Originally published in 1971, The Exorcist, one of the most controversial novels ever written, went on to become a literary phenomenon: It spent fifty-seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, seventeen consecutively at number one. Inspired by a true story of a child's demonic possession in the 1940s, William Peter Blatty created an iconic novel that focuses on Regan, the eleven-year-old daughter of a movie actress residing in Washington, D.C. A small group of overwhelmed yet determined individuals must rescue Regan from her unspeakable fate, and the drama that ensues is gripping and unfailingly terrifying. Two years after its publication, The Exorcist was, of course, turned into a wildly popular motion picture, garnering ten Academy Award nominations. On opening day of the film, lines of the novel's fans stretched around city blocks. In Chicago, frustrated moviegoers used a battering ram to gain entry through the double side doors of a theater. In Kansas City, police used tear gas to disperse an impatient crowd who tried to force their way into a cinema. The three major television networks carried footage of these events; CBS's Walter Cronkite devoted almost ten minutes to the story. The Exorcist was, and is, more than just a novel and a film: it is a literary landmark. Purposefully raw and profane, The Exorcist still has the extraordinary ability to disturb readers and cause them to forget that it is "just a story." Newly polished and added to by it author and published here in this beautiful fortieth anniversary edition, it remains an unforgettable reading experience and will continue to shock and frighten a new generation of readers.
Prologue
Northern Iraq…
The blaze of sun wrung pops of sweat from the old man’s brow, yet he cupped his hands around the glass of hot sweet tea as if to warm them. He could not shake the premonition. It clung to his back like chill wet leaves.
The dig was over. The tell had been sifted, stratum by stratum, its entrails examined, tagged and shipped: the beads and pendants; glyptics; phalli; ground-stone mortars stained with ocher; burnished pots. Nothing exceptional. An Assyrian ivory toilet box. And man. The bones of man. The brittle remnants of cosmic torment that once made him wonder if matter was Lucifer upward-groping back to his God. And yet now he knew better. The fragrance of licorice plant and tamarisk tugged his gaze to poppied hills; to reeded plains; to the ragged, rock-strewn bolt of road that flung itself headlong into dread. Northwest was Mosul; east, Erbil; south was Baghdad and Kirkuk and the fiery furnace of Nebuchadnezzar. He shifted his legs underneath the table in front of the lonely roadside chaykhana and stared at the grass stains on his boots and khaki pants. He sipped at his tea. The dig was over. What was beginning? He dusted the thought like a clay-fresh find but he could not tag it.
Someone wheezed from within the chaykhana: the withered proprietor shuffling toward him, kicking up dust in Russian-made shoes that he wore like slippers, groaning backs pressed under his heels. The dark of his shadow slipped over the table.
“Kaman chay, chawaga?”
The man in khaki shook his head, staring down at the laceless, crusted shoes caked thick with debris of the pain of living. The stuff of the cosmos, he softly reflected: matter; yet somehow finally spirit. Spirit and the shoes were to him but aspects of a stuff more fundamental, a stuff that was primal and totally other.
The shadow shifted. The Kurd stood waiting like an ancient debt. The old man in khaki looked up into eyes that were damply bleached as if the membrane of an eggshell had been pasted over the irises. Glaucoma. Once he could not have loved this man. He slipped out his wallet and probed for a coin among its tattered, crumpled tenants: a few dinars; an Iraqi driver’s license; a faded plastic Catholic calendar card that was twelve years out of date. It bore an inscription on the reverse: WHAT WE GIVE TO THE POOR IS WHAT WE TAKE WITH US WHEN WE DIE. He paid for his tea and left a tip of fifty fils on a splintered table the color of sadness.
He walked to his jeep. The rippling click of key sliding into ignition was crisp in the silence. For a moment he paused and stared off broodingly. In the distance, shimmering in heat haze that made it look afloat like an island in the sky, loomed the flat-topped, towering mound city of Erbil, its fractured rooftops poised in the clouds like a rubbled, mud-stained benediction.
The leaves clutched tighter at the flesh of his back.
Something was waiting.
“Allah ma’ak, chawaga.”
Rotted teeth. The Kurd was grinning, waving farewell. The man in khaki groped for a warmth in the pit of his being and came up with a wave and a mustered smile. It dimmed as he looked away. He started the engine, turned in a narrow, eccentric U and headed toward Mosul. The Kurd stood watching, puzzled by a heart-dropping sense of loss as the jeep gathered speed. What was it that was gone? What was it he had felt in the stranger’s presence? Something like safety, he remembered; a sense of protection and deep well-being. Now it dwindled in the distance with the fast-moving jeep. He felt strangely alone.
By ten after six the painstaking inventory was finished. The Mosul curator of antiquities, an Arab with sagging cheeks, was carefully penning a final entry into the ledger on his desk. For a moment he paused, looking up at his friend as he dipped his pen-point into an inkpot. The man in khaki seemed lost in thought. He was standing by a table, hands in his pockets, staring down at some dry, tagged whisper of the past. Curious, unmoving, for moments the curator watched him, then returned to the entry, writing in a firm, very small neat script until at last he sighed, setting down the pen as he noted the time. The train to Baghdad left at eight. He blotted the page and offered tea.
His eyes still fixed upon something on the table, the man in khaki shook his head. The Arab watched him, vaguely troubled. What was in the air? There was something in the air. He stood up and moved closer; then felt a vague prickling at the back of his neck as his friend at last moved, reaching down for an amulet and cradling it pensively in his hand. It was a green stone head of the demon Pazuzu, personification of the southwest wind. Its dominion was sickness and disease. The head was pierced. The amulet’s owner had worn it as a shield.
“Evil against evil,” breathed the curator, languidly fanning himself with a French scientific periodical, an olive-oil thumbprint smudged on its cover.
His friend did not move; he did not comment. The curator tilted his head to the side. “Is something wrong?” he asked.
No answer.
“Father Merrin?”
The man in khaki still appeared not to hear, absorbed in the amulet, the last of his finds. After a moment he set it down, then lifted a questioning look to the Arab. Had he said something?
“No, Father. Nothing.”
They murmured farewells.
At the door, the curator took the old man’s hand with an extra firmness.
“My heart has a wish: that you would not go.”
His friend answered softly in terms of tea; of time; of something to be done.
“No, no, no! I meant home!”
The man in khaki fixed his gaze on a speck of boiled chickpea nestled in a corner of the Arab’s mouth; yet his eyes were distant. “Home,” he repeated.
The word had the sound of an ending.
“The States,” the Arab curator added, instantly wondering why he had.
The man in khaki looked into the dark of the other’s concern. He had never found it difficult to love this man. “Goodbye,” he said quietly; then quickly turned and stepped out into the gathering gloom of the streets and a journey home whose length seemed somehow undetermined.
“I will see you in a year!” the curator called after him from the doorway. But the man in khaki never looked back. The Arab watched his dwindling form as he crossed a narrow street at an angle, almost colliding with a swiftly moving droshky. Its cab bore a corpulent old Arab woman, her face a shadow behind the black lace veil draped loosely over her like a shroud. He guessed she was rushing to some appointment. He soon lost sight of his hurrying friend.
The man in khaki walked, compelled. Shrugging loose of the city, he breached the outskirts, crossing the Tigris with hurrying steps, but nearing the ruins, he slowed his pace, for with every step the inchoate presentiment took firmer, more terrible form.
Yet he had to know. He would have to prepare.
A wooden plank that bridged the Khosr, a muddy stream, creaked under his weight. And then he was there, standing on the mound where once gleamed fifteen-gated Nineveh, feared nest of Assyrian hordes. Now the city lay sprawled in the bloody dust of its predestination. And yet he was here, the air was still thick with him, that Other who ravaged his dreams.
The man in khaki prowled the ruins. The Temple of Nabu. The Temple of Ishtar. He sifted vibrations. At the palace of Ashurbanipal he stopped and looked up at a limestone statue hulking in situ. Ragged wings and taloned feet. A bulbous, jutting, stubby penis and a mouth stretched taut in feral grin. The demon Pazuzu.
Abruptly the man in khaki sagged.
He bowed his head.
He knew.
It was coming.
He stared at the dust and the quickening shadows. The orb of the sun was beginning to slip beneath the rim of the world and he could hear the dim yappings of savage dog packs prowling the fringes of the city. He rolled his shirtsleeves down and buttoned them as a shivering breeze sprang up. Its source was southwest.
He hastened toward Mosul and his train, his heart encased in the icy conviction that soon he would be hunted by an ancient enemy whose face he had never seen.
But he knew his name.
Release Date: December 26, 1973
Release Time: 122 minutes
Director: William Friedkin
Cast:
Ellen Burstyn as Chris MacNeil
Max von Sydow as Father Lankester Merrin
Jason Miller as Father / Dr. Damien Karras, SJ
Lee J. Cobb as Lieutenant William F. Kinderman
Kitty Winn as Sharon Spencer
Jack MacGowran as Burke Dennings
Linda Blair as Regan MacNeil
Father William O'Malley as Father Joseph Dyer
Barton Heyman as Dr. Samuel Klein
Peter Masterson as Dr. Barringer
Rudolf Schündler as Karl
Gina Petrushka as Willi Engstrom
Robert Symonds as Dr. Taney
Arthur Storch as the Psychiatrist
Father Thomas Bermingham as Father Tom Kanavan
Vasiliki Maliaros as Mrs. Karras, Damien's mother
Titos Vandis as John, Damien's uncle
John Mahon as Language Lab Director
Wallace Rooney as Bishop Michael
Ron Faber as Chuck and the voice of Pazuzu
Donna Mitchell as Mary Jo Perrin
Dick Callinan as Captain Billy Cutshaw
Roy Cooper as Jesuit Dean
Robert Gerringer as Senator at Party
Mercedes McCambridge as the voice of Pazuzu
William Peter Blatty as Fromme (uncredited)
Paul Bateson as Radiologist's Assistant (uncredited)
Elinore Blair as Nurse (uncredited)
Barton Lane as Angiography Doctor (uncredited)
Eileen Dietz as the face of Pazuzu (uncredited)
Ann Miles as Spiderwalk (uncredited)
Awards:
46th Academy Awards - April 2, 1974
Best Picture - William Peter Blatty - Nominated
Best Director - William Friedkin - Nominated
Best Actress - Ellen Burstyn - Nominated
Best Supporting Actor - Jason Miller - Nominated
Best Supporting Actress - Linda Blair - Nominated
Best Screenplay – Based on Material from Another Medium - William Peter Blatty - Won
Best Art Direction - Art Direction: Bill Malley & Set Decoration: Jerry Wunderlich - Nominated
Best Cinematography - Owen Roizman - Nominated
Best Film Editing - Jordan Leondopoulos, Bud Smith, Evan A. Lottman, and Norman Gay - Nominated
Best Sound - Robert Knudson and Chris Newman - Won
28th BAFTAs - February 25, 1975
Best Sound - Chris Newman, Jean-Louis Ducarme, Robert Knudson, Frederick Brown, Bob Fine, Ross Taylor, Ron Nagle, Doc Siegel, Gonzalo Gavira and Hal Landaker - Nominated
31st Golden Globes - January 26, 1974
Best Motion Picture – Drama - Won
Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama - Ellen Burstyn - Nominated
Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture - Max von Sydow - Nominated
Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture - Linda Blair - Won
Best Director – Motion Picture - William Friedkin - Won
Best Screenplay – Motion Picture - William Peter Blatty - Won
Most Promising Newcomer – Female - Linda Blair - Nominated
AFIs 100 Years . . .
100 Thrills - #3
100 Heroes & Villains - Regan MacNeil – #9 Villain
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William Peter Blatty is the bestselling author of The Exorcist, which he turned into an Academy Award–winning screenplay. The son of immigrant parents, he was a comic novelist before embarking on a four decade career as a Hollywood writer, penning the screenplays for A Shot in the Dark, What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?, the Julie Andrews romantic comedy Darling Lili, and The Ninth Configuration (which he also directed), among many other films. A graduate of Georgetown University, he lives with his wife, Julie, in Bethesda, Maryland.
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