Boorman and the Devil

It’s unusual for the ‘making of’ a classic movie to warrant a cinema release: Hearts of Darkness (Apocalypse Now) and 78/52 (Psycho) are rare exceptions. But a documentary about the making of a notorious flop? A film so thoroughly reviled that its first public screening resulted in the audience chasing studio executives down the street? Absolutely – Boorman and the Devil is just that good.

The Exorcist was a colossal hit back in 1973, a pre-Jaws, pre-Star Wars blockbuster that rewrote the rules of box-office success and scored 10 Oscar nominations, winning Best Picture. At the time, sequels were just starting to catch on – Magnum Force was the second biggest film of that year – but even if a follow-up made financial sense, was British director John Boorman, who hated Friedkin’s film, the man to make it?

The Heretic, as the film was originally to be known – sequels with numbers wouldn’t catch on until The French Connection II and The Godfather Part II – was an audacious departure from the original film, with some connective tissue (Linda Blair as Regan, Max von Sydow as Father Merrin), but more metaphysical, existential, and science-over-supernatural than demonic horror – not, in other words, what audiences wanted or expected. Set across sprawling locations, Exorcist II: The Heretic drafted in Richard Burton and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s Nurse Ratched, Louise Fletcher, and wasn’t so much a sequel, but, as Boorman put it, ‘a riposte’. It was, as everyone else put it, a disaster.

Boorman and the Devil tells one hell of a story

Kittredge conducts the autopsy with precision and wit, gathering surviving cast and crew, critics and filmmakers to lay out in withering detail everything that went wrong on what appeared to be a cursed production: the pre-production death of its original lead (Lee J Cobb, The Exorcist’s Lieutenant Kinderman); the loss of key locations; hospitalisations (Boorman and Fletcher); near-fatal stunts; and a sozzled star (Richard Burton) who ‘couldn’t act from the neck down’. Yet it also sets out the artistic ambition, technical innovation and honest intentions with which the film was made.

Kittredge’s film comes neither to bury The Exorcist II: The Heretic nor to praise it. It allows Boorman to exorcise his own demons about the film that almost killed not just career, but also him. But it offers the audience so much more: a fascinating, funny and fully riveting film about the making of one of history’s most notorious critical and commercial failures. Could this be the beginning of a reassessment? Hell, no – but Boorman and the Devil tells one hell of a story.

In UK and Ireland cinemas Sep 25.