HOW WILLIAM PETER BLATTY DIRECTED THE EXORCIST III, BASED ON HIS NOVEL LEGION
HOW DO YOU FOLLOW UP ONE OF the scariest (and arguably also one of the greatest) horror movies of all time? In the case of 1990’s The Exorcist III, it was a matter of eradicating an earlier sequel to William Friedkin’s 1973 seminal classic, one which had provoked more giggles than jitters.
“This was the blessing of Exorcist II: The Heretic. It was so bad that it made William Peter Blatty decide to turn his book Legion into The Exorcist III and direct it himself,” Steve Jaffe, Blatty’s former press agent and the associate producer of Exorcist III, tells SFX. “He said, ‘I will put my heart and soul into it to erase the memory of the sequel.‘”
A NEW BODY
While Blatty had initially been approached to pen a follow-up to The Exorcist, the studio became disinterested when the Oscar-winning writer revealed his story would disassociate itself from the possessed child Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair). Ultimately, his idea was for a psychological detective story – a spiritual, non-supernatural sequel that notably didn’t include an exorcism. Blatty turned that screenplay into his 1983 novel Legion.
Despite the critical and commercial failure of John Boorman’s Exorcist II, which did indeed feature (a now teenage) Regan, it wasn’t an easy ride to the director’s chair for Blatty. With only one directorial credit to his name and a temperamental reputation that got him banned from the set of The Exorcist, Blatty was seen as somewhat of a liability.
“Blatty had this devilish, razor-sharp intelligence and piercing eyes,” recalls Jaffe. “He also had a strange impression on people. It was like a rainbow of colours – different types of impressions. It didn’t make you feel secure or make A-list actors feel like, ‘I want to hang out with this guy from six in the morning until midnight.’” Nevertheless, Jaffe, who had worked on publicity for the original film, was instrumental in helping secure Blatty as the director of The Exorcist III.
“‘They won’t let me make it!’ he told me when I ran into him, looking very glum at The Palm [restaurant] in LA. I said, ‘What?’. He said, ‘Legion’. I said, ‘Well, why won’t they let you make it?’ ‘Oh, they don’t think I can handle it.’ I said, ‘Handle it? You wrote one of the greatest movies of all time!’ He said, ‘No, I mean as a director’.
“I have a sarcastic humour,” admits Jaffe. “And I replied, ‘But Bill, you know you’re crazy. People are probably not lining up to put millions of dollars in your hands and see what you do with it.’ He didn’t have a great sense of humour, but I think I may have seen a crack.
Then he said, ‘Well, I want to direct this because if I don’
