With Mike Flanagan’s The Exorcist: Martyrs unveiling its first trailer, Adam Page looks back at the franchise’s low point with five reasons why Exorcist II: The Heretic is the worst movie ever made…
As horror fans, I think we all know the joy that comes from watching a bad movie. I don’t mean a boring one, boring movies are a waste of everyone’s time and I’d outlaw them if I could, but a bad movie, the one that swings so hard for the fences that it ends up in a different postcode. Movies like The Room, or Troll 2. Yes, even a movie as baffling as Birdemic.
And then we have Exorcist II: The Heretic.
Mark Kermode is a legendary film critic, a man who has built an entire broadcasting career on his love for William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. He has written books about it, hosted an incredible documentary (The Fear of God, I highly recommend it) and who once flew to Georgetown to stand at the steps where Father Karras met his end. On more than one occasion he has described this particular sequel as “clearly the worst movie ever made by anyone ever.” Not “one of the worst,” or “quite bad, actually.” The worst movie ever made, full stop, in the whole history of the medium of cinema.
On the face of it, this is a wild claim. There are movies out there which were shot on a single Betacam over a weekend with the director also playing the werewolf. Movies funded by tax-evasion schemes that were never meant to be watched. But here is Kermode, pointing not at some backstreet VHS crap but at a major studio production, directed by John Boorman, Oscar-nominated for Deliverance, scored by Ennio Morricone, who was an actual genius, and starred Richard Burton, Louise Fletcher, fresh off One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Linda Blair returning to her most famous role. And he declared it worse than literally everything else.
So I did what any sensible person does when a critic they trust makes an insane-sounding claim: I watched it. Twice. First time straight through, the second, pausing it to make notes and make myself believe this movie was actually real.
And the thing is, Kermode isn’t exactly wrong. Yeah he’s being hyperbolic, this doesn’t beat something like Manos: The Hands of Fate for pure incompetence (go check that beauty out) but he identified something real, which is that Exorcist II isn’t bad in the fun, so-bad-it’s-good way. It’s bad in a way that feels like it was designed to offend you personally. It takes one of the most frightening, tightly-constructed horror movies ever made and follows it up with something that plays like a fever dream experienced by a man who’s never seen a horror movie and is losing an argument with his editor in real time.
So in tribute to Kermode’s righteous fury, and because I want you all to know what you’re getting into if you watch it, here are five reasons why Exorcist II deserves its reputation…
The Locust Machine
I’m going to start with one of the strangest objects in 1970s cinema: the Synchronizer.
In the first Exorcist, faith is shown as a real and terrifying wrestling match between good and evil, something mediated through prayer, ritual and the weight of the Catholic Church bearing down on two exhausted priests. Whatever else you think about it, it’s a serious movie about serious things.
In Exorcist II, faith is shown via a machine that looks like a cross between a dentists chair and a prop from an old game show, which allows two people to share the same hypnotic trance by staring into a strobing light while wearing biofeedback headbands. Louise Fletcher’s Dr. Gene Tuskin, a psychiatrist treating Regan for the trauma of her possession, uses this to hypnotise both herself and her patient at the same time, on the theory that this is a good and safe thing to do with a girl who was possessed by an actual demon four years earlier.
The movie treats this with complete and unblinking sincerity. There’s no winking to camera, no acknowledging that this looks like something you’d win at a village fair. It’s shown as cutting-edge 1977 psychiatric science, in the same way The Exorcist showed the Ouija board and Latin rites as ancient and dangerous magic. Except the Ouija board is a real thing that unsettles people and the Synchronizer looks like it should be selling cereal.
It’s through this machine that Regan and Dr. Tuskin end up sharing psychic visions of Regan’s exorcism, of Father Merrin’s earlier fight with the demon Pazuzu in Africa, and eventually (I promise I am not making this up) locusts. So many locusts. Locusts as a visual motif for evil and deployed with all the subtlety of someone hitting you over the head with a rolled-up newspaper labelled METAPHOR.
Kermode has rightly pointed out that the first movie worked because it grounded the supernatural in the ordinary: a suburban house, a frightened and worried mother, doctors who can’t explain the symptoms. Exorcist II immediately dumps all of that for hypnotic light shows and swarms of CGI insects, and once you make that choice, you’ve pretty much opted out of horror and into something closer to a fever-dream stage play performed by a drama society that has just discovered Jungian psychology.
Richard Burton is Doing a Completely Different Movie
I have to be fair to Richard Burton here; I’ve read his diaries and he was really going through it during filming. His marriage to Elizabeth Taylor had just ended (again), he was drinking heavily (again) and was reportedly in real physical pain throughout the shoot. None of that is funny and I don’t want to make light of a man’s very real struggles.
But, wow, the performance that emerged from all of that is one of the weirdest things ever committed to 35mm film.
Burton plays Father Phillip Lamont, a priest looking into the death of Father Merrin (Max von Sydow appears mostly in flashbacks and looks as though he’d rather be literally anywhere else). Lamont is supposed to be a man struggling with his faith, haunted by doubt, and being drawn inexorably towards the demonic forces that killed his predecessor. What Burton really delivers is a performance pitched somewhere between a Shakespearean tragedian doing a matinee for a school trip and a man who had just been told his flight home has been cancelled.
He intones every line like it’s the “to be or not to be” soliloquy, and it doesn’t matter if the line is, let’s say, “I want to know about Regan MacNeil” or something equally bland. There’s a scene where he’s supposed to be flying to Africa on a small plane through a locust storm (yep, there they are again) and Burton delivers his lines with the same doom-filled gravity he might have used for Hamlet on stage, except the plane is so clearly a model, the locusts are obviously stock footage, and the entire effect is a lot less “man confronting ancient evil” and a lot more “man doing a poetry reading that’s gone on a bit too long.”
It’s honestly one of the strangest actor performances of the decade. I don’t mean it’s bad, exactly; Burton can clearly act and is clearly committed to something, but it’s so utterly miscalibrated for the movie surrounding him. It’s almost like someone told him he was in a different and much better, more serious movie, and nobody had the heart to correct him before the camera rolled.
The Ending Makes No Sense, Even by Exorcist Standards
Okay, I’ll grant you that “demons and possession” isn’t really a genre that rewards close reading of internal logic. You don’t watch The Exorcist and complain the pea soup vomiting is scientifically improbable. You watch it and accept a certain amount of “well it’s about the Devil, so…” as a get-out clause.
But the third act of Exorcist II pushes even that generous allowance to its breaking point. Without spoiling it all (although really, spoiling this movie feels like a public service) the climax involves Regan’s old home in Georgetown, now derelict and scheduled for demolition, a mystical psychic link between Regan and an African man named Kokumo played by James Earl Jones who is immune to Pazuzu’s influence because of locust-related reasons that are never fully explained, a city walled by what seems to be crystallised locust poop (again, this isn’t a joke, this is a real plot point that the movie treats as profound), Father Lamont becoming possessed himself and tuning into some sort of shambling, slightly feral demon-priest, and a finale where the whole house collapses while Regan and Lamont fight for Regan’s soul among a small army of locusts again, a character who was good in the first movie and has now (for some reason) chosen to be evil. Oh yeah, there is also a weirdly sexualised doppelganger of Regan who must be destroyed before the real Regan and Lamont walk off together into the sunset.
The credits then roll and you’re left with several real and unresolved questions, and the biggest is: just what, exactly, was the plan here? What was anyone involved in this movie trying to achieve? Either narratively or spiritually. The first movie has a nearly mathematical clarity to its structure; there is an established threat, building horror, the ritual confrontation and finally resolution. Exorcist II has all the structural integrity of the Jenga tower my daughter assembled when she was 2 and had just discovered the concept of “up.”
Kermode’s whole thesis about the movie, and one I now wholeheartedly agree with, is that it doesn’t just fail to be scary, it fails to be coherent, and the second failure seems to be worse than the first. A movie can be unscary and still be a perfectly fine and comprehensible piece of work. Exorcist II achieves neither of these things.
It Insists on Explaining the Original Movie’s Mystery and Gets it Horrifically Wrong.
The thing I think actually earns Kermode’s fury, beyond the camp value of the locusts and the Synchronizer and Burton’s interesting fugue state of a performance, is this: The Exorcist works, in large part, because it refuses to explain itself.
We never really find out why Pazuzu chose Regan, or get a tidy backstory for the demon’s motives. Father Merrin’s earlier encounter with that demon in Iraq is glimpsed but not narrated. The movie’s horror comes from the fact that in this story, evil is ancient, patient, and at its most basic level unexplainable. It doesn’t need a reason and the movie is much scarier for not giving it one.
Exorcist II took a look at that carefully maintained ambiguity and said “Ah, but what if we explained literally everything?” And so we get the backstory; we get the childhood of Kokumo, the “good” African boy who resisted Pazuzu’s influence and grew up to become (I’m going to stress again that this is a real plot point in this movie) a scientist studying locust behaviour, because apparently Pazuzu’s power is somehow connected to the swarming instincts of locusts, which is a connection the movie asserts with confidence and never once tries to justify. We get psychic flashbacks explaining Merrin’s original exorcism in a lot more detail than anyone asked for. Basically, we get a whole mythology bolted onto a story that worked specifically because it didn’t have one.
And it’s this sin, I think, which genuinely explains the depth of Kermode’s contempt for the movie, something beyond the simple pleasure of hyperbole. It isn’t just that Exorcist II is a bad movie in isolation. It’s that it actively works to diminish the thing which came before it. It took a story about the unknowable nature of evil and reduced it to a pretty stupid conspiracy involving bugs. It’s a sequel that doesn’t just fail to build on its predecessor; it deliberately reaches backwards and tries to explain away the very mystery that made the original work so effectively, like the guy who interrupts a ghost story to explain, well actually, it was just static electricity. And nobody likes that guy.
Nobody Involved Seems to Agree What Kind of Movie This Is
I thought about summing up Exorcist II’s core problem in a single sentence and came up with this: every single department seems to have made a different movie, and no-one in the editing suite noticed until it was too late to do anything about it.
The score by Ennio Morricone does really lovely, atmospheric and mournful work. There are parts of that score which are as good as anything in his career I think, gentle and eerie. Richard Burton is doing booming Shakespearean tragedy. As director, John Boorman seems to be attempting some kind of trippy, spiritually-minded art movie about faith and Africa and the nature of good and evil. It reminded me in parts of his earlier movie Point Blank, or the more meditative parts of Deliverance. Louise Fletcher does professional, slightly bemused psychiatrist-drama, like she’s wandered in from a different and much more restrained movie about institutional care. And bless the effects team, because they are doing full-bore, 1970s horror spectacle, with flying, levitating, people on fire, the works, and all with the subtlety of fireworks at a funeral.
Taken individually, none of these elements are particularly bad. Morricone’s score, listened to in isolation, is beautiful. Boorman’s ambitions, which he’s described in interviews, really do sound interesting; a movie about faith as a psychological and even evolutionary force rather than a straightforward supernatural threat. But all smashed together into a two-hour object, with a script having trouble deciding whether it’s a psychological drama, a religious allegory or a monster movie, and the result is a movie that never settles into a coherent tone or genre. Each scene feels like it’s being pulled in four different directions by four different but equally confident collaborators, and none of them seem to have read each others notes.
And it’s this which is why I think Kermode’s hyperbole, “the worst film ever made by anyone ever,” lands close to a real critical point, even though it’s dressed up as a punchline. Truly incompetent movies are easy to write off; there’s a clarity and a consistency you can point to and giggle at. Exorcist II is stranger and more fascinating than that, exactly because it’s stitched together from honestly talented people, at enormous studio expense and with total sincerity. It isn’t a movie that fails to be good, it’s a movie that fails to be one thing, and in doing so, it becomes a sort of accidental Frankenstein’s monster of 1970s cinema; parts assembled from better movies, and re-animated into a shambling, locust-obsessed, Synchronizer-wielding whole, lurching around Georgetown before finally and mercifully collapsing.
So, is it actually the worst movie ever made? Well, no, obviously not. There are movies out there that will make you question the existence of a benevolent God far more effectively than this one. Most of them star Steven Seagal, and at least one involves a tornado of sharks.
But having sat through it twice, I now understand exactly what Kermode means. There’s a certain kind of disappointment reserved for sequels that had all the resources in the world; a truly great director, a great composer, fantastic actors, the backing of a major studio, and still managed to create something this confusing, this tonally chaotic, and this committed to explaining a mystery that didn’t need explaining. Bad movies made with no money and no time can be forgiven. This is a bad movie made with everything, and I think that’s a much stranger, and in its own way, more damning kind of failure.
But watch it anyway. Ideally with friends and appropriate refreshments and a willingness to pause every ten minutes to ask “wait, what is happening?” It won’t scare you or move you, except to serious bafflement during the locust sequences. But I promise it will entertain you in ways its creators never intended. And really, in today’s hellscape of algorithmically-focus-tested, committee-made studio horror, isn’t a movie so defiantly and brilliantly wrong-headed almost a relief?
Almost.
What are your thoughts on Exorcist II: The Heretic? Let us know on our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
Adam Page
