[granville1]

Welcome back, Ken.

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Nice!

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Hellish is right. Billy Graham said he thought that a demon lives in the celluloid of The Exorcist. Probably, though, Heretic, is most likely to contain a demon…

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Okay!

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Of course, that’s Jung’s testimony, so it may be biased…

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Smythe introduces Breakthrough.

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If only big wishes like this could come true! Dang it!

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Yeah, it’s powerful stuff, certainly not a typical “horror” novel and film…

[granville1]

Nice comments re: re-tooling the spiderwalk. I would have preferred that they drop the bloody-mouth version and kept the creeping-around, long-tongue version. The latter was closer to what happens in the novel, and I think would blend in with the correct kind of fade-out.

I would hate to lose the scene completely, because we get to see another facet of Chris’s character. The look on her face right after Chuck leaves and she sees Regan spidering down the stairs, is priceless. Priceless in terms of her looking driven beyond endurance, and her look of total vulnerability. Whenever I see her turn from the wall and begin to see Regan, my heart goes out to her. Over and over again, every time I view this scene I choke up at “my poor friend Chris” being exposed to a new trauma.

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In any case, thanks for passing it on to everyone. You’re quite a scholar!

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Thanks for all your comments.

Ryan, I just read that Keach, Stacy, was in line for Karras but got bumped for Miller but please don’t kill me, I can’t recall where I saw it. I will post when I run into it again.

Captain, I’m glad you agree that Friedkin’s commentary was awful.

Mike, I need to go shopping and find the DVD you mention that has Blatty’s commentary… my DVD only has the Friedkin and a couple of TVYNS trailers.
Thanks for the tip.

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I’m happy to read your stuff!

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I have a few pix from the Ritual, but maybe Fr Lamont would enjoy it if you post some pix…

I never could figure out in The Beginning the stuff about “the Roman rituals”. Seems they were talking about two different things,

1) the red-covered book used in exorcism and featured in all of the Exorcist films. If that is the case, they mis-named it, because its correct name is the Roman Ritual, singular, not “the Roman rituals”, plural;

or

2) Merrin’s work with “the Roman rituals” in general, as if he were somehow involved with some kind of pre-Vatican II reform of Catholic rituals. If that is the case, they’re still off-base because Merrin is not a theologian-liturgical clerk, but rather an archeologist. There is no reason to think of him as revising or being at all involved with “the Roman rituals”.

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Blizzi, thanks for clearing that up.

Ryan, what an extraordinary find – looks interesting.

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Ryan, I’m glad you found the Keach reference.

Wouldn’t you know I seem to have the one DVD that doesn’t have any Blatty comments.

I don’t know why he didn’t supply a commentary track for Exorcist III.

I agree, having his explanations would be a rich experience. I don’t know how these things work – did Blatty have a choice whether or not to contribute a commentary? Or did he need to be invited to do so by the producers and/or the DVD people?

You would think that whoever put the DVD together would have wanted to have Blatty on it. I presume they would offer a substantial fee to Blatty? Maybe they didn’t invite him – or maybe he was too expensive for them, or from his POV, maybe they didn’t offer him enough…? Just speculating.

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