Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)

Pazuzu, king of the evil spirits of the air, help me to find Kokumo!

In 1966, Time Magazine’s religion editor John Elson infamously asked the cover question “Is God Dead?” which became the subject of immediate backlash and spittle-flecked sermons from pulpits up and down the country, but the key point remained: “As always, faith is something of an irrational leap in the dark, a gift of God. And unlike in earlier centuries, there is no way today for churches to threaten or compel men to face that leap; after Dachau’s mass sadism and Hiroshima’s instant death, there are all too many real possibilities of hell on earth.” Seven years later, The Exorcist would take that central premise and ruin Christmas for audiences nationwide, becoming the second most popular film of 1973 (behind The Sting) and the highest grossing R-rated film of all time.

Director John Boorman was not a fan. He’d refused to direct The Exorcist with extreme prejudice: “I replied that not only would I refuse, but that I didn’t think Warners should produce it. It seemed to me a very difficult film to make, since everything depended on the performance of a twelve-year-old child. The problem of rendering the story credible was enormous. And, as a father, I found the book extremely tasteless, cruel and sadistic towards children.”¹ Boorman would have been a singularly poor choice anyway – despite his successes with Point Blank (1967) and Deliverance (1972), The Exorcist required a director at least willing to engage with Catholicism. Boorman had been raised Protestant, endured a Catholic comprehensive education, and frequently espoused enmity towards the Catholic Church. Friedkin may have been an agnostic Jew, but he was compelled to immerse himself in research and worked closely with the Jesuit-educated William Peter Blatty to ensure a terrifying quasi-realism.

And yet, when Warners approached Blatty and Friedkin with the sequel, both men demurred – “I respectfully declined,” said Friedkin. “I said, ‘I’d rather direct my nephew’s Bar Mitzvah!’”² – and so producer Richard Lederer returned to Boorman with essentially a knock-off sequel proposal: “What we essentially wanted to do with the sequel was redo the first movie – have the central character, an investigative priest, interview everyone involved in the first exorcism, then fade out to unused footage, unused angles from the first movie. A low-budget rehash – about $3 million – of The Exorcist, a rather cynical approach to moviemaking, I’ll admit. But that was the start.”³

And it was just that, because Boorman had his own ideas about what the sequel should be, not least that it shouldn’t be a sequel, “but a kind of riposte, a film about spirituality.” William Goodhart was the man for the job. Goodhart, a successful Broadway playwright who had adapted his hit play Generation into the less-of-a-hit movie A Time for Giving (1969), was preoccupied with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and paleontologist who had provided part of the model for Father Merrin in The Exorcist. Teilhard de Chardin’s theories of metaphysical unification were not popular with the Church – he would spend much of his time in exile – and Goodhart would suffer a similar fate: after much tinkering by Boorman, the proposed lead Jon Voight, and a new co-writer Rospo Pallenberg, Goodhart called it quits. According to Boorman: “It was rather painful for me, because I like him a great deal. He resented Rospo, he resented Voight, he resented any external input. He’s a playwright – Generation was his big success – and playwrights rent their words. Screenwriters sell them outright, whether for a few thousand or a few hundred thousand dollars. The words of a play are rarely altered. But the essence of a screenplay is that it must have a strong structure but be totally flexible.”

Unfortunately, the structure of Exorcist II: The Heretic is anything but strong: Father Lamont (Richard Burton), a protégé of Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) is tasked with investigating the exorcism that led to Merrin’s death and his posthumous charges of heresy. He starts with Regan (Linda Blair), who is now undergoing therapy at an institute run by Dr Gene Tuskin (Louise Fletcher), who has pioneered a new approach to therapy in the form of the “synchronizer” – essentially a couple of flashing bulbs – which allow a kind of mind-meld between two people. The memory of the exorcism awakens the dormant demon Pazuzu, which eventually sends Lamont off to Ethiopia to follow in Merrin’s footsteps and discover that Regan is no ordinary seventeen-year-old girl: she has psychic healing powers, and these powers attract eeeeeevil.

And that, dear readers, is the closest I can come to a coherent summary of the events of The Heretic. Any further inspection of the plot is likely to send you cross-eyed, because chief among The Heretic’s flaws is a fundamental misunderstanding of its prequel: neither Merrin nor Regan were the demon’s target in The Exorcist. The whole point of the possession was to torment Father Karras, whose faith was wavering in the wake of his mother’s death and the fact he lived in ‘70s New York, where poverty and crime abounded. As Merrin says, “I think the point is to make us despair. To see ourselves as animal and ugly. To make us reject the possibility that God could love us.” The central dramatic struggle of The Exorcist is not the exorcism, it is Karras’s crisis of faith, and its denouement works not because the demon is exorcised from Regan, but that Karras rediscovers his faith and sacrifices himself.

Father Karras – for reasons best known to those involved in The Heretic – is never mentioned in the film, not even indirectly. For those who hadn’t seen the first movie, it would be entirely possible to believe that Merrin was the only priest attending the MacNeil case. Therefore it’s also possible to believe that the exorcism wasn’t properly completed, and that Pazuzu⁴ just lay dormant for a few years before the synchronizer provided a wake-up call. It’s one thing for someone who hated The Exorcist to jettison the events of that movie for their sequel, it’s quite another do so with such obvious disregard for logic. Even Pazuzu’s intents have been changed: if the demon’s original plan was to shake the faith of the exorcists, then it’s now to menace (though not kill)⁵ the unification of girl and God as presented by Regan. It does this by directing Father Lamont to Kokumo (James Earl Jones)⁶, who is the only person alive able to explain how to defeat it. This is logical only in the sense that Lamont needs some exposition and the tools for victory, but renders Pazuzu pretty much toothless as an antagonist. Which is handy, because Lamont is the worst priest in the world, incapable of performing exorcisms, frequently hysterical, and an easy mark for possession himself. Hell, the man can’t even put out a small fire without thrashing around with a crutch and making it ten times worse.

With a story like this, a strong cast was required. While Boorman and Goodhart originally pictured Lamont as a young, headstrong priest – hence the pursuit of Voight – they were unable to find an actor that would suit the character and the executives. Christopher Walken apparently auditioned successfully for the role. “There was something brittle about him that I found interesting,” said Boorman. “You always felt Walken could break at any point, that he could snap.” But the studio weren’t about to take the chance on an actor with only a handful of supporting roles to his name, and instead the part went to Richard Burton, then in his fifties and usually three sheets to the wind, in desperate need of cash thanks to his divorce. Boorman wasn’t happy: “Impossible when he’s drunk and only half there when he’s sober. Wooden as a board with his body, relies on doing all his acting with his voice.” What Boorman failed to understand was that Burton does a hell of a lot with that voice, and while Burton’s performance may seem equal parts wooden and histrionic, he’s never less than interesting, even if it is the grim interest inherent in a man with great talent being forced to say lines that make him sound like English is a second or third language.

Supporting Burton is Louise Fletcher as Dr Tuskin, another prime example of horrible miscasting. Fletcher was a fine actor, but the shadow of Nurse Ratched looms over Dr Tuskin, so it’s difficult to buy her as a caring medical professional.⁷ Chris Sarandon and George Segal had been considered for the part – originally written as a male role – and both actors had a basic warmth that is sorely lacking in Fletcher’s performance. It could be that she simply checked out – nobody would blame her – but she is resolutely emotionless until the very end of the movie, which makes Tuskin’s relationships with Lamont and Regan seem almost entirely transactional.

And if Boorman had turned down The Exorcist because “everything depended on the performance of a twelve-year-old child,” then he was in no better shape five years later with Linda Blair, whose performance in the first movie is exemplary, but who was now mired in personal problems and saddled with a role that was too saintly to be interesting. As with Burton and Fletcher, I’m inclined to forgive Blair her worst moments in The Heretic, simply because the script is so bad. She’s inexplicably forced to tap-dance to “Lullaby of Broadway” not once, but twice; Regan is still written as if she’s a child; and she’s forced to deliver possibly the worst line in the movie - “I was possessed by a demon. Oh, it’s okay, he’s gone!” – in the worst scene, in which Regan “cures” a non-verbal autistic girl by talking to her. And it doesn’t help that Friedkin was (some might say too) hands-on with his actors, while Boorman preferred to step back, saying to the cast, “I have to be detached, to know only what I see on the camera. I’m not interested in what you’re thinking, what your motivations are, unless I can see it through the glass of the viewfinder.” Sometimes actors need help, after all, and Boorman was unwilling to give it.

The Heretic’s odd plot, terrible script, and dodgy performances combined with unrealistic audience expectations to result in one of the most derided studio films of all time. Most critics sharpened their hatchets – Gene Siskel started his review with a (likely entirely fictional) death threat: “If you say one nice thing about that movie, I’m going to burn your paper, kick in my television set, and then I’m coming after you!” – and many were incredibly creepy about the seventeen-year-old Blair’s sex appeal (or lack thereof).⁸ It didn’t help that Star Wars had premiered only a month before, which made The Heretic’s special effects look hokey in comparison. Only Pauline Kael would come close to giving the film a good review, mostly by deriding the audiences who didn’t get that the film was “too cadenced and exotic and too deliriously complicated,” choosing to laud it as “winged camp – a horror fairy tale gone wild,” and suggesting that its merit lay in its “visual magic.” Even Martin Scorsese – a man who is usually spot on when it comes to reassessing cinema – was a fan, choosing it for one of his “guilty pleasures” in a 1978 issue of Film Comment, suggesting that The Heretic surpassed The Exorcist while acknowledging that maybe Boorman “failed to execute the material.”

For fans of The Exorcist, The Heretic lives up to its title: very few sequels go out of their way to disparage their prequels with such unmitigated loathing, and it represents colossal hubris on Boorman’s part for him to think that his misguided antidote would be anything other than a massive failure. Some might call it unfettered ambition, though, and I have to admit admiration for someone committing millions of dollars to such a doomed project: as Kael rightly said, there is a “long history of moviemakers’ king-sized follies,” and we see so few of them these days that there’s something refreshing about failure on this scale. And let’s not forget, The Heretic wasn’t a commercial flop; in fact, it was the only one of two prequels and sequels to date that actually made a profit.⁹

If we divorce the film from its prequel (which is difficult, I know), there are some minor, slightly scuffed gems to be found. Boorman’s visual sense is still top-notch – glass and mirrors play an important role in establishing the thin line between reality and unreality – and the film’s studio-bound shoot results in an otherworldly quality to some of the locations, most notably Ethiopia, which might as well take place on Mars. Ennio Morricone’s score – all whipcracks and aggressive wailing – is weirdly fun. I’m never going to totally hate a movie that features James Earl Jones spitting nails, Ned Beatty as a pilot and purveyor of plastic relics, and Richard Burton barking about demons. And William Friedkin’s (often unprompted) diatribes about The Heretic have been a constant source of amusement for years.

As for Boorman, The Heretic represented a significant personal failure and a deeply traumatic experience. He would of course continue to work, giving us the bonkers Arthurian tale of Excalibur (1981) with Pallenberg as co-writer, the brilliant Hope and Glory (1987), as well as the fantastic Martin Cahill biopic The General (1998) and a fine Le Carré adaptation with The Tailor of Panama (2001), but for many devotees of “bad movies”, he would always be the director whose worst work was only beaten by Ed Wood.¹⁰

---

Next Up: “The raw, shocking movie of a pop star who makes it big!”

1. Quotes come from either Boorman’s memoirs or from the extraordinary Horrible and Fascinating - John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic by Declan Neil Fernandez. All are well worth a look, especially the Fernandez, which is a thorough and balanced read that also goes into great detail about the various on-the-hoof cuts Boorman made in the wake of The Heretic’s initial failure.

2. For Blatty’s part, he managed to nab a copy of Goodhart’s script and was appalled: “I thought, this is some kind of sly send-up. They’re trying to torment me. They’re not really going to do this.” He then filed an injunction to prevent the novelisation of the movie, just in case anyone thought he had anything to do with it. He would write his own sequel, Legion, in 1983, which would become the basis for The Exorcist III (1990).

3. It’s probably worth mentioning that this was the usual take on sequels back in the ‘70s. The idea of franchises as big box office had yet to fully sink in and ruin cinema forever. Ahem.

4. If you think I’m saying “Pazuzu” too much, then brace yourself for the movie. The name is mentioned so often, it sounds like most of the cast are saying their lines through a kazoo.

5. For such a powerful demon, Pazuzu does very little in The Heretic beyond making Regan walk to a ledge and talking a lot.

6. Alas, pronounced “Kuh-koo-moe,” but I guarantee you’re singing, “Aruba, Jamaica, ooh I wanna take ya …” As Fernandez points out, the name comes from West African dialect, which makes it a weird choice for an Ethiopian character.

7. Don’t get me started on the whole “shock of recall could result in self-punishment” warning from Tuskin - Lady, that’s exactly what you’re trying to do with your woo-woo doo-hickey.

8. I’m not overstating this. It’s really disgusting. Ever the sex-obsessed critic, Peter Biskind suggested The Exorcist was a “male nightmare of female puberty,” which completely ignores the fact that Blatty’s original real-life inspiration was a fourteen-year-old boy, and changed it because - unlike the Amityville folks - he didn’t want the guy hounded by the press.

9. The other was 2023’s The Exorcist: Believer which, much like David Gordon Green’s Halloween reboot trilogy, is a huge shrug of a movie, despite the return of both Burstyn and (spoiler alert) Blair.

10. The Heretic was second to Plan 9 from Outer Space in the execrable Michael Medved book, The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. Richard Burton is also named as the Worst Actor of All Time, which just goes to show that right-wing talk show hosts wouldn’t know culture if it stood up in their soup. Apparently he’s still reviewing on Substack. To paraphrase Moe Szyslak, I’m a well-wisher, in that I don’t wish him any specific harm.