The Exorcist was something of a phenomena. A huge box office hit that scared its audiences senseless, earned 11 Oscar nominations winning 2 and is generally regarded as one of the best horror films ever made. The sequel was its mirror opposite. Reviled by audiences, bombed at the box office, lost a fortune and ignored by all the major award ceremonies. It was an utter catastrophe that’s recounted in detail in the terrifically entertaining documentary, ‘Boorman and the Devil’.
Behind Boorman and the Devil….
Made at a time when sequels were only just becoming a deal for the studios after the critical and commercial success of ‘The Godfather Part II’ the studio saw a sequel to the equally acclaimed The Exorcist as a sure thing and ploughed huge money into it with an acclaimed director John Boorman at the helm. Unfortunately Boorman really disliked the first film regarding it as little more than a story about a child being abused and instead set about making a sequel that dealt with metaphysics far more than horror. It was downhill from there.
Director David Kitteridge has made a warts and all documentary here and has managed to get Boorman himself to talk about the film quite openly and in fairness the director is philosophical about the films failure. He was a bold choice to helm the project having made terrific films ‘Point Blank’, ‘Hell in the Pacific’ and ‘Deliverance’ followed by the frankly bonkers ‘Zardoz’ where he had managed to persuade a post Bond Sean Connery to wear red thigh boots and speedos paired with a Zapata moustache. For his Exorcist sequel he landed a doing it for the money Richard Burton with a budget inflated further by Linda Blair returning for a huge sum and a design budget that ballooned.
Disaster after disaster….
Disaster after disaster hit the film’s production costs notably after Boorman was hospitalized for weeks and shutting down the production meaning the schedule grew ever tighter due to a set in stone release date and an uncredited script writer Rospo Pallenberg rewriting the script in the downtime yet essentially making it up as he went along making it increasingly incomprehensible.
At this point in his career Boorman was am exciting risk taker and he remains defiantly proud of the film and is in turn both philosophical and analytical about the film whilst others openly deride it. Giving further insight into the films production are a delightfully blunt Linda Blair, a bemused Louse Fletcher, a defensive Pallenberg plus a load of production staff and film critics who are on both sides of the fence in their view of the film.
Perhaps the first mistake the film made was titling it ‘The Exorcist II : The Heretic’ setting up audiences expectations for a sequel to equal or maybe even better the terrifying original when Boorman’s intent was never to explore the theological undertone of the first film preferring the setting of a laboratory with a dual person hypnotic device and including the unintentional laugh out loud line for Blair who when asked why she was there said matter of factly, ‘Oh I was possessed by a demon!’. From thereonin audiences were laughing and hurling abuse at the film with one screening seeing the audience chase the studio executives out of the cinema into the street. Perhaps it would have stood more chance if it was just titled ‘The Heretic’.
And yet…..
And yet there are staunch defenders of the film most notably Martin Scorsese and looked at on its own there is a lot in the film that creatively is very good but just not as a horror film. It was far from frightening and as such was often frankly risible.
Over the years I have written a large number of magazine features about the making of numerous of which The Exorcist II is one of the most extraordinary. And as a documentary ‘Boorman and the Devil’ is a compelling watch even if the film itself isn’t.
related feature : ‘The Exorcist’ franchise rated
related feature : ‘When Evil Lurks’ – director Demian Rugna talks demons, conspiracies & horrors
Here’s the trailer for Boorman and the Devil…
