One year into the channel’s literary videos, Daniel (@dungeondive) devotes an October episode to the author he could call his favourite on any given day: William Peter Blatty. The centrepiece is the Trilogy of Faith — The Exorcist, The Ninth Configuration, and Legion — read as works of theology as much as horror. Daniel’s core claim is bold: nobody writes better dialogue than Blatty, full stop. He reads the famous kitchen scene where Father Merrin, moments before the exorcism, disarms the terror with brandy and a joke about being named after a cargo ship — proof that The Exorcist is genuinely funny before it is frightening. The Ninth Configuration, a theological comedy set in a military asylum, he ranks among his five favourite novels; Legion may hold Blatty’s best dialogue and, via Exorcist III, one of cinema’s great jump scares. Along the way: the Teilhard de Chardin Omega Point rabbit hole hiding inside The Exorcist, the collector’s tour of Centipede Press editions and shooting scripts, Mark Kermode as the essential Blatty scholar, and the parting shot that the man who wrote the scariest story of all time also wrote A Shot in the Dark, the funniest Clouseau film.
Blatty used horror to argue for the existence of God — if there’s this much evil, there must be its opposite. Does theology deepen horror for you, or get in its way?