The Exorcist was an enormous critical and popular success, elevating Friedkin to the forefront of Hollywood directors. Inevitably there were calls for a sequel, although neither Blatty nor Friedkin would be involved. Instead, taking over the franchise was British director John Boorman (who had made a genuine American classic in Deliverance), sometimes noted for his rather convoluted religiosity and mysticism. Boorman would expand on the idea of a crisis of faith, this time charting the efforts of a priest (Richard Burton) who believes that the exorcised Blair, now a blossoming young woman, still has the demon dormant within her but who is also now capable of great spiritual good. His quest leads him to confront the demon, Pazuzu, who is something of a seducer, taking Burton on a mystical journey to Africa which impels the priest to seek out other such spiritual conduits. Soon Burton is led to believe that the demon is deliberately targeting God’s holy people and that Burton’s own mission is thus to protect Blair, who can be a great spiritual leader. He returns to find that she may already be in danger. Boorman’s spiritual conflict, however, would prove far more ambiguous than the clear-cut good and evil dialectics of Friedkin.
Although Exorcist II: The Heretic is a complex film, its muddled hysteria and comparative lack of explicit horror disappointed the core audience and the film became one of the most ridiculed of all modern movies. After terrible pre-screenings, it was withdrawn and slightly re-edited but still flopped on release. Years later, director Boorman was asked about the failure of this film and his response is telling – he commented that he didn’t throw enough Christians to the lions. Indeed, the returning audience could not adjust to the more ambiguous, even symbiotic relationship between good and evil that Boorman explored. Again tackling the inter-relationship between religion and psychiatry (however modishly realized), Boorman is more concerned with the philosophical relationship between the soul and the mind than of the more spiritual rationales behind mental illness. Burton admits that evil is horrible but fascinating: it is this alluring and seductive idea of a corrupting and even mischievous evil that Boorman puts forward instead of the vile ugliness of Friedkin’s conception. Evil is thus drawn by good (almost magnetically) and the film explores their mutual dependence, a more complex and confusing view of possession than simple binary oppositions. read more