William Peter Blatty obituary

William Peter Blatty, who has died aged 89, was miscast as a writer of horror. He shot to worldwide fame in 1971 with The Exorcist, a novel about the efforts of two Roman Catholic priests to exorcise a demon from a 12-year-old girl. The book sold more than 13m copies in the US alone, and two years later became a groundbreaking and immensely successful film, with Blatty winning an Academy Award for his adapted screenplay.

But The Exorcist marked the fulcrum of Blatty’s career. He had previously been known as a talented comic novelist and screenwriter, but after The Exorcist found himself having to fight the expectations of his audience for another horror shocker – when in reality the book is a story about faith and sacrifice.

It reflected Blatty’s own Catholic faith. He was born in New York; his parents were immigrants from Lebanon. His father, Peter, a cloth cutter, abandoned the family when Blatty was eight. He was raised by his mother, Mary (nee Mouakad), a devout Catholic and the niece of a bishop, in what he called “comfortable destitution”. She sold quince jelly on the street, and moved the family from flat to flat just ahead of eviction. But she made sure William was educated by Jesuits, on scholarships, first at Brooklyn Prep, then at Georgetown University, from where he graduated in 1950.

Blatty took menial jobs while studying for a master’s degree in English literature at George Washington University, then joined the US air force, where he worked in psychological warfare. After his discharge he worked for the US Information Agency in Beirut, then returned to the US to become head of public relations at what is now Loyola Marymount University, a Jesuit college in Los Angeles.

Moving to the bigger University of Southern California, in his spare time he wrote a comic memoir of his air force service, Which Way to Mecca, Jack? (1960). The following year he appeared on Groucho Marx’s television game show You Bet Your Life and, with the $10,000 he won, quit his job and began writing full time.

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His first novel, John Goldfarb, Please Come Home! (1963), was a farce that combined the U2 spy plane crisis with American football in the Middle East, and drew comparisons with SJ Perelman. He went on to movies with the screenplay for Frank Tashlin’s Danny Kaye comedy The Man from the Diners’ Club (1963), but wrote two more novels, I, Billy Shakespeare (1965) and Twinkle Twinkle “Killer” Kane (1966), a black comedy set in a military psychiatric facility, influenced by Catch-22 and by his own experiences in “psy-ops”.

In 1964 he began collaborating with the writer/director Blake Edwards on the second Pink Panther film, A Shot in the Dark. They then did the war comedy What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (1966) and the underrated noirish thriller Gunn (1967), an updating of Edwards’s 1950s hit television detective. He also scripted Promise Her Anything (1966), The Great Bank Robbery (1969) and a Charlie Chan parody, The Mastermind, which took seven years to gain release in 1976, with Blatty’s credit changed to a pseudonym. After a final film, Darling Lili (1970), with Edwards, he changed direction.

Blatty’s mother died in 1967, prompting in him the crisis of faith that lay at the heart of The Exorcist, though its direct inspiration was a notorious case of exorcism by Jesuits of a 13-year-old boy in Washington DC that occurred while Blatty was at Georgetown. The novel also benefited from the huge success of Ira Levin’s novel and Roman Polanski’s film Rosemary’s Baby a few years earlier.

Rosemary’s Baby ends with the triumph of evil, but Blatty saw his book, and Father Karras’s sacrifice, as a triumph of good. That point was overlooked somewhat, as the story of the priest’s internal struggle with faith was subsumed by Linda Blair’s performance in the film as Regan, and its special effects of spinning head and projectile vomiting. The Exorcist became the first horror film nominated for an Academy Award for best picture; the film and Blatty’s screenplay both won Golden Globe awards.

Publishers clamoured for a sequel, but Blatty’s next book was a memoir of his mother, I’ll Tell Them I Remember You (1973). He refused to have anything to do with the film The Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), though in 1983 he wrote his own sequel, Legion, which would become the basis for The Exorcist III (1990), Blatty’s second film as writer/director.

The first had been The Ninth Configuration (1980), based on his 1978 novel of that name, itself a rewrite of Twinkle, Twinkle. The original intention was that this should be directed by The Exorcist’s director, William Friedkin, but Blatty wound up funding half the costs himself after Friedkin dropped out and no studio would pick it up. It starred Stacy Keach, Jason Miller (Father Karras in The Exorcist) and Scott Wilson, and is a darker and wilder remake of the original novel; the astronaut character in the military asylum being consciously connected with the astronaut whom Regan warns against going into space in The Exorcist. Unsuccessful at the time, and appreciated more in Europe (he won his second Golden Globe, voted for by Hollywood’s foreign press, for the screenplay), it is now considered an underground cult classic.

It was hard to escape The Exorcist, and Blatty addressed that in a comic novel, Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing (1996), and in a book about the making of the film, If There Were Demons (2001). The film was reissued in a director’s cut in 2000, with Friedkin making changes to make the ultimate triumph of Karras more obvious. For the 40th anniversary reissue of the book, Blatty added an additional chapter aimed at further clarification. The Exorcist was eventually remade as a 2016 TV miniseries; a stage adaptation starring Richard Chamberlain and Brooke Shields premiered in 2012 in Los Angeles, and in the UK in 2016.

Blatty’s later writing included a short horror novel, Elsewhere, which appeared in a 1999 anthology; Dimiter (2010), about the execution of a priest in Albania, which Friedkin tried to get made as a film; and Crazy (2010), an offbeat novel set in 1940s New York that combines religious, psychological and horror elements of his previous work. His 2015 memoir, Finding Peter, deals with the death of his son, and “evidence of life after death”.

Blatty’s first three marriages ended in divorce; he is survived by his fourth wife, Julie (nee Witbrodt), whom he married in 1983, three daughters and two sons, seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

This article was amended on 30 December 2019 because an earlier version incorrectly referred to the book Tell Them I Remember You as a memoir of Blatty’s father. It was about his mother.