Legendary director William Friedkin died last month, just four months shy of the 50th anniversary of his most notorious film: “The Exorcist.” Released the day after Christmas in 1973, the movie irrevocably changed the pop culture landscape, and half a century later it’s only fitting that someone make a serious attempt to grapple with the legacy the film left behind.
In Nat Segaloff’s The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear, the former movie publicist forgoes the carnival barker approach to “The Exorcist,” which all these years later is not only the scariest movie Hollywood has produced but also the most controversial. The film, with its sacrilegious content and terrifying scenes, was ripe for publicity and exploitation. But Segaloff, who worked as a publicity agent at a Boston theater when the movie came out, mostly keeps his head by neither affirming nor denying the existence of Satan.
Segaloff doesn’t begin the book in 1971, the year William Peter Blatty’s novel was published. Instead he goes back to 1949, when a real-life exorcism was conducted on a young boy in Maryland (whose behavior Segaloff dismisses not as possession but as manipulation by a crafty kid). Convinced by one of the priests who participated in the exorcism that it was the real deal, Blatty, then a student at Georgetown University, was inspired later to write a case study that quickly became a novel
From there, Segaloff describes the nuts and bolts of adapting the novel into a movie as only a Hollywood insider
