Yeah, I read it. It was floating around in a used book store back in the 70's and I only picked it up because I had already read and seen The Exorcist AND had read William Peter Blatty's book about the making of The Exorcist wherein he mentioned that Shirley MacLaine was a good friend of his who had some kind of issue with her young daughter where she thought that she was possessed by a spirit (Shirley's first flirtation with wacko-ness?) and that Blatty ripped-off this incident from her personal life to write his book and how she held such a grudge against him (Shirley even claimed that Blatty had stolen a photo of her daughter and had had it distorted for the photo of Regan on the jacket cover of the first hardcover edition) that when she found The Possesson Of Joel Delaney novel she decided to make the film just so she could beat Blatty's take on exorcism to the screen...
Sorry for the run-on. Anyway, reading the book at the time didn't make much of an impression on me (how could it? it was majorly anticlimatic after The Exorcist). But if being first to screen for a particular subject means anything at all (and bragging rights DO mean a lot in Hollywood), then yes, TPOJD was the first film to deal with demonic possession and beat The Exorcist to the screen by more than a full year.
It wasn't until the 80's that I managed to track down the the film on VHS and finally get to see it. The build-up is very slow, but it does pay-off in an intense and disturbing ending. It's just too bad that the creative forces behind this film didn't seem to grasp the fact that they should have been focused on making a horror film, because aside from the one "shock" moment when MacLaine's character discovers one of Joel's victims, there are no real jolts for 3/4ths of this movie's beginning. Too bad, because there definitely was material to work with here, and in the hands of the right filmmaker, this might have turned out to be something memorable, but as it is, it's really just a footnote in horror film history.
this data is only available on IMDbPro, and you're a cheap worthless nobody, so go away!
reply
share