It’s been a week of writing about hard things at OnlySky: a piece on the gamification of a humanitarian nightmare, a piece on the folly of expecting international intervention amid atrocity, and a piece (for Monday) on the complexity of a state’s obligations to its citizens, non-citizens, and the world. So here on Substack, I addressed wartime hardship through an easier lens: poetry.
Now I’ll do so again, through film.
Sometimes, I’m moved to rewatch something out of a vague sense of déjà vu, and after earlier conversations this October reminded me of The Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), I sought it out after this heavy news week with just that feeling in mind.
Some backstory, for folks who are a little less film- and horror-film-inclined:
The Exorcist (1973) shook the world by depicting the demonic possession of a child. Throughout Christian history the idea of demonic possession has been a stand-in for the commingled concepts of illness and sin, which is why Christ is presented as an exorcist in the New Testament: he moves through the world literally pulling demons out of people (Mary Magdalene apparently had seven) just as he heals their physical ailments. In large part due to the Hays Code, a set of morality restrictions which ran from the 1930s to late 1960s in Hollywood, most horror films prior to this point would never have dared to focus on the defilement of children. Nevertheless, this one dealt with the great problem of “evil” in secular and spiritual worlds alike:
Namely, the question of why children, through no fault of their own, suffer horrifically in this world—whether through cancer, congenital disease, childhood abuse unto murder, or… in this case, demonic possession.
Yes, we atheists have it a little easier on paper. For us, the “why” is simply because nature is indifferent to individual suffering. There is no intentionality to a genetic defect, no grand design behind being born to die in garbage heaps or at the hands of brutal foster parents. But even then, there are times when we see the world that humans have created, and our “why” targets the parts that could be different, if only we cared enough to act more often like we genuinely prioritized human life.
Our “why”—and the “why” of many spiritual humanists with us—is a question posed in the direction of funding denied to people in need: Why do we let people die of treatable diseases? Why do we let people starve when there is enough to go around?
But The Exorcist also went for a kind of Catholic existentialism—shockingly not a contradiction of terms!—when it created a world informed by Catholic doctrine, but where the Enemy is not defeated by the Good, and where no great light of grace sets itself upon the suffering. Instead, The Exorcist creates a landscape where holy items offer little reprieve (the demon, while annoyed by holy water, is particularly comfortable touching a crucifix and a St. Joseph’s medallion), and where two priests die—one in a way that jeopardizes his own soul—for the child to be saved. This last priest does not vanquish the Enemy, so much as strike a bargain with it.
And this—as much as the grotesque cinematography and attention to suspense—was what drew audiences to The Exorcist: this terrifying notion that “Good” never triumphs, not really. Yes, the girl’s life is spared, but the Enemy also gets its pound of flesh, and the world remains “demon-haunted” for all the clergy left behind.
Today, of course, this concept of “evil” never being vanquished is old-hat for horror films. It’s a predictable closing beat, after the major crisis in a horror film has passed, to have a scene where the surviving characters seem to have returned to normal, only to offer a fleeting glimpse of the monster that still lurks nearby, waiting.
But while those endings are by and large gimmicky jump scares, The Exorcist didn’t need such a trick, precisely because it never offered the illusion of peace in the first place. The world of The Exorcist is in constant war—and its main “soldiers” know that. Its clergy must go through their lives shepherding people who—if lucky—never have to grapple with that horrible truth firsthand.
Imagine, too, the weight of this Catholic-inspired film, which came out only a few years after Vatican II: a modernizing of religious practice that would see many people lose their faith and leave the church entirely. The Exorcist grappled implicitly with the fear that a secular world would forget the battles that those of faith believe to be literal and abiding. To many today, after all, the world is haunted by demons, and Satan is in a constant battle for human souls. This grand story is no more figurative to many than the idea of consuming the actual blood and body of Christ at Eucharist.
But there’s also a complex push-pull in Catholicism (and Evangelical Christianity), because some believe that hyper-fixation on the idea of demons—even if they are expressly named in the Bible, and even if Christ is depicted as an exorcist himself—is itself an heretical act, because it gives too much power to malevolent spirits.
It’s a bit of a paradox, really: one is supposed to believe in and guard oneself against evil, but not so much that one becomes obsessed with evil, and thus consumed by it.
And that’s a concept with legs far outside Catholicism, too.
A film like Manhunter (1986), for instance, introduces us to Hannibal Lecter through an FBI profiler, Will Graham. In this film, we learn that one must study the minds of serial killers to defeat them… but also, we’re asked a compelling question: How does one defeat depravity without to some extent adopting the thinking of a depraved person? Can a man hunt a monster without becoming monstrous himself?
(Granted, there is a huge fallacy in this whole fetishization of serial killers, who are generally far less interesting than they’ve been made out to be for the purposes of entertainment, but that’s a thought for another day. The You’re Wrong About podcast has an excellent meditation on the creation of serial killer myths, for now.)
Horror in the world at large
I don’t believe in demons or Satan, of course, but I suspect that you can sense where this narrative concern starts to dovetail with the world of added warfare that erupted this past week, in Gaza and Israel, while Ukraine still wages a war of its own.
Humanity’s age-old problem of “evil” (a term I don’t like because it’s disembodied, stripped of human agency and responsibility) emerged in a series of violent acts against civilians this past week: first by Hamas, which slaughtered civilians and soldiers in Israel; then by IDF, which has been bombing the Gaza Strip ever since, and shooting into vehicles deemed suspect among populations trying to flee.
What had a child done to deserve demonic possession in The Exorcist?
Well, what has a civilian done to deserve to be murdered in real-world conflict?
The Exorcist doesn’t have an answer to either question. Its aesthetic simply sits with the horror of bearing witness to arbitrary suffering—because there is no answer. Because the demon Pazuzu is just going to do what it will Pa-do-do.
But The Exorcist II: The Heretic is different.
And almost immediately after putting it on, I realized what had drawn me back, in the wake of so much horror in the world: John Boorman’s attempt to explain evil, to mount a defence for why terrible things happen to helpless human beings. (NB: If you don’t recognize the name, Boorman did Point Blank, Deliverance, Zardoz, and Excalibur, so suffice it to say he’s had a career-long interest in the limits of transgression and how what happens at those limits defines the rest of our world.)
I should note, of course, that The Exorcist II was quickly condemned by most reviewers, and landed itself high on “worst-ever” lists. People mocked it, laughed at it, considered its story-line incoherent, and viewed its concept a complete undoing of all that had made The Exorcist so enjoyable. Boorman himself later sagely described the reason for this furious and/or derisive response:
It all comes down to audience expectations. The film that I made, I saw as a kind of riposte to the ugliness and darkness of The Exorcist—I wanted a film about journeys that was positive, about good, essentially. And I think that audiences, in hindsight, were right. I denied them what they wanted and they were pissed off about it—quite rightly, I knew I wasn't giving them what they wanted and it was a really foolish choice.
Linda Blair signed on to the sequel because she loved its original script and was excited to work with Richard Burton (a classically trained Thespian, famous for roles in My Cousin Rachel and The Robe—and to my mind, even more impressive for getting perma-banned by the BBC for daring to question Winston Churchill hagiography and criticize exterminationist rhetoric in WWII). However, she also noted in a Scream Factory interview that the script changed in production:
That script was rewritten five times. So the movie we set out to make never happened. Too many cooks spoiled the brew, and in this case it’s what affected this movie. We all left with great disappointment, I believe. Certainly I know I did.
The Exorcist II wasn’t universally hated, mind you. Martin Scorsese wrote of the piece,
The picture asks: Does great goodness bring upon itself great evil? This goes back to the Book of Job; it's God testing the good. In this sense, Regan (Linda Blair) is a modern-day saint — like Ingrid Bergman in Europa '51, and in a way, like Charlie in Mean Streets. I like the first Exorcist, because of the Catholic guilt I have, and because it scared the hell out of me; but The Heretic surpasses it. Maybe Boorman failed to execute the material, but the movie still deserved better than it got.
And I, too, when first watching this sequel in my late teens, found it to be an interesting experiment. It does have some arresting visuals, and its approach to psychotherapy—whether intentional or otherwise—has a science-fictional feel, imagining a hypnosis device that not only allows you to regulate someone else’s mental activity, but also to actively step into their memory and see what they see.
Absurd? Of course. Sort of. But only if you hold to the logic of many of these religiously inspired films, which accept empirical reality for everything except spiritual intervention. Here, The Exorcist II says, “Well, why shouldn’t science be just as magical as faith? Why shouldn’t the quotidian in a world created by a god bend as much it bends for demonic possession and exorcism?” And so we get a “saintly” teenage Regan who visits a therapist (played by Louise Fletcher, far from her Nurse Ratched and Kai Winn Adami infamy here), who’s convinced that Regan is suppressing her childhood trauma. In reality, Regan is still plagued by the demon nightly—waking every morning on the cusp of suicide in a lush apartment made possible by her mother’s acting career—then goes through the rest of her day spritely and sweetly, spreading goodness in theatre productions and acts of community service, and above all else never letting anyone know what’s wrong.
Is that picture of mental crisis not both extraordinary and also very similar to how people hide their suffering behind a smile in the real world? How it feels sometimes like we are all wrestling with larger-than-life “demons” while trying to get by?
I also didn’t see The Exorcist II as entirely out of step with the first film, at least when it came to how much its editing compelled the viewer to fill in narrative blanks. Ennio Morricone’s soundscape further lends this picture the feel of an Italian giallo, a kind of slow-build psychological horror that uses characters and settings more figuratively, to stand in for bigger and more abstract concepts, than most Western audiences expect and look for in our “serious” cinema.
The giallo features lurid stories of castles and villas, old quarters and country estates, politicians and the rich and famous. The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963). The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970). A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971). In such stories a figure is tasked with figuring out who is slaughtering or otherwise brutalizing beautiful women, and sometimes gets drawn into horrific worlds of the occult or even supernatural. Dream sequences and hypnotic cinematography feature highly, and there is often a sordid commingling of sexuality and brutal death. The beautiful woman represents the world’s fallen state, and so our protagonist must confront the sordid underside of world and woman alike: not to heal either, necessarily, but at least to understand the peril in both, and to fortify him- or herself further from it.
No, The Exorcist II isn’t quite as dramatic or exploitative (though not for lack of trying: the cast had to push back on the proposed inclusion of a far more elaborate version of a scene that already inappropriately tackles sex abuse in the clergy by imagining the child as a seducer the priest can’t help but fall for). In fact, this sequel is quite tame when it comes to shows of violence—especially next to The Exorcist, which Boorman expressly did not want to direct because he wasn’t interested in “child torture” (a literalized reality for poor Linda Blair, sadly; her screams during a levitating bed sequence come from actual, permanent damage to her body).
But in that relative “tameness”—The Exorcist II maintaining the look and feel of a psychological thriller with a long lurid history, minus the guts and gore and sex scenes—Boorman advanced something much more chilling. At least, to those who weren’t furious with him for not creating another picture like the first.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Better Worlds Theory to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.