Chasing the history of Exorcist II: The Heretic
Barbara Pallenberg’s 1977 The Making of Exorcist II: The Heretic is a rare commercial tie-in book that ranks with the best serious, scholarly film criticism. Its on-set, behind-the-scenes, reportorial insights (and secrets) surpass the nostalgic fascination of the new documentary Boorman and the Devil, a fanboy’s view of how The Heretic became a legendary Hollywood flop.
Doc director David Kittredge explores why The Heretic, one of the most misunderstood films by master filmmaker John Boorman (Point Blank, Deliverance, Excalibur, Where the Heart Is, Hope and Glory), failed to meet marketplace expectations and was roundly ridiculed. Boorman, a visionary aesthete, did not deliver a shock-and-horror sequel to the outrageous box office blockbuster The Exorcist. Instead, The Heretic turned a commercial IP into a singular expression of faith and vision. “It’s not a scary tale, it’s a fairy tale,” Boorman told Variety at the time.
Personal filmmaking is anathema to the millennium’s venal media habits, so Kittredge takes the unimaginative route of subjecting Boorman, actress Linda Blair, and selected veterans who worked on the film to TV-crime-procedural techniques — as if to expose what went embarrassingly wrong. But this is a wrong, unscholarly approach. Kittredge’s trio of unserious, dull-witted talking heads, film reviewers from the New York Times and Time and New York magazine, never mention the concept of film maudit, proving that The Heretic remains “cursed,” as Jean Cocteau would put it, by cultural illiteracy, not supernatural forces. B-movie ace Joe Dante apologizes: “There was a palpable sense of betrayal.” But I was there at The Heretic’s national film premiere and witnessed the audience’s shocked, resentful, then mocking stupefaction. Their befuddlement only made sense to me when Pallenberg’s book put the entire enterprise into context.
Kittredge’s doc features Boorman’s confession, “I made a film about goodness and [William Friedkin’s The Exorcist] was a film about evil.” Kittredge’s other interviews ignore the significance of Boorman’s rejection of the Friedkin film. “I was horrified by it. As the father of daughters, I thought it was a book about the torture of a child.” Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s influence on Boorman is only mentioned in passing. But Pallenberg goes deeper: She quotes Boorman in mid-production: “I was of course, working in America, and historically American filmmaking has been unconscious — they work in a system that is fairly simple and inherited. It’s just there in the blood, like in a John Ford film. It isn’t intellectualized. There’s no esthetic theory in Hollywood, although it has had its self-conscious periods.”
Kittredge de-emphasizes the decision of Boorman, the philosophical aesthete, to make more than a sequel. Treating The Heretic in studio-production terms reveals more about the cultural limitations of our era than about artistic ambition or the crowd-thinking of the vaunted Seventies. (The Heretic’s audiences had yet to experience Brian De Palma’s very similar The Fury.) Kittredge favors the devilishness that has now become hive-mind banality.
But Pallenberg (who is the wife of Boorman’s creative consultant Rospo Pallenberg) quotes Boorman’s central thesis: “The greatest weapon that moviemakers have at their disposal is the imagination of the audience. To think that they are idiots, and to make a movie around that premise demeans the whole idea of cinema.” This contradicts the fake epic sensibility of James Cameron, Denis Villeneuve, Christopher Nolan, and James Gunn, whose condescension to the great popular audience demeans contemporary culture.
Boorman and the Devil ignores the essential moral subversion of The Heretic, which Pallenberg captured when detailing how Boorman convinced Max von Sydow (who played the first film’s Father Lankester Merrin) to collaborate: “If von Sydow felt The Exorcist had been harmful and destructive, it was his duty, Boorman argued, to help repair the damage he had been party to.”
Some of Pallenberg’s most insightful writing describes Boorman’s decision to shoot “almost entirely within the studio, where reality could more easily be distorted, stylized. . . . It would be like living in a city and starving for a bit of greenery. It would create a sort of tension in the audience, but not merely as a manipulative device. It would express exactly what is happening in a world hurtling headlong into technological nightmare.”
Compare that with Kittredge’s fanboy revisionist boast: “I miss big, ambitious filmmaking that takes huge risks. In 1977 Boorman took an enormous creative and commercial swing with The Heretic which didn’t connect with almost anybody at the time — but now we can look back and appreciate how big creative swings are what going to the movies is all about.” (The “big swing” notion is how reviewers praise idiocy such as Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride.)
Millennial culture needs to apperceive The Heretic on Boorman’s terms (“metaphysics in images, sound and character”) — without the jokey, animated, B&W explanatory sequences of cutout movements and facetious dialogue, or Dante’s silly assessment of Friedkin’s “brilliantly manipulative movie” — which amount to cinema illiteracy.
Kittredge rightfully links The Heretic to the film maudit lineage of At Long Last Love, The Fortune, The Missouri Breaks, Sorcerer, New York, New York, Apocalypse Now, 1941, and Heavens Gate but leaves out what Seventies audiences overlooked and what millennium audiences ought to appreciate: Boorman’s grand ambition to correct a monstrous film and create “a beautiful, poetic, healing film bearing the hope of spiritual regeneration.”
