The Story Behind "The Exorcist"

by Peter Travers, Stephanie Reiff

All ten of these stories originally published between 1942-50: Far Centaurus; The Monster; Dormant; Enchanted Village; A Can of Paint; Defense; The Rulers; "Dear Pen Pal"; The Sound; The Search; Postscript, by the author

160 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 28, 1974

Reviews

[Steve Wiggins]

For what it is—a young critic’s period coverage of a blockbuster movie—The Story Behind The Exorcist isn’t bad. It’s not a great book, but, as I’ve noted elsewhere (Sects and Violence in the Ancient World), it gives a good sense of the time in which the film was still in everybody’s mind. It was controversial and ground-breaking. The book gives readers a pretty good sense of the early seventies.

William Friedkin didn’t allow journalists on the set and gave very few interviews during filming. The book includes various interviews, a rare one with the director, more with the screenwriter (author of the novel, William Peter Blatty), and some with critics of the film in its early days. It was still before The Exorcist surpassed The Godfather for box office records (of course, blown out of the water by today’s totals). People still weren’t sure if the movie would be talked about, in one interview, five years after its release. It is still being discussed ten times that much later.

As a fan of the film, I’ve been wanting to read this book for years. It wasn’t great, but I was too young to see the movie when it came out, and too scared to see it until I was in my mid-forties. The book itself is a period piece. It rather cheekily included The Roman Ritual (used for exorcisms) as an appendix.