It’s 1976. You’re an Oscar nominated director. Your last film, which you wrote and directed for free, crashed at the box office.
By Paul Markey
It’s 1976. You’re an Oscar nominated director. Your last film, which you wrote and directed for free, crashed at the box office. The Hollywood studios aren’t hot for your re-imagining of the Arthurian legend and you’ve got bills to pay. Who are you? You’re John Boorman, director of Point Blank, Deliverance and (the aforementioned box-office bust) Zardoz. It was under these circumstances that Boorman decided to accept an offer from John Calley of Warner Bros. to make Exorcist II: The Heretic, the sequel to the most successful horror film ever made.
The director had been offered the job of directing the original, but turned it down feeling it was nothing less than ‘child torture’ – surely nobody would want to watch that. Ten Oscar nominations and hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide had proved him wrong – as least as to what audiences were willing to watch. Boorman wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. The original is all about evil, he reasoned, so his film would be about ‘good’. Stanley Kubrick wasn’t so sure. He told Boorman that the only way to make a successful sequel to The Exorcist was to give people more gore than before.
Turns out they were both right. I think we can all agree – me, you, Boorman and Kubrick – that trying to top a film like The Exorcist would be a fool’s errand; it is a picture that transcends horror to be a great example of the power of cinema