Novelist and film director William Peter Blatty, a former Jesuit school valedictorian who conjured a tale of demonic possession and gave millions the scare of their lives with the bestselling novel and Oscar-winning movie The Exorcist, died on January 12, 2017. He was 89 years old.

Blatty died Thursday at a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, where he lived, his widow, Julie Alicia Blatty, told The Associated Press. The cause of death was multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer, he said.

Inspired by an incident in a Washington suburb Blatty had read about while in college, the book was published in 1971. Two years later, it was followed by the film of the same name. Blatty's story of a 12-year-old girl inhabited by a demonic force was on the New York Times fiction bestseller list for more than a year. It eventually sold more than 10 million copies. A much wider audience was reached through the film version, directed by William Friedkin, produced and written by Blatty and starring Linda Blair as the young, heartbroken Regan.

"RIP William Peter Blatty, who wrote the great horror novel of our time," wrote Stephen King on Friday, January 13, 2017. "So long, old Bill."

"The scariest picture of all time" was the rating given to The Exorcist by Entertainment Weekly. The movie topped $400 million worldwide at the box office, among the highest at the time of an R-rated film. Oscar voters also offered rare respect for a horror film: The Exorcist was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and received two: Best sound and Blatty's script.

"When I was writing the novel, I thought of it as a supernatural detective story, and to this day I can not remember having a conscious intention of terrifying anyone, which you can take, I suppose, as an admission of failure on a near-gigantic scale," Blatty told The Huffington Post in 2011.