The Exorcist by Mark Kermode

Author:Mark Kermode
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781839021732
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

A grisly Blair in full demon make-up

‘All those rumours of a curse were total nonsense,’ laughs Blatty now, recalling how they began:

Billy Friedkin had fallen vastly behind schedule, and he gave an interview to Newsweek magazine blaming it all on devils. The next thing, reports about all these troubling occurrences started circulating. But for God’s sake, if you shoot something for a year, people are going to get hurt, people are going to die ... these things just happen.

Blair with birthday greetings on the set of The Exorcist

If a confrontation with evil forces was happening anywhere on the production of The Exorcist, it was being played out not on the set, but in the editing room. According to Blatty, some time in the autumn of 1973, Friedkin screened a 140-minute cut of the movie which the writer/ producer had enthusiastically endorsed. But as the 26 December opening date loomed ever closer, Blatty found himself barred from post-production as Friedkin proceeded to excise a number of scenes which he believed were adversely affecting the pace of the movie. Having casually remarked that, ‘In editing The Exorcist, every attempt is being made to play down the metaphysics and play up the horror,’65 Friedkin had resolved to reduce to a minimum any dialogue of an explicitly theological nature, letting the action speak for itself. Blatty, who had felt from the outset that his work was in danger of being spiritually compromised, was clearly not going to consent to any such cuts and was therefore banned from the Warner lot by Friedkin, who alleged bluntly that he was ‘being a pain in the ass’.

Friedkin and Blatty’s disagreements about the theological message of The Exorcist dated back to their earliest meetings, when Friedkin simply refused to work from Blatty’s much-loved first-draft screenplay. During the writing of the second-draft screenplay, in which Friedkin had assisted Blatty by circling scenes from the original novel, Blatty had held fast to a lengthy exchange between Father Merrin and Father Karras in which the exact nature of Regan’s possession is explained. Located in both the novel and first- and second-draft screenplays during a lull in the exorcism just prior to Merrin’s death, this scene was always considered problematic by Friedkin, and had been gradually whittled down at his request. As it appears in my copy of the revised script, the scene reads thus:

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