Chapter Two
Exorcist II: The Heretic
By Brett Ballard-Beach
September 1, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
The Broncos’ victory in ’98 in San Diego and the following year in Miami killed the novelty factor for me. But whether it’s a 40 to 1 long shot at the Preakness or my hometown Portland Trail Blazers starting out once again in search of their first NBA title since 1977, the surest and simplest way to curry my emotional favor is to be “that team” that the announcers snigger at and the odds makers have forsaken.
This introduction is particularly relevant because this week’s column concerns a film that receives almost no mention outside of its recurring inclusion on those frequent lists of the worst sequels and/or worst films. I think the reason it continues to be adorned with those crowns of thorns on the way to its perennial crucifixion is that it’s the most visible and blatant example of a direct sequel to a phenomenally successful and acclaimed original film that seems to shit all over what everyone loved the first time around, and to do it intentionally. For comparison: I have never seen Jaws 2, and so am taking a shot the dark in the here, but I would imagine that even if it doesn’t live up to Spielberg’s benchmark, it offers terror, and shark attacks, and Roy Scheider begging the damn city council to just shut down the beach.
Exorcist II: The Heretic is not a sequel designed for anyone who found the first film to be grueling, and terrifying, and unnerving, and upsetting and wants those traits again in larger portions. (Perhaps this is why the film’s small number of defenders seems to include those who actively dislike The Exorcist and respond to The Heretic’s refusal to worship at the altar of its parent’s success.) It makes little effort to up the ante on special effects or scares or gross-out moments. It doesn’t attempt to play up the spiritual angle at the expense of the secular adornments. It continues the plot, but oftentimes at right angles to the first film. It would be straight camp if it took itself just a little more seriously or was made by a director of considerably less talent.
For some initial frame of reference, I would argue that The Heretic’s bizarre plot rhythms, hallucinogenic imagery, and complete aversion to offering anything even slightly akin to the “pleasures” of The Exorcist, are mirrored most closely by a pair of sequels from last decade - Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 and The Ring Part Two. Both of those films infuriated me, as I imagine they did many others, because they seemed to have no interest in acknowledging the strengths of the first film.
The plotlines did grow out of what came before but only through tangents that then took off for parts unknown. As frustrating as the viewing of both those proved to be, a part of me was also intrigued because (if you’ll allow for a fairly obvious truism) neither of them would exist if not for the unexpected success of another film and it is hard to imagine either one being made in isolation. But as expected as it might be in the 2000s for sequels to sleeper horror films to arrive and strike while the iron was hot (and, as was the case for Blair Witch and The Ring, for the iron to cool significantly and then crack and fall apart), in neither instance was anything as remotely crucial at stake as with Warner Bros’ release of Exorcist II: The Heretic in June 1977.
In December 1973, The Exorcist was released, and would eventually come to rival The Godfather as the highest grossing film of its time, raking in $440 million worldwide, when counting re-releases. It snagged ten Oscar nominations, including Picture, Director, three acting nods, Cinematography, and Editing, and won for Best Sound and Best Adapted Screenplay. Author William Peter Blatty, working off his own 1971 novel, provided the adaptation, and in a rare feat of ownership for a scribe, also produced the film. William Friedkin, fresh from another multiple Oscar nominee/winner (1971’s The French Connection) provided the direction and, if anecdotes from the set are truthful, kept the shooting as tightly wound as possible by firing off guns, and through physical intimidation and verbal abuse.
The film’s plot certainly put its 12-year-old protagonist Regan McNeil through hell as it charts her unexplained demonic possession and eventual exorcism at the hands of Father Merrin, as unwavering a man of faith and belief as one could imagine, and the more tormented Father Karras, suffering through the recent loss of his mother and a doubt about his relationship to the Church.
I find it hard to put myself back in the shoes of an audience encountering such a provocative and visceral piece of cinema for the first time. Perhaps jaded from decades of rip-offs and imitations, my thought on a recent reviewing is that it doesn’t strike me as particularly scary (and yet it continually tops or places near the summit on lists of the scariest films of all time). If it isn’t as shocking as it once was, it yet remains as raw and wounded as ever. The thought that people in attendance during the 2000 theatrical release of the Director’s Cut were laughing because they found it funny is upsetting to me. Friedkin and Blatty place their demonic action in a world that is defiantly and unapologetically real. The colors are muted; the skies are overcast and the superb Georgetown locations (the infamous flight of steps included) all seem to come with a damp chill in the architecture.
The haunted lead performances by Ellen Burstyn (as Chris, Reagan’s actress mother) and Jason Miller (as Karras) anchor the film. Both play caring and sensitive individuals who find themselves tested by events beyond the realm of easy explanation, and left wanting by their reactions. Veteran actor Lee J. Cobb as a police lieutenant investigating a mysterious death tied to the McNeil household seems the most extraneous character to the plot and yet his sole conversation with Chris ranks as the single best scene of dialogue in the film.
The most upsetting and disturbing image in all of The Exorcist (or The Heretic for that matter) is one that has nothing to do with head spinning, bed lifting, or a demonic face on a pre-teen girl. It is, if I recall, the only dream sequence in the film. Father Karras stands on a traffic island in the middle of a busy street scene, observing his mother a block away climbing up the stairs from an underground subway stop. He yells, but she (and we) cannot hear him - the sound is muted - and in a devastating cut from her to him and back again, she has changed course and is now descending. The despair, foreboding of loss, and intimations of helplessness in this brief interlude reverberate through the rest of the film.
I am of the opinion that The Exorcist is really the story of Chris McNeil and Father Karras and how they individually cope and help each other deal with an event (possession) that seems as arbitrary, cruel, and random as the rest of life can be. The flip side of this is that Regan is an extra in her own story, although she is at the center of it, as much in the first film as she is in The Heretic.
“It is four years later. What does she remember?” queried the tag line for The Heretic, those words framed above a large black and white headshot of Linda Blair with a deer-in-the-headlight expression, seemingly lit from behind with ethereal light. It strikes me as a rather odd marketing move, far less mysterious and evocative than The Exorcist poster’s now classic shot of a silhouetted Max Von Sydow (as Father Merrin) standing under the street lamp and surrounded by fog outside the McNeil house. The teaser trailer and the full theatrical trailer for The Heretic heightened this ambiguity by moving in completely opposite tonal directions.
The teaser consists of b&w stills of the cast in scenes from the movie and ominous voiceover that is suggestive of a sci-fi thriller rather than a supernatural drama. The full-length (about 1:45) trailer is set to a hard-hitting Theremin-driven rock instrumental that wouldn’t be out of place in setting the atmosphere of some lost 1970s Dario Argento film. It gives the impression that the film will be fast-paced (wrong), jarring (not quite) and jump-the-rails-insane (towards the end, yes). This song does not appear in the first version of the film released to the public but is in the closing credits of most film prints and on the VHS copy (more on both of those to follow)
Friedkin, Blatty, and Burstyn wanted to have nothing to do with a sequel. Warner Bros - shockingly - did and wound up recruiting John Boorman (who on the basis of 1972’s Deliverance had been approached to direct The Exorcist and had declined the offer, finding the source material too cruel and sadistic). The original script for The Heretic was penned by William Goodhart, a playwright with only one previously produced screenplay to his name but who was apparently in-house at the studio. Shooting lasted about six months and Warner Bros allowed production costs to exceed the set budget of $12.5 million and run up to $14 million, making it the most expensive film ever for them at that time. The Heretic would open strongly with $6.5 million before finishing with $30 million. Not dreadful numbers but in the face of the expectations for the film, underwhelming.
Boorman’s 118 minute cut was roundly jeered at Exorcist II’s premiere and he set about tweaking it, resulting in a version with a running time of 110 minutes that is the one that wound up going out to theaters. The former version is the one released on DVD and that I viewed; the latter is harder to come by, although between the alternate opening available as an extra on the DVD, a YouTube video of the abbreviated climax of the VHS version and a German website that painstakingly compares differences between those two cuts and a third even shorter version, replete with hundreds of screen shots and some iffy English translations, I feel somewhat enlightened and even more confident that the many flaws (and a few virtues) of Boorman and Goodhart’s vision are consistent no matter the running time.
To start with, consider that the title that appears onscreen (and as far back as the early trailers) is “John Boorman’s film of Exorcist II: The Heretic”, not one of the more common and expected possessives “a film by John Boorman” or “a John Boorman film.” It’s...unusual in its wording and suggests a disconnect between the screenplay and what plays on the screen. Boorman and his frequent collaborator Rospo Allenberg apparently made numerous revisions to the script (although neither was able to claim a credit) and the finished product is markedly different from early drafts. As a side note, one of my many Google searches directed me to a website offering up a 1976 copy of the script, draft dated right before filming commenced, for only $245.
The Heretic is founded upon an interesting premise - an investigation into the events surrounding the exorcism in the first film by a peer of Father Merrin’s, at the request of the Catholic Church, to determine if Merrin’s views on the existence of the Devil and the sway of evil stepped out of line with Church dogma towards the end of his life and if he subsequently needs to be whitewashed out of the record, in a manner of speaking. Father Lamont is chosen for this task and his inquiry necessarily brings him into the orbit of Regan, and from there, into a confrontation with the demon from the first film, as well as the reasons why Regan was specifically chosen by the demon.
I find it compelling that when Blatty chose to write his own book sequel to The Exorcist (Legion in 1983) and later adapted and directed it for a different studio as The Exorcist III in 1990, he focused almost exclusively on the characters that hadn’t been included in The Heretic and crafted a metaphysical detective story that quite neatly complements the religious and faith-based inquiry Lamont conducts in The Heretic. And both of those represent the two most obvious paths of a continuing narrative to emerge from the finale of The Exorcist (whether Blatty intended for there to be such an obvious window for sequels I don’t know, but it exists there as blatantly as the concluding scene of John Carpenter’s Halloween or any slasher film from the 1980s).
In telling its tale, The Heretic suffers from ironic fits of pacing: in rushing to throw a whole host of ideas and back story into the plot in the first half, the story drags unmercifully under a weight of a lot of information that only becomes understandable in hindsight. The second half is payoff for all the setup but even as it builds towards a bravura “love it or hate it climax”, it feels rushed, and ends rather abruptly (even more so in the 110 minute edit). But the two biggest anchors to the film ever taking off are poor performances and the film’s inability to convey in visual and rhetorical terms its key plot linchpin (psychic phenomena), without evoking utter incredulity from the audience.
In the Heretic, Regan is a frequent visitor at a psychiatric institute where Dr. Gene Tuskin works (the layout of said institute is a marvel of production design with interconnected glass rooms that reveal one another’s inhabitants almost as if by cross-section). Convinced that Regan has deeply repressed her memories of the first film’s events (which Regan denies), Tuskin convinces her to use a boxy device called the synchronizer - like a hypnotist’s twirling pen or gold locket crossed with a weather vane and spruced up with blinding light bulbs - that will allow a pair of participants to “go under” simultaneously and then link together their brainwaves through biofeedback.
As matter of factly as the first film dealt with the possibility of demonic possession, does The Heretic allow for this procedure to take place, with the added bonus that Regan has strong psychic skills to boot. Goodhart’s screenplay clumsily and confusingly dumps all of this information on the audience - that is, if I have even begun to accurately capture what he attempts to convey - and then adds on top of that the re-emergence of the demon from The Exorcist, here dubbed “Pazuzu," and its connection to an African boy - once exorcised by Father Merrin - whose name is Kokumo (which nobody in the film pronounces the same way, a fact confusing in itself.) At times, the plot seems as dense as the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing, only with none of the quotable dialogue.
The synchronizer is charmingly low-tech, but the dual flashing lights grow wearisome and the efforts of those who hook up to the machine to embody a deep state of hypnosis (monotone, glassy eyes, dead gaze) are epic fails. And in large part, the plot rests on this (well that, and locust herding but I’m getting ahead of myself). A year later, Warner Bros would help the world believe a man could fly, but here they cannot capture the mood of a deep state of suggestiveness without provoking an even deeper state of laughter.
This leads into the second key area of trouble: the performances. Richard Burton may have been a tyro in most every other genre on stage and screen, but as the lead in a special effects-filled horror film (playing Father Lamont), he is adrift. Even in his more restrained moments, he appears to be inching towards bug-eyed, sweat-drenched lunacy. When this coincides with similar tonal shifts in the material, it can be passed off as genius. The rest of the time Burton wears the mark of an actor stubbornly refusing to cop to the fact that he has taken a gig for the paycheck, and overcompensating with too much thespian flair (post-Hannibal Lecter Anthony Hopkins would have found the right tone, I think).
Blair was largely ridiculed for being either out of her depth or too flat and ridiculously underplaying her role, but opposite Burton, and in the context of the lunacy of the plot, her efforts, whether conscious or the results of acting limitations, seem inspired. This isn’t to say that it’s a great performance but she is sunny, friendly, and charmingly matter of fact.
What the film seems conflicted about, however, is what to do with the fact that between ’73 and ’77 - ages 12 and 16 - Blair went from child to near-woman. Boorman isn’t interested in any kind of recurring sexual exploitation and her grown-up figure isn’t made much of until the climax (set back in the McNeil home) where a Regan-doppelganger decked out in a revealing nightgown attempts to coerce Lamont into killing Regan (this in the midst of a plague of locusts, a wind and light phantasmagoria, and the house itself seemingly being rent in two by the forces of evil.) And if one of the many subtexts of the first film would seem to be the punishment of a young girl on the verge of becoming a woman by brutalizing her and equating her to a vile, profanity-spewing demon, then it would have been enlightened for the sequel to excise the scene or deal more fully with the implications throughout.
If The Exorcist succeeded by subsuming the horrific into the everyday and lending everything the shade of a waking nightmare, then The Heretic is saved (to some degree) from sinking into a morass of under realized ideas through technical flourishes that drape everything in the heightened urgency of a fever dream. From Regan’s sleepwalking forays towards the edge of the Chrysler Building’s roof to soaring cinematography that pushes across African savannas with the POV of a swarm of grasshoppers to the chaos of blood and glass and flames that mark the out-of-left-field car crash near the film’s ending, there is a bounty of visual flair that makes the film come alive in one’s mind when sifted through in retrospect, outside of and separate from the tricky proposition of actually sitting through the film again. If not for all the baggage that comes with, you know, actually being a sequel to The Exorcist, The Heretic might have carved out its own space on the shelf of cult classics. As it stands, it hasn’t even worked its way up to underdog status.
Next time: If you want to believe, then go ahead and believe. The truth is out there.