Richard Burton and Linda Blair in The Exorcist 2: The Heretic Photo: Alami
The Exorcist director William Friedkin, who died in August – once told the story about the sequel to John Boorman’s film “The Exorcist 2: The Heretic.”
According to a story relayed to Friedkin by a studio executive, Warner Bros. bigwigs were present at the first preview of The Exorcist 2. Confident of its brilliance, they sent their limousine drivers to get something to eat and settled in the very back row of the theater. But the film was demonically bad. Ten minutes later, one outraged spectator stood up and declared: “The people who made this piece of crap are in this room!” The leaders quickly disappeared. “We got up, ran out of the theater, went out into the street — there were no cars!” — Friedkin said. “McDonald's has all the cars! And they were chased down the street. This was the first public reaction to The Exorcist 2.
Friedkin told the story at the 2013 Chicago Film Critics Festival. While it was probably embellished for the sake of a good story, it's a fun coda for William Friedkin, who wants absolutely nothing to do with directing the sequel. “He was the hottest director in the world at the time,” says Nat Segaloff, author of The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear. “He wasn’t going to rehash what he’d already done.” This was long before big sequels became an important piston in the Hollywood machine. «Making a sequel was a step down for any director,» adds Segaloff.
By the studio's own admission, the 1977 sequel was supposed to be nothing more than a cut-price rerun. But John Boorman's finished version was far from formulaic. It's more of a ludicrous and ambitious farce in which a priest played by Richard Burton — drugged to the point of catatonia — wanders through the brainwaves of exorcism survivor Linda Blair, awakens the demon inside her and flies to Ethiopia on the back of a locust. Or, as Nat Segaloff puts it: “In the ass of a grasshopper.”
The latest sequel, The Exorcist: The Believer, which hits theaters on October 6, will be the fourth attempt at a direct sequel to the original. Exorcist III: Legion, released in 1990, ignored its predecessor (“The first rule of Exorcist III: don’t talk about Exorcist II,” wrote Segaloff), and the Geena Davis series, which aired in 2016, had its own version.
Exorcist II: The Heretic remains one hell of a low point. Mark Kermode, The Exorcist's number one fan, called it «clearly the worst film ever made.» Hyperbole, of course, but also a fair assessment of the difference in quality between the first and second Exorcist films. Boorman himself admitted that Exorcist 2 failed because it didn't give audiences what they wanted. Boorman hated the original and wanted the sequel, a sermon on the power of good over evil, to act as a kind of “antidote”—a holy water tonic, perhaps—to wash away the evil from Friedkin's film.
“I should have known better.” «, wrote Burman in his memoirs. “Kubrick told me that the only way to make a sequel to The Exorcist was to make it even more bloody and scary than before. Nobody is interested in good.”
While the first Exorcist is famous for its supposed curse, the same can be said for the sequel, which faced a number of problems: script rewrites, deaths, fights, illnesses and panicky edits. Even the locust plague in the film will lose the will to live, apparently choosing to die rather than perform in front of the camera. “Everything that could go wrong did go wrong, both technically and personally,” Boorman wrote. He recalled how the prop master warned him about tampering with the dark forces: “This is what happens when you play with the occult.”
The idea for The Exorcist II came from John Kelly, the renowned executive and then head of worldwide production at Warner Bros. “It was a deal,” Segaloff says. “A shrewd business decision, but a very poor artistic decision.” Kelly turned the project over to Richard Lederer, a publicist turned producer. In fact, Lederer was involved in advertising the first Exorcist.
Linda Blair in the film “The Exorcist 2: The Heretic” Photo: Alamy
William Peter Blatty, the author of the original novel, retained the rights to the sequels. As described in Segaloff's book, Blatty did not want any involvement and threatened to sue, but was persuaded by a significant amount of money. (Blatty's honesty was not for sale, however: He turned down a $100,000 fee — essentially for doing nothing — to allow Warner Bros to publish The Exorcist II. «These are my characters,» Blatty told horror critic Douglas E. Winter. «No one else can use them in a novel.»)
A continuation was inevitable. The original film became Warner Bros.' highest-grossing film of all time and was nominated for ten Academy Awards. Bob McCabe, in his book The Exorcist: Out of the Shadows, described how the 1970s sequels were not «bigger, better, faster, more» but «cheaper, tackier and significantly smaller.»
Lederer would agree. He planned to make a «low-budget remake» for just $3 million, built around unused scenes and footage from the original. “A rather cynical approach to filmmaking, I admit,” Lederer said at the time. “But it was the beginning.”
A cheap knockoff of The Exorcist sequel now seems like a lost curiosity. Several scenes were cut from The Exorcist, including the infamous «spider walk» scene that was eventually shown in Mark Kermode's documentary Fear of God and then reinserted into the 2000 director's cut. Could the spider-walk scene sneak into an alternate universe version of Exorcist II?
Exorcist II director John Boorman set with Richard Burton. Photo: Alamy
If Exorcist II was cursed, then the hiring of Boorman—an ardent anti-exorcist—probably cursed it. The original Exorcist's power didn't push Burman one bit. In fact, John Colley approached Boorman about directing The Exorcist, but Boorman found Blatty's story «repulsive». For Boorman, The Exorcist was “a movie about torturing a child,” a point he particularly took offense to and often repeated (though he was quite happy to torture everyone else in The Exorcist 2). Boorman despised The Exorcist so much that he told Kelly, “Not only will I not make that movie, but I don’t want you to make it.”
However, when it came to The Exorcist 2, Boorman was intrigued by playwright William Goodhart's script, originally simply titled The Heretic. Goodhart was inspired by the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—a Jesuit priest, philosopher and archaeologist—who said that the next stage in human evolution should be telepathic communication. “I was tempted,” Boorman wrote. “I will receive a handsome fee. I would have a large budget and resources at my disposal to create something like an experimental metaphysical thriller with innovative special effects and huge sets.»
Boorman later told the press that his sequel was «a sequel to the original, just as French Connection II and Godfather II were sequels to the original.»
Of course, Warner Bros wanted references to the first film. Linda Blair, the first film's angelic victim, returned on the condition that she wouldn't have to endure the makeup ordeal again (which required a less-than-convincing stunt double). But original leading star Ellen Burstyn pulled out. Instead, Louise Fletcher was cast in an Ellen Burstyn-like role, and Kitty Wynne, who played Sharon in the first film, was brought back (then cooked alive in the sequel's worst moment).
Louise Fletcher and Linda Blair in The Exorcist 2 Photo: Alamy
Lee J. Cobb — Detective Kinderman in the original — was supposed to play a larger role but died, forcing a rewrite. Jon Voight, who starred in Emancipating Boorman, almost played the lead role of Father Lamont but pulled out, prompting Boorman to cast Richard Burton, who was hoping to bounce back from a series of flops in his tumultuous marriage to Elizabeth Taylor. , and fights with a bottle. “Allowing Voight to slip through my fingers and choose Burton against my instincts was another mistake,” Boorman wrote.
Burman was certainly able to attract talented authors. Louise Fletcher won an Oscar for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest shortly before production began, and composer Ennio Morricone signed on to score the film. Most surprising was the return of Max von Sydow as the eponymous exorcist Father Merrin, who was killed by a demon in the first film. Indeed, The Exorcist 2 is both a sequel and a prequel of sorts, with flashbacks to the exorcism performed by Merrin in Africa, which is briefly mentioned in the original.
According to Burman, von Sydow also hated The Exorcist. “I met Max and suggested that by creating a sequel, he might be able to undo the damage he had helped cause,” Boorman explained in his memoir, The Adventures of a Suburban Boy. However, as detailed in Segalow's book, von Sydow told William Peter Blatty that he starred in The Exorcist 2 for a paycheck and begged for mercy. “Bill, I had to do it,” von Sydow told Blatty. “I didn't want to do this. I never wanted to do this, but Bill, I had to think about my family. They gave me sooo much money to do it. I'm sorry. I'm very sorry.»
Linda Blair, Max von Sydow and Jason Miller in The Exorcist. Photo: getty
In the story, Father Philip Lamont (Burton) is tasked with investigating the exorcism in the original film in order to save the church from shame. Merrin is about to be posthumously charged with heresy — his writings on evil are too hot for the Vatican to handle. (“Satan has become a disgrace to our progressive views,” says the blushing cardinal). Lamont finds Regan MacNeil (Blair), now 17 and with no memory of her exorcism, in the care of tech-savvy psychiatrist Dr. Tuskin (Fletcher). Taskin then connects Lamont and Regan using a «synchronizer», a machine that allows users to enter each other's minds through synchronized hypnosis. The priest enters Regan's subconscious, learns that the demon Pazuzu is still there, rendering the climax of the first film meaningless, and sees visions of Merrin's first exorcism in Ethiopia.
The idea is that Regan is so inherently good (a quality that manifests itself in the X-Men's ability to heal autistic children) that she attracts evil. This is neatly expressed through the image of the metaphorical locust. If this sounds dizzyingly funny, that's because it is. At least, that’s how it is in Burman’s finished version.
Linda Blair agreed to star in the film based on the script by William Goodhart. “I’m not going to lie, it was very, very well written,” Blair told Scream Factory. “It’s just not the project we were filming.” She added: «I think we all came away very disappointed.»
Burman and Goodhart's working relationship broke down due to the rewrites. Boorman continued to work on the script with frequent collaborator Rospo Pallenberg. “The core of Goodhart's story remains, but a more hallucinatory scenario has evolved around it,” writes Declan Neil Fernandez in Horrible and Fascinating, an excellent book about The Exorcist 2.
A rewrite of the script delayed the start of production by six months. Elsewhere, plans to film in the Vatican and Ethiopia were scrapped. Even Georgetown, Washington, D.C., where the first film was filmed, did not want the crew there, forcing the producers to remodel the house and «Hitchcock steps» in the studio. The lighting and special effects were problematic, and the sets were not ready on time. But to make matters worse, the dirt brought in to create the Ethiopian landscape gave Burman Valley Fever, a fungal infection that kept him out of action for a month. Louise Fletcher also had to leave the production when her husband had heart surgery and later had gall bladder surgery herself.
A fabulous scene from the film “Exorcist 2: The Heretic” Photo: Alami
The locusts, the physical embodiment of the demon Pazuzu, turned out to be especially insidious. A shipment of 2,500 locusts (actually grasshoppers, which are also locusts) was sent, but they were dying at a rate of 100 per day. Those who did not die refused to fly, so Burman tried to cut off their legs. He resigned himself to using pieces of styrofoam packaging painted brown to create a demonic swarm. On top of all this, Pallenberg's wife, Barbara Pallenberg, was commissioned to write a book about the making of the film, and she shadowed Boorman. In this book, according to the director, “there is more horror than in the film itself.”
According to Segaloff's book, the film brought Richard Burton back to the bottle. Although Boorman recalled that «Richard continued to drink until the weekend.» This — compounded by what we can only assume is utter confusion — may explain why Burton looks dead for much of the film and seems to be talking directly into the camera. Linda Blair revealed that Burton did use cue cards. And like much of the dialogue, Burton's lines linger in the air, like the smell of pea soup spewed by a shell (stoppers like «Do you realize what we're up against…? EVIL!» and «I flew with Pazuzu… in a trance!») Burton's wife, Susie Miller, advised him to never make a film like The Exorcist 2 again. “Even for a million dollars,” she said.
Just watched The Exorcist 2 — a dreamscape filled with thematic and visual nonsense, ranging from the inexplicable and ill-conceived (former demonic tap dancer Regan and James Earl Jones dressed as a giant locust regurgitating an entire tomato) to EastEnders-style over-the-top. shoulder action. “Burman is, without a doubt, an artist,” says Segaloff. “But I believe that with Exorcist II he bit off more than he could chew. On the one hand, it is very stylish. On the other hand, it's so banal. He tries to follow the road, but doesn't know how to get there. This is an exercise in style that has nothing to do with substance.»
It would all be bearable if The Exorcist II had a killer ending to bring it all together. Instead, the climax—also subject to Boorman and Pallenberg's rewrites—becomes a textbook sequel, throwing most of the first film off the screen. Father Lamont and Regan return to the MacNeil home to battle Pazuzu—Regan's demon doppelgänger—as the house cracks and collapses under an attack of locusts. In one unpleasant moment, the demon double of 17-year-old Linda Blair seduces 50-year-old Richard Burton. «It was weird,» Blair said.
Burton was mostly confused. «They must have shot 10 different endings and I didn't understand any of them,» he told The New York Times.
As Fernandez detailed, Boorman requested a preview, but Warner Bros turned him down—a decision that would prove costly. One executive offered to show William Peter Blatty a preview, but only if Blatty agreed not to publicly disparage the film. Blatty said he could not agree with this and did not receive a response from the manager.
Exorcist II: The Heretic was released on June 17, 1977 to great fanfare. “Four years have passed…what does she remember?” read the slogan. Cinemas, anticipating a blockbuster like The Exorcist, agreed to give Warner Bros a fair cut and show the film for 12 weeks. But the reaction was catastrophic. The audience openly ridiculed and mocked the film. Blatty, who himself admitted to laughing about it, claimed that angry, unruly audiences destroyed the box office at one Los Angeles movie theater. Blatty called Richard Lederer and urged him to pick up the tape and hand it over. He left the film as it was, but rewrote it as a silent comedy with subtitles. “And I was completely serious,” Blatty told Bob McCabe.
The Exorcist 2 was Warner Bros.' best opening to date. over the weekend, but ticket sales fell sharply. Boorman, who had returned to his home in Ireland, received word of the US reaction and dictated a hasty re-edit by telephone. He returned to California to supervise the second cut and, as the story goes, attended the screening and cut out parts that made the audience laugh. The third edit made 130 changes. New versions were distributed to movie theaters, although recalling all original copies was too costly. The final version was released overseas. According to Fernandez's book, four versions were shown in theaters in 1977. This is the mark of a true cult film — the legends of multiple versions swirl through the ether. And The Exorcist 2 has its fans, including—incredibly—Martin Scorsese.
The Exorcist 2 ultimately earned $30 million from a $14 million budget. What's truly frightening is the film's reputation as, as Mark Kermode said, «the worst film ever made.»
Boorman, of course, tried something different, but releasing a movie called «The Exorcist 2» after «The Exorcist» and not ending with a stunning, almighty exorcism for Regan — or leaving at least some real horror, in Na in fact, when you talk about locusts and fly to Africa, it is a sin. “This is the red-haired stepson of all exorcist creativity,” says Segaloff. “You have to love him for who he is, but he doesn’t have the magic that is necessary for success. It's just a disaster movie.»
Legacy of the Exorcists: 50 Years of Fear is now available
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