The Exorcist will always be my favorite scary movie. I don't know why exactly, seeing as how I cannot bring myself to watch it alone! :)
Few people know that the book and the movie that followed was actually based on a true story.
THE BOY
Rather than present the whole confused legend and then set about refuting it, I’ll here set out the sequence of events as far as I have been able to establish them. Rob Doe - as I prefer to call him - was born on 1 June 1935, making him around 13 when the exorcisms were conducted. The Doe family were German Lutherans and lived with the boy’s grandmother who barely spoke English.
We know that, in January 1949, members of the family - probably led by Rob’s mother and grandmother - began experimenting with a ouija board. The disturbances began around 18 January; scratching noises came from the walls, the boy’s bed would shake violently and objects (such as fruit and pictures) would jump to the floor in the boy’s presence. Rob - if he was suspected at all - claimed to be possessed by an "invisible entity". It is significant (from the diary entries) that Mrs Doe suspected that there was a connection between the strange events and the death of ‘Aunt Tillie’, a spiritualist who had introduced the family to the ouija board. At various points throughout this ordeal, Mrs Doe attempted to communicate with Aunt Tillie, apparently alternating the beliefs that the problems with her son were either the work of the Devil or their departed relative.
The family agreed to let Rob spend a night (17 February) at the home of their local priest - the Reverend Luther Miles Schulze, pastor of St Stephen’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Washington DC - so he could observe the boy. Despite his scepticism, Fr Schulze told of hearing vibrating sounds from the boy’s bed and scratching sounds on the wall. During the course of the night, he allegedly witnessed a heavy armchair (in which the boy sat) tip over seemingly on its own and a pallet of blankets on which the boy lay inexplicably move around the room. He called in the family doctor, who prescribed phenobarbital for the whole family.
AFTERMATH
POSSESSED
Thomas B. Allen's latest book is a revised edition of Possessed, the true account of an exorcism. The book is being published in conjunction with the Showtime movie "Possessed," based on the book, and the 25th anniversary of William Peter Blatty's "The Exorcist." The exorcism described in Possessed is the source of the Blatty movie. In the new edition of Possessed, Allen publishes the exorcist's diary for the first time.
The diary tells the story of a true exorcism--America's only documented exorcism. The story begins when a objects begin moving in the home of a 14-year-old boy. Then strange scratches appear on his body . . . . One priest tries to exorcise the boy, who severely wounds the priest. Then another exorcism begins--and goes on for weeks until the explosive climax.
The movie version of POSSESSED was recently shown on Showtime and may still be running.
HOW "THE EXORCIST" CAME TO BE
Early reports that Blatty based his 1971 novel on a story of demonic possession that he learned of while a student at Georgetown University in 1949 were confirmed by his own book-length account of the creative process behind the story, William Peter Blatty On The Exorcist From Novel To Film (1974). He writes that he was a 20-year-old English Literature major when he read an article in the Washington Post (20 August 1949) by Bill Brinkley. It told of a 14-year-old boy, of Mount Rainier, Maryland, who had been freed from a tormenting devil by a Catholic priest earlier that year.
Blatty began writing The Exorcist in 1969, drawing upon the material he had discovered some 20 years earlier, and finished during the summer of 1971.
In his book, he tells of writing to the priest who conducted the actual 1949 exorcism and learning of a diary kept by an assisting priest, recording the daily events of the on-going exorcism - see diary panel. The exorcist refused Blatty’s request to see the diary so, to ease the priest’s anxiety, Blatty changed his central character from a 14-year-old boy to a 12-year-old girl. Eventually, Blatty gained access to one of a number of copies of the diary and based much of his book and movie on its contents.
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THE MIDI PLAYING IS "THE EXORCIST THEME".
