‘Evokes not terror but laughter.” “A movie for morons, a total cheesy rip-off that makes not one minute of coherent sense.” “The stupidest major movie ever made.” These were some of the milder responses from reviewers to Exorcist II: The Heretic, one of the most notorious disasters in Hollywood history, on its release in 1977. Its director, John Boorman, says he felt utterly humiliated and close to despair. “I considered my choices. The first was to commit suicide. The second was to defect to Russia,” the chastened director told one interviewer. He asked another if he could atone for his film by “immolating myself on Hollywood Boulevard”.
What was the problem? Audiences had, most likely, been looking for shock and horror, revolving heads and vomit, but Boorman gave them metaphysics and surrealism instead – and they weren’t standing for it. That’s why many jeered, laughed, hurled popcorn at the screen, and even – according to William Friedkin, director of the original Exorcist, who called the sequel a “horrible picture” – chased studio executives down the street. Viewers were nonplussed by a plot that had Linda Blair’s Regan, the traumatised girl from the first movie, now turned into an all-American tap dancing teenager. For some reason, she is undergoing a course of hypnotic therapy on a Bakelite “synchroniser” machine operated by a brusque, no-nonsense psychiatrist played by Louise Fletcher (Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest).
The film broke box office records on its opening weekend – because the public was desperate to see the follow-up to the first film. Word of mouth was terrible and ticket sales quickly plummeted. A distraught Boorman re-cut the picture days after its release (just as Michael Cimino would do with his equally ill-fated western Heaven’s Gate a couple of years later).
The story of one of the “biggest disasters in movie history” is told in David Kittredge’s new documentary Boorman and the Devil, which screens for the first time at the Venice film festival this week. Exorcist-loving British critic Mark Kermode may have called its follow up “clearly the worst film ever made by anyone ever”, but Kittredge’s entertaining and exhaustively researched documentary makes a strong case that it’s time to look at Boorman’s folly again. This was the English director at the peak of his powers. He was self-consciously making a big budget studio-based movie in the vein of Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (which famously recreated the Himalayas in Pinewood studios). Boorman shot almost the entire film, including the African scenes, on sound stages in Burbank, California. To its admirers, The Heretic is far richer, more humanistic and less misogynistic than the infinitely more successful Friedkin original, one of the highest-grossing movies ever made.
Kittredge says he was a teenager when first saw the film on a Betamax video in the re-edited European version. He “didn’t love it” then but it still got under his skin. “I thought it was really, really fascinating,” he tells me. This was a Hollywood blockbuster made as if it was “an experimental art house picture”. Boorman himself later admitted some regrets. He desperately wanted his friend Jon Voight, with whom he worked on Deliverance, to star as Father Philip Lamont, the grizzled protagonist looking evil in the eye. Voight, who once wanted to train for the priesthood, was initially keen but, as Boorman explains in the documentary, turned the role down on the grounds that “at this particular time, he was thinking about becoming a Jew because his researches into Christianity led him to the belief that Christianity was a heresy of Judaism”. A youthful Christopher Walken was also up for the role but had a stomach bug and flunked his audition. That’s why Richard Burton, fresh from his Broadway success in Equus, landed the role.
It was a fraught production which seemed dogged with misfortune from the outset, as if Pazuzu (the story’s trademark demon) had damned it in advance. One of the lead actors (Lee J Cobb) died of a heart attack before production began. Cast and crew fell ill; Linda Blair reminiscences in the documentary about how she almost fell off a skyscraper, while Boorman himself became dangerously sick with valley fever, causing the production to grind to a halt.
Kittredge’s thesis is a familiar one: the failure of The Heretic and of all those other equally idiosyncratic and ambitious movies of the era – The Missouri Breaks, New York, New York, 1941, Sorcerer and Heaven’s Gate among them – changed the way the US studios operated. The bean counters all noticed that George Lucas’s Star Wars, released a few weeks before The Heretic, had grossed over $775m. This led to an immediate studio backlash against auteur film-making and a plunge instead into the world of juvenile galactic franchises.
The Heretic was certainly an object lesson on how not to do a sequel – and that was the problem. Boorman regarded it as a “riposte” to Friedkin’s original, not a follow-up at all. He and several of the actors embarked on the film precisely because they didn’t like its predecessor, which they regarded as sadistic and exploitative. “Boorman told me he made the film to attack the first film. Max von Sydow [who played Father Merrin] felt the same way, and that the first one was exploitation and child abuse,” says film historian Joseph McBride, who was a journalist for Variety when The Heretic was being made.
After the disastrous premiere, the producer Richard Lederer recommended Boorman talk with McBride, “if you need a friend”. McBride spoke with Boorman three or four times. By then, Boorman was desperately trying to re-edit the film and take out the moments that had left audiences tittering. McBride describes this as “a misguided mission … he was mutilating his own film which I think is a really great film. It’s a very serious, very moving and visually spectacular.”
Ironically, the original version released in the US was protected from its director’s tinkering by Warner Bros itself because it was going to be too expensive to make new prints.
Attempts to reclaim once-vilified movies as misunderstood masterpieces can seem like special pleading – or a cynical attempt to squeeze out a little extra revenue from a justly forgotten film. Even so, Kittredge makes a strong case for admitting The Heretic into the canon. There is astonishing Steadicam work from Garrett Brown (later to work on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining); Ennio Morricone’s mesmerising score; Richard Macdonald’s stylised production design; buzzy mind-bending shots from a locust-eye point of view; a rip-roaring race back to Georgetown to confront the evil one; and, above all, the sheer, crazy ambition of Boorman’s storytelling.
Boorman, now 92, rebuilt his career with successes such as Excalibur, The Emerald Forest and Hope and Glory, but, as he acknowledges to Kittredge, the “the old wound” opened by the failure of Heretic has never fully healed. He still clings to the belief that if the film had been released separately from The Exorcist, it would have been received far more warmly.
Was there really a hex on the movie? Kittredge, who has spent seven years making his own documentary, isn’t sure, but admits that when a friend gave him a Pazuzu statue, he says he was far too afraid even to take it out of the box. Now, though, he hopes any curse is lifting and that audiences will realise that, at the very least, this is one of the 70s’ most unfairly neglected and misunderstood movies.
