Justice & Law Quote by William Peter Blatty

Blatty’s line is a shrewd act of genre-judo: he sidesteps the “horror writer” label not by denying the demons, but by recasting their function. The Exorcist isn’t, in his telling, a carnival of shocks; it’s a case file. That reframing matters because it pulls the story away from cheap sensation and toward credibility. “Suspenseful,” “detective,” “procedural” are trust-building words. They promise method, evidence, and discipline - the scaffolding that makes the supernatural feel perversely plausible.

The subtext is partly literary self-defense. Horror, especially in the mid-to-late 20th century, was often treated as disreputable: popular, vulgar, unserious. Blatty’s insistence that he “never read horror” telegraphs distance from the genre’s pulp reputation and aligns him with a more “respectable” lineage: mystery, investigative narrative, institutional realism. It’s also marketing savvy. A “paranormal police procedural” invites audiences who might roll their eyes at gore but will gladly follow a mystery with high stakes.

Context sharpens the point. The Exorcist arrived in a culture newly fascinated with psychiatry, Catholic doubt, and the authority of institutions that suddenly looked shaky. A procedural structure lets the story stage that crisis as an inquiry: doctors fail, tests proliferate, rational explanations collapse, and the exorcism enters not as medieval melodrama but as the last, grim tool in the kit. By dressing possession in the language of investigation, Blatty makes terror feel like the conclusion you reach, not the mood you’re sold.