New Documentary Revisits the Making of One of Hollywood's Most Notorious Sequels
A new documentary headed to theatres on 28 August pulls back the curtain on the chaotic making of Exorcist II: The Heretic, the 1977 sequel that sent its director scrambling to recut the film even as it was playing in cinemas.
Boorman and the Devil, written and directed by David Kittredge, centres on John Boorman — the filmmaker behind Deliverance (1972) and the man who both turned down and ultimately embraced the Exorcist franchise. According to Variety, which published its review on 23 August, the documentary draws on interviews conducted with Boorman at his country home in County Wicklow, Ireland, when the director was 85. He is now 93.
The story the documentary tells is full of reversals. After the success of Deliverance, Boorman was offered the chance to direct the original The Exorcist (1973). He declined, telling interviewers the source novel seemed to him to be about torturing a child. When the sequel came around a few years later, he said yes — but on his own terms. Boorman has stated he wanted Exorcist II: The Heretic to be a meditation on the aftermath of the first film, not a repeat of its shocks. Stanley Kubrick, a friend, offered blunter counsel: to make a sequel to The Exorcist, Kubrick told Boorman, just get more blood and gore.
Boorman ignored that advice. The film that reached screens in the summer of 1977 baffled audiences and critics. After release, Boorman made a frantic attempt to recut the picture, replacing what he regarded as an atrocious ending with a different one — prints were swapped in theatres while the film was still in circulation.
Decades on, Boorman's assessment has not softened into apology. He has said the film contains "some of the best work I've ever done." Director Joe Dante, interviewed for the documentary, notes that many of the techniques Boorman deployed in Exorcist II were never repeated by anyone — a compliment and an epitaph in the same breath.
The Exorcist franchise's later chapters had their own troubles. Exorcist: The Beginning (2004) went through multiple directors and reshoots; Variety's review of the 2005 recut, Exorcist: The Prequel, noted that Stellan Skarsgård as Father Merrin was in "better, more soulful form" than in the version directed by Renny Harlin.
What makes Boorman and the Devil more than a making-of footnote is the access. Boorman, speaking from the same Wicklow home where he has lived for decades, is by turns defiant and reflective. The film does not adjudicate whether Exorcist II is a misunderstood masterpiece or a noble failure. It lets the man who made it have his say — at 85, with the hindsight of a half-century.
For a franchise that has spent fifty years generating sequels, prequels and recuts, that may be the most surprising turn of all.
