 The most prominent example is the 1971 horror novel, "The Exorcist", written by William Peter Blatty, who received an English degree from Georgetown in 1950.The novel is loosely based on a series of 1949 exorcisms conducted on a fourteen-year-old boy at Georgetown University Hospital, nearby Maryland, and in St. Louis, Missouri.In 1973, Blatty's bestselling novel was made into a film, also titled "The Exorcist".