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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.

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