‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ Was Not What Anyone Expected, But Don’t Dismiss Its Ambition

Strange Terrors is a limited series exploring bizarre horror sequels, how they came to be, and whether or not they work.

Few movies have been as quickly and thoroughly rejected as Exorcist II: The Heretic, which arrived in theaters in a cloud of bad buzz in the summer of 1977 and met with a, to put it mildly, hostile reception. “Some people walked out. They asked for their money back. They threw things at the screen,” no less than John Boorman, the film’s director, says on a new audio commentary on the recently released Scream Factory Blu-ray edition of the film. Exorcist director William Friedkin has openly mocked it. The film’s reputation only grew worse over the years, earning a first runner-up “prize” in The Golden Turkey Awards, a widely read book about bad movies. It currently ranks 84th on the IMDb’s list of the worst films of all time, a slot below Stan Helsing but above The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence). Everyone knows it’s terrible.

But what if everyone was wrong?

Wait, hear me out: I’ll admit right away that appreciating Exorcist II: The Heretic requires clearing a couple of mental hurdles. For starters, there’s a huge gap between its two lead performances. As Father Philip Lamont, a priest introduced overseeing an exorcism that goes horribly wrong who’s then sent to investigate the exorcism we witnessed in the 1973 film The Exorcist, Richard Burton gives a stern, sour-faced performance, highly theatrical performance, as if he were appearing in a long-lost Eugene O’Neill play that just happened to feature a demon named Pazuzu. Returning as Regan, the girl on the receiving end of the exorcism in the first movie, a now-teenaged Linda Blair is all smiles and chirpy line readings. They don’t seem to be in the same movie.

Also, and here’s what probably turned so many viewers against the film, whatever movie they’re in is decidedly not The Exorcist. Though a direct sequel to that runaway hit, Exorcist II: The Heretic is about as definitive of a break in approach from the original as James Cameron’s Aliens is from Alien. The Exorcist lets a battle between good and evil play out mostly within the confines of a single house. It’s creepy and claustrophobic, exploring what horrors can be visited on a girl’s body and what power, if any, faith had in the face of absolute evil. Boorman’s film is expansive, staging its confrontation between good and evil across two continents. Burton’s Father Lamont travels to Africa not once, but twice, arriving in the flesh after first exploring it on the wings of demon that’s taken the form of a locust.

Wait! Come back. That sounds off-puttingly strange, maybe even a little stupid. So does this: The film features several scenes in which Regan and Lamont commune mentally at a New York psychiatric institute overseen by Dr. Gene Tuskin (Louise Fletcher, fresh off her Best Actress Oscar win) via a machine that “syncs” their minds in a kind of hypnotic state via rhythmic flashes and blinks. It’s a bit of off-the-cuff made-up pseudoscience that the film trusts will be as entrancing to viewers as it is to the characters on screen.

But get on Boorman’s wavelength, and it’s a bet that pays off. Boorman passed on the chance to make the original Exorcist, dismissing the book as an “abhorrent” work about torturing a child. (He made Deliverance instead, a pretty OK trade-off.) Here, working from a script by William Goodhart and an uncredited Rospo Pallenberg, he takes the same raw material and turns it into a bizarre fantasia on religious themes filled wild images and strange sets. Tuskin’s clinic is a honeycomb-like space filled with floor-length windows and Star Trek-like automatic sliding doors. Blair lives in an apartment in which virtually every surface is mirrored — even the pigeon nest on her balcony.

Boorman had sizable budget, but not sizable enough to travel to Africa and the owners of the original Exorcist house refused Warner Bros. permission to film there again. Working around this, he recreated both locations on soundstages, a choice that gives the film a dreamlike quality enhanced by William A. Fraker’s gauzy cinematography and Ennio Morricone’s score, a mix of “tribal” vocals and pounding percussion that’s one of his most out-there offerings from his most out-there decade. Also, at one point, James Earl Jones shows up dressed as a giant locust.

It’s a strange brew and, as history has proven, not to everyone’s taste. But to dismiss it as merely bad, much less one of the worst movies ever made, is to ignore the ambition on display in a film in which one of the era’s most daring filmmakers was given one of the biggest possible canvases to explore the grandest themes imaginable. It’s not what anyone expected. That was the point.

Keith Phipps writes about movies and other aspects of pop culture. You can find his work in such publications as The Ringer, Rolling Stone, Vulture, and The Verge. Keith also co-hosts the podcasts The Next Picture Show and Random Movie Night and lives in Chicago with his wife and child. Follow him on Twitter at @kphipps3000.

Where to stream Exorcist II: The Heretic