a writer, and Blatty has fallen silent... forever, if we are lucky." The movie, which opened in December 1973, broke box-office records. It transformed the horror movie with its realistic and shocking effects - Friedkin, the director, retained many of the novel's images, including the projectile vomiting, head rotations, and the scene in which the possessed girl masturbated with a crucifix. In Britain this last scene was cut by the censor. However, the shot of the exorcist standing outside the MacNeil home, in the middle of a mist, is one of the most famous visual images of the film. Despite ten nominations, only sound and Blatty's screenplay won an Academy Award. The film was followed by two sequels. In 1977 Exorcist II appeared: The Heretic, written by William Goodhart and directed by John Boorman, starring Richard Burton, Linda Blair, Louise Fletcher, Max von Sydow, Kitty Winn, James Earl Jones and Ned Beatty. In the story Father Lamont, investigating the case related in the first film, found that the evil Regan, apparently exorcized, is only dormant. They reach the Washington house where the events of the first case occurred. Lamont defeats the demon, but at the cost of his own life. In his novel LEGION (1983), the sequel to Exorcist, Blatty used detective story structure to convey his theological message to readers. After the commercial disaster of Exorcist II, Blatty wrote and directed the film version of the book. The plot in Exorcist III centers around a serial killer, who is caught and executed, but whose soul is inserted by 'The Master' into Father Karras's soul, who died in the original version. The traces lead to a hospital, where a catatonic patient has woken and is becoming violent. Blatty has received several awards, including Golden Globe Awards (1973, 1980), Academy of Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror award (1980), and The American Film Festival Blue Ribbon and Gabriel Award for an episode of the religious 'Insight' television series titled 'Watts Made Out of Thread'. In 1998 Blatty received the Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement. He lives in California. Blatty is married; the family has seven children. For a moment there was silence. Dare gulped down the scotch and stared into the fire. "All that rot about eternal hell's fires and damnation. Just because I like Mackinaws more than silk blouses, I'm condemned to take bath in jalepeño juice and eat napalm hot fudge sundaes with Son of Sam for all eternity in some Miltonesque Jack in the Box. Is hell fair?" (from 'Elsewhere', 1999) After Exorcist Blatty has mostly written horror, although he does not wish to be regarded as a 'horror writer'. An exception in his early period, when he wrote comic novels, is DEMONS FIVE, EXORCISTS NOTHING (1966), a thinly veiled satirical fable about the author's involvement with the film. In his novels Blatty has debated the existence of God, the soul, the afterlife, and the nature of good and evil within a specifically Roman Catholic framework. Blatty's short novel, 'Elsewhere' (1999), was based on the idea that ghosts are dead people who refuse to accept that they are dead. For further reading: The Story Behind the Exorcist by Peter Travers and Stephanie Reiff (1974); 'The Exorcist and Jaws' by Stephen E. Bowles (1976, in Literature/Film Quaterly); 'William Peter Blatty', in Faces of Fear by Douglas E. Winter (1990); The Monstrous-Feminine by Barbara Creed (1993); Clive Barker's A-Z of Horror, compiled by Stephen Jones (1997); Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers, ed. by David Pringle (1998) - Blatty's film cameos: No Place to Land (1958), The Exorcist (1973), The Ninth Configuration (1980) - Quote: "I don't believe believers can be possessed by the Devil." Reverend Billy Graham on The Exorcist. Selected works:
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