It's 1976. You’re an Oscar nominated director. Your last film, which you wrote and directed for free, crashed at the box office. The Hollywood studios aren’t hot for your re-imagining of the Arthurian legend and you’ve got bills to pay. Who are you? You’re John Boorman, director of Point Blank, Deliverance and (the aforementioned box-office bust) Zardoz. It was under these circumstances that Boorman decided to accept an offer from John Calley of Warner Bros. to make Exorcist II: The Heretic, the sequel to the most successful horror film ever made.
The director had been offered the job of directing the original, but turned it down feeling it was nothing less than ‘child torture’ - surely nobody would want to watch that. Ten Oscar nominations and hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide had proved him wrong - as least as to what audiences were willing to watch. Boorman wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. The original is all about evil, he reasoned, so his film would be about ‘good’. Stanley Kubrick wasn’t so sure. He told Boorman that the only way to make a successful sequel to The Exorcist was to give people more gore than before.
Turns out they were both right. I think we can all agree - me, you, Boorman and Kubrick - that trying to top a film like The Exorcist would be a fool’s errand; it is a picture that transcends horror to be a great example of the power of cinema itself. The only thing you can do is make the sequel your own. The Heretic continues the story years later of once-possessed teen Linda Blair, now leading a regular life under the monitoring of Louise Fletcher - fresh from her Oscar-winning turn as Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest - at a high-tech psychiatric institute. Enter Richard Burton’s Father Lamont (original choice Jon Voight had to turn it down), a priest struggling with his faith, who’s been assigned by the church to investigate the death of Father Merrin in the first film. That’s the bare bones of a rather heady screenplay, which involves fiery African exorcisms, flashbacks with Max Von Sydow, a psychological investigation into the true nature of good and evil... And locusts. Lots and lots of locusts.
It’s 1976. You’re a full time firefighter and jobbing filmworker. You get an offer of a day's work at Ardmore Studios, in Co. Wicklow. Who are you? My dad. John Boorman is doing pick-up shots on an African model set. The job: chuck an endless series of locusts from a succession of cardboard boxes at various miniatures and at Garrett Brown, a one-man walking camera wearing a new device called a Steadicam. This was Hollywood’s first use of the famous rig, a few years before it would feature in Kubrick’s The Shining.
Nice work if you can get it. Alas for Boorman, it wasn’t so nice. Between negotiating with Linda Blair (who allegedly refused to don the possession makeup), dragging an on-the-wagon but utterly inert performance from struggling alcoholic Richard Burton, and a bad case of San Joaquin Valley fever (a respiratory fungal infection from the sand brought in to shoot the African sequences in the studio) which ultimately sent him to hospital for many weeks - Boorman was utterly mentally and spiritually exhausted by the time editing was completed. The movie opened to hostile critics and audiences both, with both groups seemingly angry that he hadn't simply rehashed the first picture. Despite this initial response, and its reputation today as a ‘flop’, Exorcist II: The Heretic was a modest financial success upon its release in 1977. It might have enough plot to fill a ten-part HBO series but it’s an ambitious film and makes for a fascinating and entertaining watch, made by an earnest John Boorman in complete control of his film making powers.
Returning to his home at Anamoe in Co Wicklow, Boorman nursed himself back to health. With the devil behind him, maybe it was time to finally pull the sword from the stone and return to that script of King Arthur and the knights of round table. My dad would return, too. And me, as it happens. No priests, exorcisms and locusts required that time. Just wizards, kings, rain and smoke. Lots and lots of smoke.
You can listen to John Boorman speak his Exorcist truth in a new feature documentary Boorman and the Devil, showing in a double feature with Exorcist II: The Heretic this Friday night (October 24th) at the Irish Film Institute’s Horrorthon festival - find out more here.
