The Exorcist III
Dir. William Peter Blatty
Written by William Peter Blatty
Starring George C. Scott, Jason Miller, Brad Dourif
THE EXORCIST was an enormous, unqualified success when it
premiered in late 1973. A critical and popular darling, it grossed $441 million
worldwide on a modest $12 million budget, became a cultural phenomenon, was the
first horror film ever nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, and remains a
high-water mark for 70's genre cinema, and cinema at large. So of course
the two people the studio sought out to direct the sequels were the only two
people who were on record hating the original. I mean, that just makes sound
creative and financial sense, frankly it would have been irresponsible to do
anything else.
The first of those was John Boorman, who perpetrated THE EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC (1977) on the world, and for that unforgivable act is
forever damned. William Friedkin (who directed THE EXORCIST but was not
initially interested in coming back for a sequel) was not coy about his
feelings regarding that little misstep: “It's just a
stupid mess made by a dumb guy – John Boorman by name, somebody who should be nameless,
but in this case should be named. Scurrilous. A horrible picture." And
Boorman probably didn’t feel any kinder to Friedkin’s movie: he had turned down the opportunity to direct THE EXORCIST, which he
found "rather repulsive" and almost turned down the sequel too,
saying, “‘I don't want to make a film about torturing a child’, which is how I
saw the original film" before ultimately taking the job in order to create
"a kind of riposte to the ugliness and darkness of The Exorcist – I wanted
a film about journeys that was positive, about good, essentially." So yes,
obviously you simply must hire the guy who hated the original and
wanted the sequel to be a direct repudiation of one of the most popular and
iconic movies of all time. It went about as well as you might expect. No wait,
scratch that, I actually don’t think it would even be possible to expect
anything to go as badly as it did. Humans, even the most pessimistic among us,
simply don’t have the imaginative capacity to conceive of something as
profoundly, insanely misguided as THE EXORCIST II until it arrives in front of
us.
Suffice to say, with
EXORCIST II a complete and unmitigated critical, popular, and commercial
disaster, nobody was begging Boorman to come back again. So the studio cast
about for the second-biggest EXORCIST hater they could locate, and found William
Peter Blatty. Blatty, having written the bestselling novel that served as the
basis for the original film, and having written the script and produced the
film himself (with a great deal of creative input, including about casting),
was about as deeply involved as anyone in the making of THE EXORCIST, and
consequently wasn't entirely bearish on the finished film. But he
nevertheless felt dissatisfied with the final result, especially after Friedkin
trimmed 20 minutes for the final (122 minute) cut at the behest of the studio,
after which, according to Friedkin, “Bill
[Blatty] was vitriolic. He was harsh. He would denounce the picture."
But not long after EXORCIST II, everyone’s temper seemed to have mellowed a
bit, and Friedkin and Blatty were actively working on a sequel.
I’m honestly a little
unclear on when exactly this began. Blatty (who, I gather from various
interviews I’ve read for this review, has a tendency to tell different stories
at different times) claims in this interview that “It took me
that long to think of a follow up to the original story. That's why I didn't do
[Exorcist II],” which means that at least as late as 1977, he hadn’t planned on
writing a sequel at all. By the late 70’s, he was presumably working on his
directorial debut, THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (which was based on his 1966 novel
with the magnificent title of Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane) which
premiered in 1980. So I suspect it wouldn’t be until the early 80’s that he
began working in earnest on an EXORCIST follow-up, first pitching the idea to
Friedkin as a film, and then, after the project languished for awhile in
Development Hell, publishing it as the novel Legion in 1983. But sources
differ on the exact timing of all this; In this interview Blatty says that
he considers The Exorcist, The Ninth Configuration and Legion to
be a trilogy of sorts – and the fact that he places them in that order (despite
The Ninth Configuration being based on a novel that precedes all of
them) suggests to me that he’s referring to the film version rather than the
book, and that therefor Legion came into being sometimes after 1980. On
the other hand, this Bloodydisgusting article claims that
Blatty “originally wrote the screenplay for a film that was called Legion right
after the release of THE EXORCIST,” but that Friedkin passed and the job went
to Boorman. This strikes me as unlikely – if the studio already had a finished
script, or even a story outline, from the original author, why would they hire
some other guy (first playwright William Goodhart, then Boorman and Rospo
Pallenberg) to write a whole new concept from scratch? This article from TheSpool claims that
Blatty’s pitch to Friedkin happened “at the same time” that EXORCIST II was
being loathed at the box office but still making enough of a profit that future
sequels seemed feasible.
So I don’t know. But at
any rate, all sources seem to agree that sometime after the original EXORCIST,
and probably after the misery of EXORCIST II, Blatty wrote a script for an
EXORCIST follow-up called LEGION, and that he took it first to Friedkin, who
was initially enthusiastic about the concept but later left the project over
creative differences. Frustrated by the lack of progress, Blatty eventually
turned his screenplay into a novel, which he published as Legion in
1983, and which did well enough to get Hollywood interested in an adaptation. Tantalizingly,
most sources also mention one further detail: that after re-adapting his novel
into a screenplay, Blatty approached John Carpenter to direct, and that
Carpenter was interested before he eventually bowed out after concluding that Blatty
was going to be a complete control freak about this and should really just
direct it himself. Knowing that John Carpenter almost directed an EXORCIST
sequel and then did MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN (1992) instead might incline
one to dwell on what we missed out on.* But actually Blatty, directing for the
second and final time (a decade after THE NINTH CONFIGURATION) proves himself a
surprisingly strong director, giving it a distinct tone and some impressively
well-staged sequences. Like Clive Barker directing HELLRAISER, it just seems
like Blatty intuitively understood --right off the bat-- what he wanted and how
to bring his distinct literary voice to the big screen.
The distinct voice is
what jumps out first. The movie is moody and uneasy, but flecked with little
notes of offbeat comedy. There's an early sequence featuring the supernatural
desecration of a church which mirrors a similar sequence in THE EXORCIST,
except this time we get a series of comic "reaction shots" of a
statue of Jesus, who changes his expression to shock and displeasure. It is at
this point that one might recall that Blatty began his screenwriting career as
writer of farce (he co-wrote A SHOT IN THE DARK, among other comedies, often
for Blake Edwards). But there's nothing else quite so silly as that in the
film; mostly, the streak of comedy manifests itself in the idiosyncratic
protagonist Lt. Kinderman (played by a very game George C. Scott, taking over
the role from THE EXORCIST's much more sedate Lee J. Cobb, who had died in 1976**).
Kinderman is a curious and intriguing character. I don't know if I've ever seen
another quite like him. He's a hard-boiled cop, but has a tendency to fly off
the handle and rant about unexpected topics. In what is certainly the best
scene in the film, and perhaps any scene in any film, Scott, at his absolute
George C. Scottiest, delivers an impassioned monologue about a carp that's
currently living in his bathtub on the way to a dinner plate. He seems
downright unhinged, but Scott also has a merry twinkle in his eye as if he's
reveling in the discomfort he's eliciting. The net result is that we're never
quite sure how much of his apparent instability is genuine and how much is a
private comedy show for a very old fart who enjoys causing a scene.
Nevertheless, while
Blatty is obviously doing something tonally different from Friedkin’s icy,
bleak take on the original, it is still a horror film, and in many ways a damn
good one. It follows Kinderman (a fairly minor character in the original movie),
who, since the days of the Regan MacNeil's exorcism, has gotten involved with
the case of a serial killer called “The Gemini”*** (Brad Dourif, CHILD’S PLAY)
and is troubled immensely when victims demonstrating his exact MO begin to
reappear. Bad enough that the killer’s back, after all, but even worse because
the killer is supposed to be dead, and the crime scenes all have different
fingerprints on them, despite the lockstep similarity in method. And even worse
than that when it starts to become clear that the victims all have a (pretty
tangential) link to The Regan MacNeil case. Plus, there’s a guy in the mental
institution at the hospital who happens to look exactly like the long-deceased
Father Karras (Jason Miller, THE NINTH CONFIGURATION). You know, this actually
seems like the kind of situation which would be better suited for an THE
EXORCIST than a hard-boiled cop. Fortunately, Kinderman, though not exactly a religiously
religious man, is spiritually open-minded enough that he doesn’t shrink from
more exotic explanations for these crimes, and before long he’s interviewing
the mystery man known as “Patient X” (in the novel, the much cheerier “Tommy
Sunshine”!) and probably wondering how in the hell you prosecute a case where
(SPOILERS) the killers are possessed by a guy who’s possessed by a serial
killer who’s possessed by a demon. Kinda a possession turducken situation. I
guess, like, start with a conspiracy charge and go from there?
Scott’s willingness to
be constantly one second away from some sort of furious freak-out fits the
material well: as you might have deduced from the previous paragraph, it’s
slightly exaggerated, sometimes to the point of comedy (as with a heavenly
dream where Scott sees an Angelic Fabio and Patrick Ewing [!]), sometimes to
the point of disturbing grotesqueness (as with an uncomfortably spot-on
Spider-Man impression from a cackling old lady). And the other actors are on
board with the off-kilter plot and tone Blatty seems to be shooting for. You’ll
be glad to know that Brad Dourif is not about to be out-freakout’d by George C.
Scott, and that Jason Miller (who sat out EXORCIST II to the point that they do
a soft retcon to remove him from the flashback exorcism scenes!) is a welcome
presence and does a lot to tie this third sequel to the original EXORCIST by
the mere fact of his being there (the links are otherwise pretty tangential). It
all works pretty well, maintaining a distinct tone, telling an odd but
comprehensible story, spicing things up with the occasional bit of horror
whammy.
It is, in fact, exactly
those moments of horror whammy which elevate this from “surprising not shitty
considering the circumstances” to “wait, this is actually great, maybe?” Though
Blatty cannot hope to recapture the soul-deep horror crucible of the original
EXORCIST, he manages to stage a handful of truly exceptional horror beats which
ensure that there’s some genuine menace lurking even through the most offbeat
scenes here. I do not consider it hyperbole to suggest that the famous
late-night nurse sequence (you know the one I mean) is up there with the
absolute best-executed coil-and-release shock scares in all horror, and
although nothing else in the movie comes close to that, having even one scene
that delivers such a wallop makes for a movie that can't be lightly dismissed.
It does stumble slightly when it finally arrives at the inevitable exorcism
finale, which can't help but invite unflattering comparisons to the
greatest-of-all-time original. But even here it's far from an embarrassment.
The climax doesn't quite come together, but it's still a ferocious and
estimable example of the form.
Which is especially
impressive, considering it was not the original ending, and was forced on
Blatty at the last minute by the studio, after the movie had already been shot.
Legion the novel, as well as the original script, had no final exorcism
scene, and no Exorcist character. And in fact, if Blatty had his way, it
wouldn’t have been titled THE EXORCIST III; he still considered LEGION to be
the correct title. But a franchise is a franchise, and despite the
well-poisoning that EXORCIST II had done, the suits insisted on the title, and
once that happened (according to Blatty) the secretary of producer James
Robinson convinced him that they couldn’t have an EXORCIST movie which
contained no exorcism. Which is, you know, not an entirely absurd point, but
probably something you want to work out at a point before the film has
been completely shot. This being Hollywood, of course, that’s exactly when the
suits intervened and demanded a new ending, as well as more narrative links to
the original EXORCIST. Blatty balked, stalled, but ultimately decided that if
he didn’t do it himself, they’d just fire him and hire some other hack to do
their dirty work, so he dutifully went back and shot new material which
radically altered the film to fit a new studio-mandated exorcism-delivering
climax.
Some of that material
includes a not-especially-well-integrated subplot about a character named
“Father Morning” (Nicol Williamson, who had previously worked with John
Boorman, of all people, on EXCALIBUR), a priest who
never meets Lt. Kinderman or any of the other characters until the climax, but
who we occasionally observe sitting around silently, obviously waiting for his chance to do some hardcore exorcizing. Not ideal from a storytelling
perspective, but fortunately the movie is hazy and strange enough that these
scenes don’t feel disastrously out of place; we’ve trusted Blatty for a lot of
weird stuff throughout the movie, and we trust that this seemingly unrelated
character is important in some way, which he indeed turns out to be (in fact,
he makes for a respectable red herring while we wait, a character strange and nebulous
enough to make a suitable alternative suspect to “Patient X”). Against all
odds, the new material manages to sit alongside the original storyline –if not neatly—at
least comfortably.
But that is nothing
compared to the biggest change imposed by the studio: in an effort to further
link this movie to THE EXORCIST, they demanded Blatty bring Jason Miller back
as Father Karras. Yes! Amazingly, Miller was not going to be in the movie at
all until the last-minute reshoots, despite the fact that Brad Dourif is
supposed to be playing a guy who looks just like and may be some kind of
reincarnation or resurrection of Damien Karras. Why did Blatty not just
approach Miller from the beginning? I can find no official first-hand
explanation, although I read that in the DVD commentary Dourif explains that Miller’s alcoholism (of which I can also find no other documented evidence)
had left him unable to do the kind of wordy monologuing that Blatty had in
mind. At any rate, Dourif had already finished his performance by the time
Miller came on board, and rather than entirely replace him, Blatty had the
insane/brilliant idea of keeping both performances. So sometimes we see
Miller, sometimes we see Dourif – which makes sense in a possession movie! In
fact, it’s sort of maybe really great; Miller makes no effort whatsoever to
mimic Dourif’s go-for-broke mega-acting, and it creates a real live-wire,
multi-layer explosiveness to the character. Sometimes we see Miller, sitting
placidly with just a shadow of a malicious smirk on his face, and then in a
blink of an eye we’ll switch to a bug-eyed, shrieking and spitting Dourif, and
then back, never quite sure which part of this, if any, is “real.” And with
apologies to Blatty, the suits were right that having Miller back links the
thing much more robustly to the original EXORCIST, which was perhaps not
strictly necessary, but it helps lend this dubious third sequel some
credibility and tactile connection to its forbearer. A good example of how
maybe the suits were not entirely wrong, or if they were entirely wrong
at least Blatty was nimble enough to make their absurd demands nestle
comfortably into his world, if not quite his vision.
I’d obviously be
interested in seeing Blatty’s original cut, and now it’s possible –there’s a semi-complete
“director’s cut” on the 2016 Shout! Factory Blu-ray release (albeit with much
of the footage taken from low-quality sources, and some never recovered). But
frankly I’m pretty enamored with the theatrical version already. Even the
studio-mandated exorcism scene is packed full of shocking imagery and
provocative theology, and I think I’d miss it if it was gone altogether. The
movie feels a little overcooked in places, but between Scott's eccentric and
frisky performance, the offbeat tone, and some solid and occasionally bravura
horror beats, it also feels dense and surprising and rewarding. All in all, a
startlingly strong showing which I feel has been unfairly pilloried with all
the other misbegotten EXORCIST sequels. Not bad for a screenwriter and novelist
making only his second (and, sadly, final!) film. And considering the dismal
reputation and equally tormented production of every other EXORCIST sequel, I’d
say it’s damn close to a miracle that this came out so well. Blatty claimed
that EXORCIST III is about the “problem of evil” – ie, why a kind, loving,
omnipotent god permits evil to exist. I’m not sure the movie exactly answers
that question, but I can relate – I have similar questions about the
proliferation of miserable franchise sequels. Every once in awhile, though,
good does triumph over evil, and a genuinely good horror sequel sneaks its way
past all the perils that beset such projects and ends up on-screen. I’m not
sure that proves the existence of a kind, loving God, but it sure doesn’t hurt
the case.
Appendix A: Cameos from people you probably do not expect to be in THE
EXORCIST III, ranked in ascending order of improbability:
1. Pre-fame Kevin Corrigan
2. Pre-fame Samuel L. Jackson (one line, dubbed by someone else)
3. “young” Larry King
4. NBA great Patrick Ewing
5. Fabio
6. Former US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.
Appendix B: Dialogue used in metal songs: I gather that some Gemini
Killer dialogue is used as the introduction to the Children of Bodom songs
"Follow the Reaper" and "Taste of My Scythe". The Cryptopsy
song "Crown of Horns" also “employs a roar and dialogue heard in Cell
11.” So that’s legit.
* But never fear, David Gordon Green, who got to be the New John Carpenter with
his HALLOWEEN sequel trilogy, is also signed to direct an EXORCIST sequel
trilogy, so in a way it'll be a chance to see what a Carpenter EXORCIST would
have been like, except nothing like that.
** It would be the first of two
times that Scott would take over a role originated by Cobb: the second would be
in 1997, when he played Juror #3 in a remake of TWELVE ANGRY MEN (Cobb played
the role in the 1957 version) directed by, of all people, William Friedkin.
*** The “Zodiac killer” made
reference to THE EXORCIST in a letter, which he called “the best saterical
comidy [sic] that I have ever seen.” Since Blatty leaned a little heavier on
comedy in his subsequent horror movies, I’m going to go ahead and assume that
naming his fictional serial killer “The Gemini” is an affectionate tribute to
the guy who gave him the idea. Later, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer would express
his own appreciation for THE EXORCIST III. From Wikipedia: “The film became a
focal point of the trial of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Detectives testified
that Dahmer claimed to identify with the Gemini Killer and would play the film
for some of his victims before killing them. Dahmer's final attempted victim,
Tracy Edwards, testified that Dahmer would rock back and forth while chanting
at various times and that he especially enjoyed a sequence with a possessed
Karras. Dahmer went so far as to purchase yellow contact lenses to more
resemble Miller, as well as to emulate another film character he admired,
Emperor Palpatine from Return of the Jedi.” Proving that above all other
things, serial killers are giant fucking dorks.
