By DECLAN NEIL FERNANDEZ (BearManor Media; 2022)
That title is spot-on, as 1977’s EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC is indeed a horrible movie, but also a fascinating one. This book explores the making of director John Boorman’s mess-terpiece, apparently “one of the most unintentionally silly films ever released by a major studio.”
The most intriguing aspect of the film is the fact that it was not the cynical EXORCIST cash-in its reputation suggests, but a highly ambitious auteur-driven spectacle with a top-flight cast and crew. Yet an escalating series of questionable artistic decisions, combined with a lack of respect for EXORCIST II’s 1973 predecessor, THE EXORCIST, (which Boorman dismissed as “a film about torturing a child”) and a highly fraught production that saw its director felled by a rare fungal infection, resulted in an astoundingly misconceived film that, if this book is to be believed, altered Hollywood irrevocably; it was the last sequel of its kind, and there’s a reason for that.
Author Declan Neil Fernandez does an excellent job filling us in on all things EXORCIST II. Exhaustively researched, HORRIBLE AND FASCINATING far outshines Barbara Pallenberg’s 1977 book THE MAKING OF EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC, which was published prior to the film’s release. Here we get the full story of what Fernandez proclaims a “barely coherent, globe-trotting mess involving half-baked mysticism, dubious science, tap dancing, and locusts.” Yet he also concedes that it stands as “an example of extravagant, go-for-broke 1970s filmmaking, the sort of film that would not have been made by the more risk-averse film industry of the following decade.”
The film began as a money-grabbing cheapie comprised largely of recycled footage from the first EXORCIST (which is itself given a fair amount of ink by Fernandez). It gradually morphed into an epic, fashioned by a director with zero experience in the horror genre and a screenwriter whose work was subjected to constant revisions by Rospo Pallenberg (Barbara’s husband), who according to many exerted an unhealthy influence on Boorman. The finished film was met with widespread hostility (things were actually thrown at movie screens), leading Boorman to hastily recut it, and resulting in multiple versions being circulated on home video.
Those various cuts are analyzed at great length by Fernandez, who also provides a learned examination of the film. In so doing he shows precisely why EXORCIST II is so reviled, and also why, in spite of itself, it continues to intrigue.