Cottage City. He foundIf recent films such as The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It are any indication, there’s no shortage of fascination with movies about demons and demonic possession. Perhaps looking to follow up on the success of their Insidious film f ranchise, last year Blumhouse Studio announced it would be teaming up with Morgan Creek Entertainment to produce a reboot of William Friedkin’s 1973 classic, The Exorcist. Based on a novel of the same name by William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist has developed quite a reputation over the years not just for the film itself supposedly being cursed (that’s a whole other story; see, for example, “Hollywood Curse Legends” in the November/December 2017 SI) but for notably being “based on a true story.”
Joe Nickell did a thorough job exploding many of the myths and misconceptions around the “true story” in his article “Exorcism! Driving Out the Nonsense” from the January/February 2001 SKEPTICAL INQUIRER. Not surprisingly, though, many continue to uncritically treat The Exorcist as though the true story were a supernatural mystery. An article from movieweb.com asks, “Should The Exorcist Reboot Follow the Chilling True Story That Inspired the Classic?” In the two decades since Joe Nickell’s article, new information has come to light regarding the case, which, evidently, many choose to ignore.