When The Exorcist hit theaters in December 1973, Francis Ford Coppola was in the middle of fighting Paramount to call his upcoming sequel The Godfather Part II. Follow-up films weren’t even close to unheard of in Hollywood, but, because a studio fully invested in making something more than a quick cash-grab—and something that took for granted that the audience had already seen the juggernaut original—The Godfather forever changed them. A few years later, the disastrous Exorcist II: The Heretic almost changed them back. It’s only fitting, then, that, after Coppola has gotten multiple illuminating documentaries observing his tumultuous productions—ranging from Hearts Of Darkness to last year’s MegaDoc, the behind-the-scenes film about Megalopolis—the filmmaker behind Exorcist II is finally able to plead his case in Boorman And The Devil.
It’s not like John Boorman was known for making straight-down-the-middle movies in the first place. The director of the surreally colorful Donald Westlake adaptation Point Blank, the unexpected hillbilly hit Deliverance, and the truly singular piece of ’70s sci-fi psychedelia Zardoz, Boorman clung on through creative highs and lows like a bullrider. When, after he’d just put Sean Connery in a codpiece for an entire film, he was offered the chance to direct the sequel to the biggest horror movie ever made—and a movie he personally disliked—it seemed just as likely to be a sure thing as a surefire failure. It’s hard to make a serious follow-up when the original had folks fainting in the theater and Saturday Night Live had already turned the idea for a sequel into a sketch.
But, as director David Kittredge eloquently explains over the course of his empathetic documentary, Exorcist II was trying its damnedest to escape expectations, whether serious or satirical. The kooky final product surely didn’t meet anyone’s expectations, even those of its creators, many of whom spoke to Kittredge for Boorman And The Devil. Boorman himself, now in his nineties, opens the doc by waxing poetic on the very business of film: This is an industry that turns money into light, he says, then expects you to turn light right back into money. Put like that, it’s easier to understand the inaccessibly philosophical directions in which Boorman and writer Rospo Pallenberg took Exorcist II. The exorcism knock-offs flooding the theater in the wake of William Friedkin’s smash hit were already raking in the dough, so why not make something different with the full strength of Warner Bros. behind you?
In part, this was the kind of maverick attitude that both ushered in New Hollywood a few years prior to The Exorcist and brought it to a close a few years after Exorcist II. A bevy of talking heads, ranging from critics like The A.V. Club contributor Simon Abrams to filmmakers like Joe Dante, contextualize the films as not-quite-bookends to the era of unprecedented directorial freedom. They might not represent perfect start and stop dates for those looking for a history lesson, but they sum up what could go very right with these movies (passion and vision clicking with audiences) and what could go very wrong (passion and vision spiraling out of control, costing a ton of money, endangering cast and crew). These problems and virtues aren’t clearly split between Exorcist and its sequel, it just shook out that the first film came together as something brilliant and legible, while the sequel came together as something laughably inscrutable.
What Boorman And The Devil is so successful at is making the intention behind Exorcist II as clear as the results. While Boorman is adamant that he wanted to make a film about good and hope after seeing the original as a film about evil, the wackiness seen in clips from the final product make it seem mostly about locusts and synchronized brainwaves. Those who’ve seen the film probably most remember The Heretic for its lack of horror, its globetrotting plot, and its inclusion of James Earl Jones in a big bug costume.
But hearing from Boorman—how he rejected Stanley Kubrick’s suggestion to just amp up the blood and gore, how he turned to unreal classics like Black Narcissus for visual inspiration, how he brought in the guy who invented the Steadicam for an innovative bug’s-eye-view shot—and you can at least imagine the version of the film that achieved its ecstatic ambitions. You can appreciate the dreamy soundstages, the conflict between science and spirituality, the in-camera effects that make the whole movie feel like a mirage. You can also appreciate it as the result of countless artists’ hard work, because many of them (camera operators, script supervisors, co-stars, and more) are interviewed about how much they put into the oddity. Boorman is most revealing and candid around both the intangible artistic side and the workaday professional side; by film’s end, you’re no longer wondering why this didn’t torpedo his career—he’s just that convincing.
Of course, Boorman And The Devil also grapples with the reality of its subject’s failure. This wasn’t just a specific flop, one that so misjudged its audience that—in a famous Friedkin anecdote—the WB executives who greenlit it were chased from a theater; it was an industry-wide omen. For one, the movie was such an unexpected flop that it helped end the practice of blind bidding, where theaters had to financially commit to movies without seeing them. For another, Exorcist II, alongside Friedkin’s Sorcerer (which ironically had their trailers cut by the same editor, who’s interviewed in the doc), both opened against Star Wars during the summer of 1977. Both were crushed under the heel of the future of films. Whether it manifested as a strange franchise film or a bold original, the Wild West of ’70s cinema was coming to an end, and with it came a creative ebb for studio filmmakers.
But, because we know how the rest of the story went, and how film history has shaken out since, Boorman And The Devil is best when exorcising its own demons. Boorman certainly has his regrets, but the seasoned filmmaker clearly still thinks he left it all out there on those locust-ravaged sets. Over the course of this granular, thorough making-of, it’s hard not to find yourself on his side. Like Megalopolis, the grand fiasco orchestrated by the grandfather of Part IIs everywhere, Exorcist II: The Heretic was a victim of its own artistic hubris—and, especially now in a time of extreme studio conservatism, that’s a laudable cause of death.
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