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 studio became disinterested when the Oscar-winning writer revealed his story would disassociate itself from the possessed child Regan MacNeil (Linda.
