Novelist and filmmaker William Peter Blatty, best known for his best-selling novel and Oscar-winning movie The Exorcist, has died of cancer at 89.

He died on Thursday at a hospital in his home town of Bethesda, Maryland, his wife Julia Alicia Blatty told Associated Press.

He died of multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer, she said.

The former Jesuit school valedictorian was inspired to write the story of a 12-year-old girl inhabited by a satanic force after reading about a Catholic church sanctioned exorcism in the US of a young boy in 1949.

His book was published in 1971 and the film, starring Linda Blair as the possessed girl Regan, came out two years later.

The book sold more than 10 million copies and the film, directed by William Friedkin and produced and written by Blatty, made $400 million (£327 million) worldwide.

Horror writer Stephen King was among those who paid tributes to the writer.

The R-rated film, with its assault of vomit, blood and head-spinning, courtesy of makeup and special effects maestro Dick Smith against a soundtrack of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, shocked audiences worldwide.

There were reports of audience members fainting, vomiting and even charged the screen waving rosary beads.

It was also blamed for murders and violent crimes and the Reverend Billy Graham alleged that the film's very celluloid was evil.

Speaking to IGN.com in 2000, Blatty said: "I know there's been a lot of hyper-talk and writing about people fainting and vomiting and all of that.

"I was standing in the back of a theater in New York at the first public press screening of the film, too nervous to sit down.

"And along came a woman who got up in about the fifth or sixth row. A young woman, who started walking up the aisle, slowly at first. She had her hand to her head. And then I could see her lips moving. She got close enough, and I could hear her murmuring, 'Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.'"

"I thought, if this is [film critic] Pauline Kale, we're dead," he joked.