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Horror sequels have a reputation for being either a step down from the first movie (the one that critics usually shower with good reviews), a soulless cash grab, or a mediocre retread of the original story. This has pretty much been the trend, especially when you look at 80s horror (insert slasher franchise) and early-2000s horror (J-horror remakes and their endless sequels). Every once in a while, though, you get a sequel that’s so perplexing, so opposed to the spirit of the film it follows, that it’s easy to question the sanity of its filmmaker and its producers.
This is the case of The Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), perhaps the most baffling horror sequel in the genre’s history. It didn’t help that it was a direct sequel to what’s arguably the best horror movie of all time, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973).
Directed by legendary director John Boorman (Deliverance, Point Blank), Heretic picks up four years after Regan MacNeil’s exorcism. She’s under the care of Dr. Gene Tuskin (Louise Fletcher) and family friend Sharon Spencer (Kitty Winn). Her days are spent in a psychiatric center, a place that’s experimenting with a new form of hypnotherapy that can recover lost memories. In comes a priest with a crisis of faith (played by an unenthusiastic Richard Burton) just as Regan (Linda Blair) discovers that the demon that possessed her is still hiding within herself.
The Heretic is a mess of ideas that barely register as good or fully formed. On the one hand, it has a strange interest in exploring the role science can play in battling ancient forms of evil. On the other, it takes to a New Age type of thinking that looks at astral projections and psychic exchanges of memories as things that have the capacity to unlock special demon-fighting abilities.
The hypnosis sequences are particularly cringe-worthy as they essentially get reduced to long bouts of moaning and heavy breathing where visions of Regan’s exorcism manifest with vague implications. It’s suggested that this type of therapy requires the therapist to allow herself to be “possessed” by the patient’s trauma to help them navigate the parts of their psyche that are kept under lock and key because of it.
None of it points to an attempt at addressing that experience, though. It’s a plot device aimed at bringing back the demon from the first movie for more unholy mischief. The idea behind treating a victim of demonic possession to free repressed traumas is a compelling one, but that’s not what happens here. In fact, I don’t think the movie even knows what’s happening in it.
Does any of this sound like an Exorcist movie? No, and that’s the problem. The film doesn’t fully commit to either its new concepts or what came before it to really get the most out of the name it carries. Were this an entirely original movie that owed nothing to The Exorcist, then perhaps there could’ve been something to the whole scientific exorcism angle.
There are some interesting and beautifully shot sequences that look back at Father Merrin (Max Von Sydow) and his first exorcism in Africa. Unfortunately, they seem as if placed to ease audience concerns about how much of an Exorcist movie the sequel is. These are, by far, the best parts of the movie and they can generate a fair amount of terror as we’re brought back to the things that made the first movie so scary.
The new priest at the center of this one doesn’t add much to the crisis of faith themes already explored with Father Karras in the original Exorcist. Burton’s Father Lamont is essentially a man that’s disappointed with Catholicism because it doesn’t want to acknowledge the existence of Satan after the changes that Vatican II (1962-65) wrought to bring the church closer to more modern sensibilities. That’s about the extent of his narrative arc. Lamont wants to be a soldier of Christ at a time when no one’s asking for them.
There is a reason to watch this movie: there’s no other sequel in horror like it. It comes so out of left field that it becomes a rarity of sorts. It can’t be compared with something like Halloween 3: Season of the Witch because, for all intents and purposes, Halloween 2 had closed the book on Michael Myers. Part three was marketed as the newest expression of Halloween as it transitioned into an anthology format with a movie about masks infused with tech and dark magic. The Exorcist 2 made no such claims. It was a continuation of Regan’s story that hoped to expand on the mythos to go in entirely different directions. It’s just that no one could’ve possibly imagined this is what we were going to end up with.
English (US)