BOORMAN AND THE DEVIL

Review by John Larkin

A Fascinating Excavation of Hollywood’s Most Notorious Sequel

When I first heard about David Kittredge’s documentary on the making of EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC, I was immediately intrigued. I had been following the project since its earlier incarnation and title, and perhaps I was naturally predisposed to be interested. I’m an enormous admirer of THE EXORCIST, and I spent five years making my own documentary, FEAR AND LOVE: THE STORY OF THE EXORCIST, as a kind of personal love letter to William Friedkin’s film. My approach was one of excavation: finding people who had been there, getting beyond the familiar stories, and trying to uncover personal experiences from the making of a movie that has fascinated me for most of my life.

Kittredge began working on what eventually became BOORMAN AND THE DEVIL in 2017, driven by his own longstanding fascination with EXORCIST II and, perhaps more than anything, the remarkable fact that such an unusual movie ever came into existence.

I’ve always had an affection for EXORCIST II, although I’ve never felt compelled to argue that it’s necessarily a good film. It’s something more peculiar than that. For every sequence that confuses me, there’s another image, idea, performance or piece of music that I find evocative, charming or genuinely impressive. I revisit it every few years and inevitably find something new to appreciate. The same is true, in a very different way, of THE EXORCIST III. Neither film approaches Friedkin’s original in the same manner, but I’ve always enjoyed the strange directions in which this franchise traveled.

John Boorman certainly wasn’t interested in recreating Friedkin’s movie. In fact, he didn’t particularly like it. Boorman had been offered THE EXORCIST before Friedkin and rejected the material, and when he eventually accepted the sequel, his ambition was in some ways to counter what he disliked about the original. He has repeatedly characterized Friedkin’s film as something dark or even “evil,” while viewing his own film as an attempt to move toward goodness and light.

That’s where I fundamentally part company with Boorman. I’ve always considered THE EXORCIST an ultimately affirmative film about goodness, faith, sacrifice and the possibility of redemption. Its spirituality simply isn’t delivered to the audience in neatly labeled packages. Depending on how you approach the film, it’s something the viewer has to discover beneath all the horror.

Boorman saw something else, and rather than imitate a phenomenon he didn’t admire, he made an extraordinarily bold attempt to overturn it. Whether that was wise is another question, but it’s also a large part of what makes EXORCIST II so endlessly fascinating.

Kittredge understands this and wisely resists making BOORMAN AND THE DEVIL merely an assemblage of stories about how a notorious sequel went wrong. What emerges instead is a film about artistic ambition, risk, collaboration and failure, and about the uncomfortable reality that talented people can work incredibly hard toward a sincere artistic vision only to discover that the finished work simply doesn’t connect with its audience.

Nobody reports to a movie set intending to make a bad film, and one of the great strengths of Kittredge’s documentary is the respect it affords the people who actually made EXORCIST II.

Through interviews with an impressively broad cross-section of the production, from major creative personnel to assistant cameramen, grips, gaffers, electricians and the script supervisor, he reconstructs what it actually felt like to participate in this famously troubled production.

The result feels unusually democratic. Film history isn’t told exclusively by the people whose names appeared above the title, but also by the people standing ten feet outside the frame.

The anecdotes are fascinating and frequently very funny, but Kittredge never allows the movie to become a monotonous succession of talking heads. The editing is supercharged, the presentation clean and inventive, the archival material expertly deployed, and the use of animation and music keeps the documentary visually and aurally alive. It moves at lightning speed without making the material feel disposable, and there’s seemingly always another story, image or piece of information arriving before the movie has any opportunity to become dull.

Underneath all the entertainment is something surprisingly moving. BOORMAN AND THE DEVIL examines artistic failure without approaching it cynically. It would be very easy, nearly fifty years later, to treat EXORCIST II as a punchline. Kittredge instead asks us to look at the people who actually made it and recognize that they were genuinely attempting something. They took chances and followed an unusual filmmaker into an unusual conception. It didn’t ultimately come together in a way that satisfied audiences, critics or even many of the people involved, but the ambition behind it remains fascinating.

One of the documentary’s most enigmatic figures is Rospo Pallenberg, whose unusual creative involvement with Boorman and the production remains fascinating even after the documentary ends. The precise nature of his influence can sometimes seem difficult to define, which is part of what makes him such an intriguing presence in the story. His proximity to Boorman and apparent ability to influence creative decisions raise questions about exactly how EXORCIST II evolved into the film it ultimately became. Kittredge doesn’t force an easy answer, and Pallenberg remains one of the stranger and more mysterious personalities in an already strange production history.

Having followed Kittredge’s project for so long, I was delighted when I finally saw that BOORMAN AND THE DEVIL was opening theatrically in New York at the Quad Cinema. I attended with Mike Mastroserio, my co-producer and director of photography on FEAR AND LOVE: THE STORY OF THE EXORCIST, and before the screening we had the opportunity to introduce ourselves to Kittredge and tell him about our film. To my surprise, he had already seen some of it online. He couldn’t have been nicer, and after spending years watching his passion project gradually come together from afar, it was gratifying to finally see the finished documentary and tell him afterward how much we enjoyed it.

During the Q&A following the screening, Kittredge revealed that he has amassed nearly two additional hours of material intended for an eventual Blu-ray release. Considering the wealth of personalities and production stories already packed into the documentary, the prospect of seeing what didn’t make the theatrical cut is especially enticing.

For now, BOORMAN AND THE DEVIL is receiving a limited theatrical release in approximately 30 cities, and I can’t recommend seeking it out highly enough. You don’t need to love THE EXORCIST, and you certainly don’t need to defend EXORCIST II, to appreciate what Kittredge has accomplished. Anyone interested in directing, filmmaking or the messy and unpredictable process by which art actually gets made should find something here.

Movies that fail can sometimes be more illuminating than movies that succeed. They expose the decisions, compromises, personalities, ambitions and accidents that normally disappear beneath the surface of a finished film. EXORCIST II followed one of the biggest successes in movie history with something almost defiantly unexpected, a bizarre and enormously ambitious swing that remains difficult to categorize almost half a century later.

David Kittredge clearly has enormous affection for the film, but that affection hasn’t prevented him from examining what went wrong. Instead, it has allowed him to look beyond the easy jokes and discover the human story underneath them.

BOORMAN AND THE DEVIL is funny, illuminating, beautifully assembled and ultimately quite moving, not simply as a chronicle of one infamous sequel, but as a testament to what happens when artists take a chance and the results don’t turn out the way anyone expected.

Nearly fifty years later, EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC has finally received the documentary its strange, audacious history deserves.