Six years ago, I did a blog post about William Peter Blatty, the writer who provided one of the funniest movies ever made (A Shot in the Dark) and one of the scariest movies ever made (The Exorcist). I was mostly interested in the fact that Blatty had these two sides to his writing ability – humor and scares – and how those areas connected. More research led to new surprises. I discovered among other things that Blatty never planned The Exorcist to be a scary book, and that in a lot of his ways his vision for the book coincided with his Protestant counterpart, Frank Peretti. Peretti also had a funny and scary side to his work. Like Blatty, he found that these two sides didn’t always gel.
Recently, Fellowship & Fairydust were nice enough to publish a compare-and-contrast article I wrote about Blatty and Peretti, where I discussed how they each dealt with this conflict.
If you enjoy that article, here are my previous articles on Blatty, including the original 2016 blog post.
G. Connor Salter 
Pingback: C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and other Christians Who Wrote Scary Books – G. Connor Salter
Pingback: George Lucas, Apocalypse Now, and Early Films – G. Connor Salter
Pingback: The Screwtape Letters and British Comedy – G. Connor Salter