British director John Boorman had already made six movies before he got the chance to direct Exorcist II: The Heretic, the 1977 sequel to William Friedkin’s 1973 blockbuster about demonic possession, The Exorcist. Boorman was hardly a novice. He even had two stone-cold classics, Point Blank and Deliverance, to his name.
But in making a movie about hope and goodness, in which Linda Blair’s former victim becomes a sort of psychic healer, Boorman disappointed those expecting more head swivels, green goo, and blasphemous “yo mama” jokes.
As director David Kittredge (Shudder’s docuseries Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror) makes clear in his affectionate and contextually rich new documentary, Boorman and the Devil, about what the director describes as “one of the most famous failures of all time in the cinema,” Boorman was a wild card who never made the same film twice.
His directorial debut, Catch Us If You Can, for instance, was a satirical vehicle for British invaders the Dave Clark Five, whereas the apocalyptic sci-fi fantasy Zardoz remains best known for Sean Connery’s red fetish-wear mankini and the immortal phrase, “The gun is good, the penis is evil!”
In Boorman and the Devil, the director, 85 at the time, appears at his home in Ireland with a model of the stone Zardoz idol head behind him, indicating fondness for a film that no one knew what to make of in 1974. That would also be the case with The Heretic, his preferred title, since he saw his 1977 film more as a “riposte” than a sequel.
Kittredge’s documentary brims with frank interviews with cast and crew, cleverly-edited film clips, and playful illustrations, but his ace in the hole are Boorman’s unromantic, clear-eyed recollections.
“It made oceans of money for Warner’s, but I didn’t enjoy it,” he says of The Exorcist. He did enjoy playwright William Goodhart’s treatment for The Heretic, which called on Goodhart’s expertise with theology and the occult, and that’s what led to his participation (original author William Peter Blatty, who directed the second sequel, The Exorcist III, was not involved).
From here, all went downhill, and everything that could go wrong did. He persuaded Linda Blair and Max von Sydow to return, but Ellen Burstyn passed and Lee J. Cobb, who played homicide detective Kinderman in the first film, died of a heart attack. He cast other fine actors, like Louise Fletcher, who had just won the Oscar for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Kitty Winn from The Panic in Needle Park. They did what they could, but the results pleased almost no one, and yet this isn’t a sad or tragic tale, because most everyone actually enjoyed working on this glorious mess.
It is, instead, a way of looking at Boorman’s career through the lens of his biggest bomb, because it was an innovative film with heady ideas about metaphysical communication and stunning practical effects, like a daring sequence in which Blair walks to the edge of an NYC high-rise and a horde of 3,000 real-deal locusts. It was also emblematic of 1970s filmmaking, because he had a ride-or-die crew and money to burn. But the project was cursed, as it were, by an ever-changing script, deadly disease, and a studio-mandated lead, Richard Burton, fresh off a triumphant run in Peter Shaffer’s play Equus, with no appetite for the material.
But failure has a way of revealing an artist’s true colors, and Boorman, now 93, didn’t let the experience break him. Instead, he got back up, dusted himself off, and continued to make the kinds of films he wanted to make, though he would never fly that close to the sun again.
I watched Boorman and the Devil and The Heretic back to back and came away more convinced than ever that John Boorman is a great director who made a bad, if fascinating film. But that humbling, edifying experience would feed into later-career triumphs like 1984’s Excalibur and 1988’s The General, on which he applied a few of the hard-won lessons he had learned.
As he says of The Heretic with a hint of a smile, “It was very much the film I wanted to make, and I got away with it.”
Northwest Film Forum, 515 12th Ave. September 4, 5, 6. (The Devil and Boorman playing with The Heretic.)