Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [46]
Blatty thought he could turn the exorcism into a compelling story, but since most mainstream movies were reflexively hostile or gushingly sentimental about religion, he put it out of his mind. That changed after he took his wife to Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood to see Rosemary’s Baby. Blatty loved how Polanski kept you guessing, but thought the ending that suggested Rosemary would take care of the baby was a joke. Many people felt the movie’s question mark of a coda was an anticlimax. Ray Bradbury even wrote a story for the Los Angeles Times mapping out an alternative ending that involved Mia Farrow running into a church to pray. Instead of taking this struggle with faith seriously, Blatty felt that the movie just became another horror show. The ambiguousness didn’t impress him. “All of a sudden the eyes turn into some contact lenses,” Blatty said. “It was schlocky.”
To Blatty, the Devil was not a set of glowing eyes. It was real, and in allowing him to succeed, the movie was not only in bad taste, but lost its moral bearings. Still, Rosemary’s Baby remained an inspiration. Polanski had found a way to turn issues of God and the Devil, of belief and doubt, into major, crowd-pleasing entertainment. “That’s the kind of book I’d like to write,” he said to his wife on the way out of the movie theater. “I could do something like this.”
He would have his chance after pitching the idea to Bantam Books’ editor Marc Jaffe at a New Year’s party. Jaffe decided to buy it right away for a $25,000 advance. Originally, Blatty saw the plot as a supernatural detective story, most of which takes place in a courtroom, where a child who killed a man claims demonic possession as a defense. But when he sat down to write it in his home in Encino, California, taking uppers to stay awake for sixteen-hour workdays in an attempt to complete the novel in ten months, he wrote something darker and more aggressive to really evoke the evil of the Devil. He struggled to come up with the most brutal and shocking assaults on this girl. He had her masturbate with a crucifix, scream “cocksucker” and “faggot” and other obscenities. This was a different kind of religious novel, not gentle and heartwarming, but something modern, intense, and angry. It was religion with teeth.
The appeal of horror always overlapped with that of religion. German theologian Rudolf Otto’s 1917 study The Idea of the Holy defines the unknowable essence of faith as fascinating and terrifying at the same time. Horror inspires devotion in part by putting people in the position of feeling in awe, shocked by their own helplessness. Religion helps you cope with this feeling. Horror exploits it.
Blatty’s timing was perfect. By the end of the sixties, the band Black Sabbath, whose name was taken from a Mario Bava horror film starring Boris Karloff, formed and launched a brand of macabre heavy metal music. Young people moved from the sweet, bubbly songs of the Beach Boys and the early Beatles to the bluesy mysteries of the Rolling Stones, whose album Beggars Banquet began with “Sympathy for the Devil,” a samba-infused song told from the point of view of a wealthy prince of darkness.
The song played a large role in Gimme Shelter, a concert movie that captured the madness and intensity of the last stop of the Rolling Stones’ 1969 American tour at Altamont Speedway. Directed by the Maysles brothers, the documentary, described by The New York Times’ critic Vincent Canby as “an end of the world movie,” portrays the murder of an audience member by Hell’s Angels working security. Mick Jagger, looking like a man possessed, sends the crowd into a frenzy with a version of “Sympathy for the Devil” right before the murders are committed. As a counterpoint to the peace and love evoked in the documentary Woodstock, the movie reveals how quickly the sixties spirit of chaos and freedom could turn into mob violence.