Pretty women meet un-pretty fates. It’s a uniting feature of many horror movies. The ice-cool glamour of Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane meets an ice-cold end on the bathroom floor. Shelley Duval’s Wendy narrowly escapes from Jack Nicholson’s axe and impending ‘REDRUM’. Marilyn Burns’s Sally finds herself on a never-ending flight from a Texan chainsaw. Acts of evil become heightened by an actress’s beauty; the more sublime their looks, the more sadistic the punishment. Whereas a male protagonist provides a glimmer of hope (he might physically overpower the threat or use his intellect to detect or deter the danger), the woman is often left scrambling: running through corridors; trying to slam shut or rattle open doors. She’s a passive victim caught up in the audience’s voyeuristic fantasies. Or, more immediately, those of her director. Take Hitchcock and his ice-cool blonde.

So, is this clichéd view why so few women direct horror films? It is historically a man’s genre when it comes to filmmakers; a fact that Warp Films recognised when they set up their Darklight initiative back in 2006. The leader of this development programme, Caroline Cooper-Charles, saw how women were being ‘excluded as audience members as well as filmmakers’ and came up with a very specific target for the scheme: to get more women making horror films in the UK. Chatting over the phone, Cooper-Charles recalls how picking female filmmakers proved quite a tricky task. The majority of women sending in submissions had never worked in horror; there was nothing on anyone’s showreel to make her jump. Instead, Cooper-Charles focused on reels with atmospheric, creepy shorts; films that made her ‘squirm or feel uncomfortable’. The chosen directors were then assisted in developing their ideas over a course of 12 months. As Cooper-Charles said, ‘there are so few female filmmakers working in the genre that even if two films came out of the scheme, it would have been quite a massive achievement’.

A couple of years on and there are several films in pre- and post-production: a ‘quite bloody’ exploration of motherhood entitled Little Miss Piggy; an ultra-low-budget teen horror, Freefall; and a project still in early development set in the male-dominated world of banking and business. The latter has strong thriller elements, and another director on the scheme decided to move away from horror altogether to make a thriller. Throughout our conversation, Cooper-Charles often mentions the ‘psychological’ aspect of the women’s work; perhaps an explanation as to why many of the projects boiled over into thriller territory. Even the ‘bloody’ Little Miss Piggy is described as ‘sophisticated with a gore element’. Despite the aims of the initiative, there’s a little reluctance to associate women with out-and-out horror.

After our call, Cooper-Charles writes to tell me that she is producing a film written by Lucy Moore, one of the writers who was part of Darklight, and puts me in touch with the film’s director, China Moo-Young. The following week, Moo-Young and I meet up for a coffee to discuss her film, ‘a monster movie set in Bristol’. When I ask her why she thinks there are so few women working in horror, Moo-Young suggests that it is partly a question of role models – ‘you’ve probably got two examples of women genre directors, Catherine Hardwicke and Kathryn Bigelow… you’ve got your Jane Campions but in terms of genre, they’re your big two’ – and partly a matter of timing. Most filmmakers are making their most important films in their thirties and forties, a time when women may be engaged with childrearing and so unable to undertake the heavy commitments needed to make a feature.

But these two points are asides in a conversation that aims to avoid too much talk of gender, no matter how hard I try to steer the discussion: ‘I kind of think it’s a moot point,’ Moo-Young says, ‘ I’d like to get to a point where it isn’t an issue’. She is not interested in taking part in schemes aimed exclusively at women directors and won’t be bestowed or lumbered with the female filmmaker tag: ‘Kathryn Bigelow’s strength is that you don’t know that she’s a woman… I wouldn’t be doing my job if you could tell which gender directed the film.’

Moo-Young also tells me that psychological horror is her favourite variety of the genre. She likes John Carpenter’s work because it is ‘restrained’; his films ‘use music and mood more than out-and-out violence’. Horror films she admires – The Shining, Rosemary’s Baby, Don’t Look Now, Jaws – are full of ‘well-drawn characters that don’t fall apart for the sake of the third act’. Ultimately, she loves horror because ‘it taps into human insecurities and fears; it’s about the strange and forbidden side of life’.

Cooper-Charles and Moo-Young are both extremely keen to emphasise the more thoughtful, intelligent aspects of horror; this careful explanation of their interest in the genre can be seen as a reaction against the sexist tendencies of horror and, in particular, slasher films. Although reluctant to talk about herself in terms of gender, Moo-Young concedes: ‘I wouldn’t ever want to generalise about fellow film directors – male or female – in terms of taste, but if a woman is a filmmaker working in horror, she’s probably not going to be making slasher films because she’ll have a female skew on violence towards women.’

This emphasis on psychological horror could also be a defence against genre snobbery; films that follow certain conventions or codes can easily be dismissed as less intelligent than other, less categorisable films. It is refreshing to talk to Moo-Young, not only because she steadfastly refuses to discuss being a woman in a discussion on gender, but also because she is very passionate about the horror genre and genre films in general. ‘I can’t really talk about it,’ she whispers, ‘but there’s a master document called the “brainstorm of kills”, with lots of different ways people could be killed off’. She talks about ‘mapping fear’ and ‘hitting genre beats’ and, in addition to her horror film, she is developing two thrillers and a romantic comedy. She sees horror as providing an opportunity to subvert the normal rules of life. She talks about the closing of Let the Right One In providing a hugely satisfying ending for the audience but also an uneasy one: on the one hand, we want Eli and Oskar to be together; on the other, we anticipate Oskar’s dark future as he takes the place of her previous protector. In horror, often the good have to commit ordinarily immoral acts in order to survive, which disorientates and challenges the audience’s normal moral framework in interesting ways.

The importance of subversion makes the idea of female directors influencing the horror genre both a natural and exciting progression. Women can question the portrayal of female victims on screen and also, viewing the genre from an outside perspective, they can shake up a rule and convention-led art form. Those genre films that work most successfully and stand the test of time are generally those that offer something different from the tried-and-tested formula. It sounds as if Darklight has tried to champion work that fits this description. We’ll look forward to seeing the results.

Eleanor McKeown

Underneath Venice, there is a hidden forest. The forest was cut down over a thousand years ago in what is now Slovenia and the trunks were driven into the marshy soil of the 117 islands on which Venice was then built. Under the water, deprived of oxygen, the wood petrifies. Venice is a labyrinth, built on a dark stolen wood that has slowly, over the centuries, turned to stone. A city perfect for the darkest of fairy tales. A little red figure sits in a church. A little red figure crosses a bridge. But (to paraphrase Shelley) if Little Red Riding Hood comes, can the wolf be far behind?

Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 horror film has one of those titles, like Eyes Wide Shut, that at first glance appear naff, but in which every word takes on a different meaning during and after a viewing of the film. It is a warning, but one that we most commonly expect to be ignored: ‘Don’t Look Now but someone is staring at us’. The Italian title gives us a giallo feel: A Venezia… un dicembre rosso shocking, which, translated, means ‘In Venice… a Shocking Red December’ – a time, a place, a colour and an emotion. But to concentrate for a moment on the place: Venice.

Venice has provided an exotic location for historical romps, a Klaus Kinski vampire film, an Al Pacino Shakespeare adaptation and picture postcard backgrounds to several 007s as well as the recent Johnny Depp excretion The Tourist. [I must here declare my bias. I almost got a job as an extra on this film, but was turned down as (apparently) I resembled the lead actor and would have only caused confusion.] Working in Venice the last 10 years, I got used to turning a corner and walking onto a film set. I even had the ambiguous pleasure of seeing Donald Sutherland (a very tall man) preparing his role for the remake of The Italian Job (hence the ambiguity) at Campo San Barnaba. And yet Nicolas Roeg’s Venice is different and its difference is of a piece with the oddness of Don’t Look Now, which despite its recent elevation from cult gem to National Treasure (Time Out’s Best British Film Ever™) stills retains a gritty, mucky unusualness that no amount of praise can polish off.

Fundamentally, Don’t Look Now is a dirty film; a film of spreading red stains, of dripping liquids, of mud and blood and breaking glass. It is a messy examination of entropy: things fall and fall apart and we try to restore what can’t be repaired and recover what has already been irretrievably lost. And this filthiness comes with the city of Venice. When we first see Venice (aside from a brief shot of the sunlight through the slats of the Venetian blinds), we are in a trench with John Baxter, the bereaved architect played brilliantly by Donald Sutherland. He is supervising the restoration of a church and the workmen are drilling into the foundation, the petrified forest of the city’s substrata. ‘Tutto marcio,’ the disgruntled Baxter tells the Italian worker. ‘It’s all rotten.’ In a crucial change to the Daphne du Maurier short story, John Baxter and his wife Laura are not holidaying in Venice, rather he is working. Venice, for Baxter, is a building site, and not a good one. The church, San Nicolò dei Mendicoli (Saint Nicholas of the Beggars), has an unassuming, perhaps beggarly exterior, and (in a city that is almost all façade) has no great façade. Tucked away in an unvisited corner of Venice, not far from the prison at Santa Marta, the church was in the process of being renovated in 1973, providing Roeg with the scaffolding he needed. Roeg’s Venice is a wintry, dirty workaday city; a city of hospitals, police offices and off-season hotels. It is a city with a rat problem (still very much the case), a city of lost gloves on windowsills and a baby doll abandoned on the steps down to the canal. In the final funereal shot of the film, we see a huge pile of bin bags in the background, also awaiting disposal.

Baxter’s work of putting the pieces back together reflects the piecing together of the Baxters’ lives after the death of their daughter. The Baxters live in rooms of middle-class clutter, strewn with books, papers and half-empty glasses, unable to find their cigarettes. This messiness and Baxter’s work are also reflected in Roeg’s justly famous non-linear editing, which mixes up the narrative in such a way as to make us uncertain as to where we are and (crucially) when we are at any given time in the film. The past pollutes the present, as indeed does the future. But this messiness is all the point and Baxter’s and the viewer’s analogous urge to bring it to some coherence is literally a doomed project. Ultimately, things fall apart. When Laura Baxter (Julie Christie) collapses onto the dinner table at the restaurant, Roeg’s slow motion, unlike Peckinpah’s epic beautifying of violence, prolongs the agony, the moment of helpless tragic knowledge when we grasp at a world that is slipping through our fingers, the glass rolling off the tilting table towards the tiled floor. While restoring a mosaic in the church, Baxter is almost killed, when a falling beam destroys the scaffolding on which he’s standing high above the floor of the church. The mosaic tiles he had been meticulously examining are scattered to the winds.

The source of all muck and chaos is the muddy English pond of Christine Baxter’s accidental death. There are very few moments of horror in the Horror genre that live up to the meaning of the word. John Baxter’s grief-filled bellow, the freezing brown water (Roeg makes sure we hear John gasp as he plunges into it), the slippery muddy slope and the hopeless struggle to carry the girl’s small body to safety are moments of bungling, tormented pain, absolutely stripped bare of any staged dignity. This is Conradian: ‘the horror’. Later in Venice, a woman’s body will be pulled, knickers dripping, the soles of her feet, from a canal in a similarly undignified end to a life. There is a murderer on the loose. However, the film refuses to comply to generic requirements. The police investigation is essentially a red (there’s that colour again) herring. We might understand at the end what we were seeing but we won’t understand why. There are no resolutions. [SPOILER] Baxter’s own death is just another meaningless death in a long line of meaningless deaths. The true horror is that all death (and all life) is ultimately meaningless.

The beam of wood falls for no reason, just as we never fully understand how Christine came to drown in the pond. There is no angry ghost, no curse, no original sin to be punished and no demonic presence. We might seek meaning, motivation, an explanation, the way Baxter chases his Little Red Riding Hood through the forests of Venice, but in a universe as arbitrary as this, death is deprived of such comforts and does not follow a narrative arc, and our Little Red Riding Hood could just as easily turn out to be the Wolf.

John Bleasdale

In William Peter Blatty’s Faith Trilogym all three films use the outré scenarios as a starting point for engaging discussions of faith and humanity.

In 1973, The Exorcist briefly became the most profitable film of all time, beaten by Jaws a couple of years later. Depending on whether you count Jaws as a horror film or a thriller, The Exorcist can be said to be the most successful horror film ever made. Naturally, not long after its release, the studio wanted a sequel, but neither writer/producer William Peter Blatty nor director William Friedkin was interested. This led to Warner Bros commissioning the risible Exorcist II: The Heretic in 1977, which was damned by critics and was listed as the second worst film ever made (following Plan 9 from Outer Space) in Michael Medved’s book The Golden Turkey Awards.

William Peter Blatty, needless to say, disowned the sequel; he was approached by Warner Bros after Exorcist II was completed to help promote the film, which he’d had no involvement with, and famously told the producers that he’d only be prepared to re-edit and redub the dialogue of the film if they wanted to release it as a comedy! Blatty himself hadn’t wanted to do a direct sequel anyway at this point and instead wanted to script an adaptation of his 1966 novel Twinkle, Twinkle, ‘Killer’ Kane, hoping he could interest Friedkin in directing it. While considering this project, Blatty rewrote much of the book and republished it as The Ninth Configuration in 1978, before directing the film himself a year later. Blatty went on to consider The Ninth Configuration to be the true sequel to The Exorcist. He then wrote the novel Legion in 1983, which he adapted into film as The Exorcist III in 1990, turning his series into a trilogy. Although not a direct sequel to The Exorcist (he wrote Twinkle, Twinkle, ‘Killer’ Kane first), The Ninth Configuration shares some of the themes of his most famous script, and if you compare the plots of all three movies (which also all feature actor Jason Miller in decreasing amounts of screen time) you can see how they complement one another.

[SPOILER ALERT] If you haven’t seen all three films, the following paragraphs contain spoilers.

The Exorcist tells the story of a young girl who is possessed by a demon and a priest who has lost his faith but regains it in sacrificing himself to save her. The Ninth Configuration is about an astronaut who has become terrified of going into space due to the absence of God in the void, and his relationship with a Vietnam veteran who has created an alternate personality to avoid his past but conquers it by killing himself. The Exorcist III is about an undead killer possessing the bodies of the mentally ill and a cop who has lost his faith in humanity but regains it by killing his best friend. By making connections that weren’t actually present in The Exorcist, both Blatty and his fans make a case for these being direct sequels – Lt Cutshaw in The Ninth Configuration may be the unnamed astronaut at the party in The Exorcist that possessed Regan MacNeil informs, ‘You’re going to die up there’; and Exorcist III misremembers the relationship between police officer Lt Kinderman and Father Karras in the original as being best friends, when in fact they only meet once in the film and three times in the novel. Regardless of the direct connections between the films, each concerns the battle between good and evil, and the influence divine and demonic forces have on the world. Each film also has existed in at least two versions, although the director’s cut of Exorcist III was supposedly destroyed by the distributors.

Although memorable for its shocking content, The Exorcist is Blatty’s finest work because of the variety of fascinating three-dimensional characters whose lives intersect and are all touched by the demonic possession of Regan MacNeil. For that reason, the producer’s cut released in 2000, titled ‘The Version You’ve Never Seen’, is perhaps better than the original cut, if only because we get to spend a little more time with all the characters – although the additional CGI superimpositions of the face of Pazuzu on top of existing footage was a somewhat ill-advised addition by Blatty. The sequels suffer in comparison by having too many characters – The Ninth Configuration – or too few – Exorcist III. However, all three films use the outré scenarios as a starting point for engaging discussions of faith and humanity, which complement and add gravitas to each plot.

These elements are perhaps best exemplified by the reoccurring themes of sacrifice and confession in each film. Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) – a very literal deus ex machina, whose brief appearances in the film and novel bookend the story – dies in his attempt to exorcise the demon from the young girl in The Exorcist. Father Karras (Jason Miller), whose wrestling with faith and ability to connect with other people are some of the major plot points of the story, commands the demon to enter him instead and tries to destroy it by hurling himself through a window down the infamous long flight of steps. As we will see in Exorcist III, this sacrifice was vain, but at this point he has at least succeeded in curing Regan through his compassion rather than (in comparison with Merrin) his accomplishments as an exorcist, and as he lies dying on a cold street in Georgetown he is absolved of his sins through silent confession by squeezing the hand of another priest, Father Dyer, who administers his last rites.

The Ninth Configuration is set in a remote Gothic-style mansion (supposedly owned by a former horror film star), which has become a sanitarium for Vietnam veterans suffering from PTSD and other mental afflictions. The idea of the traumatised Vietnam vet is something that has become almost tedious as a cinematic plot, following the likes of Oliver Stone’s various films on the subject and the Rambo franchise, but was a topic of more subversive films in the 60s and 70s. By presenting much of the dialogue as humorous, Blatty seems to place the film within the tradition of irreverent war comedies such as Oh! What a Lovely War (1969) and M*A*S*H (1970). In the 1960s, a comedy by William Peter Blatty would not have surprised anyone: before The Exorcist he was best known for co-writing the screenplay for Blake Edwards’s A Shot in the Dark (1964), the first sequel to The Pink Panther (1963), which set the template for all the sequels in the 1970s and beyond (making Clouseau the lead character and introducing Herbert Lom’s Dreyfuss and Burt Kwok’s Kato to the franchise). However, post-Exorcist, Blatty was famous for penning an Oscar-winning horror screenplay, and The Ninth Configuration sits in between horror and comedy with the set, mise en scène, lighting and atmosphere all comfortably evocative of the horror genre while the absurd dialogue is comedic. One could argue that much modern horror is unsuccessful because it treats horror as absurd, and the curious and atypical mixing of the tropes of each genre makes The Ninth Configuration a hard film to like or indeed sit through for nearly two hours.

The variety of patients being treated in the story include a character (played by Jason Miller) who wishes to perform the works of Shakespeare entirely cast with dogs, and the aforementioned astronaut who has dreams of coming across the crucified Christ on the Moon and believes that God is in fact a giant foot. It’s worth noting Terry Gilliam’s giant foot first appeared in Monty Python’s Flying Circus three years after the publication of Twinkle, Twinkle, ‘Killer’ Kane, and many of the set pieces here are Pythonesque and similar to sketch-based comedy, which makes the running time somewhat hard to stomach. However, the scenes between Kane (Stacy Keach) and Cutshaw (Scott Wilson) are excellent and make the entire production worth watching, allowing for the self-indulgence elsewhere. Unlike the dramatic scenes of exorcism in The Exorcist and Exorcist III, no physical manifestations of the power of God or the devil are visible on screen here, beyond the architecture of the asylum and outside of Cutshaw and Kane’s subconscious; the latter dreams of the three crosses at Golgotha on his way into the asylum, a scene thankfully cut, as it originally had the three crucified making jokes about their predicament. Themes and lines of dialogue in The Exorcist and Exorcist III first appeared in Twinkle, Twinkle, ‘Killer’ Kane, such as an exchange between Cutshaw and Kane about the evil/goodness in the world, transposed to Father Dyer and Regan’s mother in The Exorcist, and references to the demon Legion from the gospels first appeared in another dream sequence in Kane.

As the plot continues, we realise that the lead character of The Ninth Configuration, who we believe to be Doctor Kane, is actually his brother Col Vincent Kane, who has taken on the identity of his sibling, with the acquiescence of the actual doctors (indeed the first doctor we see in the facility is also a fake, played by Blatty himself) to help cure him of his guilt over a massacre he committed during the war. His ultra-violent nature reasserts itself during a bar fight where Cutshaw is being tormented by Hell’s Angels, and, depending on which version of the film you watch, he either dies from wounds received during the fight, or stabs himself to atone for his sins. Like Karras, who kills himself at the end of The Exorcist to destroy the actual demon he now has inside him, Kane kills himself (in the original cinematic release and Blatty’s definitive 2002 DVD version), or allows himself to die (the 1998 ‘director’s cut’), to protect the world from his potential evil. Like Karras, Kane has acted as confessor to the various disturbed individuals he has taken on the role of doctor to, and he believes the ‘shock therapy’ of his death will help them deal with their own afflictions.

The third of William Peter Blatty’s protagonists whose surname starts with a ‘K’ (which, if you want to read anything into it, is the Arabic letter signifying ‘He wrote’, bearing in mind that the opening scenes of The Exorcist take place in Iraq) is Lt Kinderman, promoted from minor character from the first drama to the lead in Exorcist III. The character of Father Karras has taken the opposite journey, going from lead in The Exorcist to a minor one here, who apparently didn’t appear in the film at all in the cut initially presented by Blatty to the studio before they asked him to reshoot and add certain scenes.

Exorcist III is set in Georgetown, 12 (novel) or 17 (film) years after the events of The Exorcist and the same number of years after the execution of the ‘Gemini’ killer, a serial murderer fashioned after the real life ‘Zodiac’ in San Francisco (the subject of a film by David Fincher in 2007 and the inspiration for the villain in the first Dirty Harry in 1971). Now, over a decade after his death, the killings have resumed and his victims are people associated with the original exorcism. Lt Kinderman is back on the case, and having failed to satisfactorily solve the death of Burke Dennings in the first film (in the novel, it’s revealed that he knows Regan is the killer but defers to the clergy to deal with the problem), he is dealing with the legacy of that murder. His investigations lead him to an asylum – a location also common to all three films as Karras’s mother is also institutionalised prior to her death – where a formerly catatonic patient is revealed to be Father Karras, who is being kept from death by the spirit of the Gemini killer (played by Brad Dourif), a spirit that also takes possession of other, more ambulatory patients and uses them to perform his executions.

The original cut, more faithful to the novel, which Blatty presented to the studio as The Exorcist: Legion, was mainly a two-hander between Kinderman and the Gemini, and this still forms most of the second half of the film. However, Jason Miller was brought in to provide a more obvious visual reference to the resurrection of Karras, and Nicol Williamson added in the character of Father Mourning, another exorcist who arrives, like the original’s Merrin, in the final act. The addition of Miller is a welcome one, but Williamson, whose equally failed exorcism includes egregious scenes of fire and serpents, undoes much of the psychological horror that this film excels in. As Williamson was most famous for his hysterical (in every sense of the word) performance as Merlin in John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981), his acting style, combined with the addition of the number ‘III’ to the title unfortunately links this film more explicitly with Boorman’s dreadful Exorcist II, something Blatty was trying to avoid at all costs.

However, since the director’s cut of this film is lost (and, to be honest, there’s little difference between the various cuts of The Exorcist and The Ninth Configuration), we have to consider the version of Exorcist III that is available. Generally it’s a success, with genuinely creepy murder scenes and more of the memorable dream sequences – including a cameo by Samuel L. Jackson as a blind man in heaven – that pepper all three films. Blatty has always written excellent dialogue, and here Kinderman is dryly witty throughout as a world-weary cop who has seen too much suffering to have any faith in humanity any more. The final scene of the 2000 producer’s cut of The Exorcist and the novel sees Kinderman and Father Dyer start a friendship, the conclusion of which (with Dyer’s murder by the Gemini) is seen here. Unfortunately, the actors who played these roles don’t reprise them; Lee J. Cobb died in 1976 and William O’Malley (a priest in real life), who was infamously slapped across the face by William Friedkin before he rolled camera on the climactic scene in The Exorcist, gave up acting after his one performance. The new Kinderman and Dyer are well cast though, George C. Scott is terrific as the savant-like detective in a crumpled coat and old car (Blatty wrote The Exorcist in the same year that Columbo was picked up for a series) and Ed Flanders is a fine replacement for O’Malley and one of four actors returning from The Ninth Configuration.

At the end of Exorcist III, Karras regains possession of his body and commands Kinderman to shoot him – suicide by cop – once more facilitating his own death to destroy the demon within him. In The Exorcist, Regan is possessed by a variety of personalities, albeit all the same demon, while in Exorcist III, the one personality inhabits a variety of bodies, reimagining the possession by Legion in the gospels. The suicides of the two Karras – at the end of his original life and his resurrected one – remind us of the pigs in the Bible destroying themselves in a river when the demons are driven out by Jesus.

In the other sequels, Karras and Dyer weren’t the only priests from the original to return – Max von Sydow reprised the role of Father Merrin in flashback in Exorcist II and Stellan SkarsgÃ¥rd took over for Exorcist: The Beginning and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist in 2004 and 2005 (the most extreme version of an Exorcist film existing in two versions). While these extrapolated prequel adventures of Merrin should generally be avoided (although Dominion has its moments) William Peter Blatty’s ‘faith trilogy’ is one of the most fascinating triptychs on film. The Exorcist is a genuine masterpiece in terms of directing, casting and writing (if not approaches to directing actors), The Ninth Configuration isn’t to my personal taste but it is an intriguing film, and Exorcist III, while a slightly odd and low-key conclusion to the trilogy, is an under-rated thriller that is well worth seeking out.

If watching the three films is slightly unsatisfying overall, due to the changes of pace, style and cast, there are other potential Blatty sequels and remakes in the wings, ignoring such recent homages as Possessed (1990), The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), The Last Exorcism (2010) and The Rite (2011). Blatty has mooted a TV mini-series remake of The Exorcist to adapt all 320 pages of his original novel and wishes to collaborate again with Friedkin on an adaptation of his gripping new book The Redemption (a.k.a. Dimiter – another project of his with two different names), which again mixes elements of faith and unbelief, good and evil, light and darkness and tells the tale of a once evil, somewhat supernatural assassin, who becomes good during a terrible mission in Albania and goes on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The book is told somewhat obliquely in the style of The Third Man, and in my opinion The Redemption is a better thematic sequel to The Exorcist than The Ninth Configuration. So, if Friedkin and Blatty do bring this to the screen, then perhaps an even more satisfying trilogy (or tetralogy) will have been achieved than the one we have already.

For all the horror on screen in Blatty’s trilogy, the titling of this series as his ‘faith’ trilogy (by the writer himself and others) is apt. While short-sighted religious groups damned The Exorcist as being demonic on original release, the film and its follow-ups by the author actually champion faith in humanity and in a higher power represented by the conquering of evil and the appreciation of the sublime in the world around us. In the original novel, Blatty describes a moment shared by Fathers Dyer and Karras before the latter has his life destroyed by demonic possession: ‘The burnished rays of the setting sun flamed glory at the clouds of the western sky and shattered in rippling, crimson dapples on the darkening waters of the river. Once Karras met God in this sight. Long ago. Like a lover forsaken, he still kept the rendezvous.’ The Exorcist, The Ninth Configuration and The Exorcist III aren’t books and films to convert a non-believer like me to Christianity, but they contain enough intrigue and beguiling storytelling to make readers ponder the questions they raise.

Alex Fitch