The Exorcist III proved not all Exorcist sequels are blasphemous
Writer/director William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist III ignored its predecessor—and his film was better for it
Aux News Exorcist
Sequels to The Exorcist always feel sacrilegious, and not necessarily in a good way. How does one follow the scariest movie ever made? It’s a question surely on David Gordon Green’s mind as he releases The Exorcist: Believer, the director’s latest legacy sequel, which—like his Halloween trilogy—skips previous franchise entries and is a direct continuation of the 1973 Oscar-winner. It’s a worthwhile endeavor if not for one problem: The Exorcist III exists. Directed by Exorcist author and screenwriter William Peter Blatty, 1990’s Exorcist III ignores The Exorcist II: The Heretic and presents a direct follow-up to the original. In some ways, it resembles a legacy sequel, but in others, it’s more than happy to go in weirder directions. The movie is a fascinating, imperfect thriller and an unsung victory in the series’ spotty record.
The Exorcist skipped the horror sequel boom of the 1980s with good reason. Echoing the thoughts of many disappointed critics and moviegoers, Exorcist director William Friedkin proclaimed 1977’s The Exorcist II: The Heretic “the worst piece of shit I’ve ever seen.” So, while The Omen’s two sequels followed Damien’s journey to the White House, the Exorcist franchise laid dormant until 1990, when Blatty returned to Washington, D.C. for another possession. Except he didn’t.
An Exorcist sequel without an exorcism?
Based on Blatty’s 1983 novel, Legion, The Exorcist III eschews much of what made Friedkin’s shocker successful. George C. Scott takes over for the late Lee J. Cobb as the movie-loving Washington, D.C., investigator Lieutenant Kinderman. Still haunted by the narrow steps where he found a dead Father Karras (Jason Miller) 15 years earlier, Kinderman sees the inexplicable terror of that night externalized throughout the city as he tries to rationalize a slew of grotesque, faith-based murders committed by the Gemini Killer (Brad Dourif), who had been put to death a decade prior.
Eagle-eyed readers might notice a lack of exorcism in Exorcist III. For much of the movie, the titular practice doesn’t factor in. Kinderman predicts Morgan Freeman’s Detective Somerset from Seven, a rational, learned observer of the world’s descent into damnation. Like Somerset, Kinderman fights on despite his belief in “slime and stink and every crawling, putrid thing,” choosing to ignore the bad if it means protecting the good. Blatty’s focus on Kinderman gives him a new way into the story, foregrounding older people’s perspectives and fears—a shift from the child-focused original. Scott projects a world-weary cynicism crafted through experience and disappointment in what post-Vietnam America has wrought: senseless violence, crumbling institutions, and a profound inkling that the worst is yet to come.
Blatty avoids comparisons to The Exorcist through a gloomy visual language more nightmarish than Friedkin’s grounded, documentary-inspired style. There’s a classical charm to Blatty’s patient camera. It creeps toward D.C.’s gothic churches and urban rot, shoving the viewer into the otherworldly horrors of mundane spaces and a surreal afterlife staged in Grand Central Station and populated by Fabio, a pre-fame Samuel L. Jackson, and the Angel of Death played by Patrick Ewing. But the movie’s centerpiece, a minute-long static shot of a hospital corridor, is pure cinema. Blatty’s lens holds on a nurse doing her evening rounds as the inevitable catches up with her, testing the viewer’s patience and stomach in a tense staredown with the unseen evil onscreen. It’s these simple but effective scares the movie loses in its bombastic, baffling conclusion.
Studio interference sends a promising film to hell
Unconcerned with the preceding movie, the film’s final 15 minutes created problems onscreen and off. Four months after filming wrapped, Blatty, who begged Morgan Creek to drop Exorcist from the title, lost his holy war, leading to studio-mandated reshoots that set the stage for a deus exorcism machina. The finale is an inscrutable but exciting set piece, filled with spectacular effects—cobbled together during the last-minute production—and an unforgettable Brad Dourif dripping with malice and hatred. However, the movie crosses into complete confusion through a tacked-on subplot about Father Morning (Nicol Williamson), a Georgetown exorcist who curiously resembles Max von Sydow’s Father Merrin from the original film. Plus, the Gemini Killer keeps swapping bodies with the late Father Karras (Remember? From the first movie!). None of it makes much sense, but we’ll be damned if a crucified and monologuing George C. Scott isn’t entertaining as hell.
That Blatty wanted to distance himself from exorcisms is understandable. Why remind audiences of the series’ last disappointment? It didn’t help that Leslie Nielsen and Linda Blair’s spoof, Repossessed, was promoted alongside—and opened a month after—Blatty’s film or that Exorcist III was one of six horror sequels between 1989 and 1991. Despite opening at number one, the movie quickly sank like a stone and closed The Exorcist business for another 15 years (only for it to reopen and close again for another 15). Though Exorcist III received some positive reviews, the film’s loudest champion was Jeffrey Dahmer, who watched the film obsessively as one of the real-life killer’s escapees reported.
Over the years, Exorcist III’s reputation as a fan curio, akin to fellow disregarded sequels Psycho II and Halloween III, would grow. In 2016, a long-rumored director’s cut of unfinished footage, rehearsal tapes, and deleted scenes gave us a glimpse of what Blatty originally had in mind. But a reconstructed Legion only reinforces what Exorcist III already proved: Not every Exorcist sequel is an affront to God.
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The title should still be changed. The studio should pull a Live Die Repeat stunt and rename this good movie “Legion.”
I finally saw The Exorcist II the other day and liked it better than its reputation, including here in this article, suggests (apparently Paul Schrader and I are the only two who liked it). Definitely commits the sin of overexplaining, but that’s because it wants to counterweight the philosophy of the original. And given how arguably damaging the original’s legacy is (I don’t think you get Michelle Remembers without The Exorcist. Or it wouldn’t have taken off as strongly), that’s forgivable.
I think as much as Michelle Remembers gets credited for the Satanic panic, the fact that the book was cobbled together from pop culture depictions of satanism proves and took off as it did suggestions that it was very much following the zeitgeist rather than leading from the front.
I think that’s true to an extent, but that casts a wider net on the question of what led to it as well. And MR and The Exorcist share a lot of their primary preoccupations: the corruption of youth, the perceived inadequacy of working single mothers, confusion between the roles of priest and psychiatrist, all under the umbrella of a rejection of modernity and Vatican II in particular (not to mention the significant thread, dropped in the movie, about gay priests. In the book the final confrontation between Karras and the demon climaxes with the demon accusing Karras of his sexuality, and Karras choosing to scapegoat himself and commit suicide. The moment when a semi-possessed Karras reaches predatorily at Regan played differently the last time I watched it, post-Men Women & Chainsaws)(And, to be fair, it’s The Exorcist II that introduces recovered memory into it. And then both versions of Dominion oddly reflect Pazder’s extremely racist reaction to mission work in Africa)
Exorcist III is so sooo much better than Psycho II or Halloween III.
^ This. All the upvotes here please.
Psycho 2 maybe, but I love Halloween 3. It’s nutty in the best ways and has Tom Atkins.
Yeah it’s a fine standalone… but Exorcist III is better all around. Blatty is a better director than Wallace, and as much as I like Tom Atkins, Brad Dourif fucking ACTS.
Those Dourif/Scott scenes are amazing for sure. Just two dudes chewing the hell (literally) out of the scenery.
Brad Dourif is absolutely terrifying in this film. I never understood why he didn’t receive much credit for giving one of the finest performances EVER in a horror film. He’s scarier than any “villain” and he viscerally personifies pure evil on a level that is so much more horrific than a dummy’s revolving head and pea soup vomit.
Halloween III will always be so strange and I love it
Here’s the thing about Halloween III– you can love it and still acknowledge that it’s not a very good film. It’s a great concept with a couple of great scenes (including an all-time ballsy ending), but mostly its wrapped up in laughably bad acting, writing, and effects.
An underrated seventies sequel: French Connection 2. Directed by John Frankenheimer, who was supposed to handle the Exorcist prequel, but had to step down as he was too ill, to be replaced by Paul Schrader. Schrader, of course, got Dominion taken out of his hands, to be given to Renny Harlin instead.
Renny Harlin being my favorite horror auteur, of course.
Not sure how sarcastic that is, but Renny Harlin had a fantastic start as a horror film director.
It’s pretty sarcastic. I like Renny, and while Prison was a fine throw away low budget horror movie… lets not compare one of the least bad horror sequels (Nightmare 4) to something like Exorcist III, which is a perfect stand alone.
I like Exorcist III, but Psycho II for me is by far the better film. Halloween III, probably not a better film, but I still love more because of Dan O’Herlihy’s performance, Cochran was just an amazing villain.
I recently learned that The Ninth Configuration is an Exorcist spin-off as one of the inmates appears briefly in the original film.
That movie is also very much worth watching. In some ways quite a bit different than Exorcist III, however. It’s going to be a smaller audience that appreciates that one.
Green ignores Exorcist III?? What a maroon.Exorcist III proves that good writing trumps all. There are so many amazing little touches in the movie – Kinderman’s monologue bout the fish in his bathtub, his habit of looking at victims hands which is explained later, the old lady telling him he isn’t a real radio repairman because the imaginary radio she’s holding is actually a phone. So much of the movie’s last half revolves around two people in a cell together, one basically talking at the other, and it’s mesmerizing. I was also really glad that Kinderman is explicitly Jewish in Exorcist III – it’s never mentioned (though heavily implied) in the first movie, even though it’s such a big part of the book. And his friendship with Dyer is one of the best movie friendships I’ve seen, it’s so natural and beautiful. On top of all that, it doesn’t hurt that Blatty seemed to really know what he was doing behind the camera, and it’s excellently directed except for some silliness in the climax.
Exorcist II came out post-Zardoz. I wonder how John Boorman’s experience on that film informed his work on the horror sequel…
Outside of Deliverance, Boorman had a seventies run that was full of weirdness: Leo the Last, Zardoz, Exorcist II.
He recovered fast though: Excalibur worked really well.
How does Excalibur hold up?
It’s still grimy as fuck.
Blatty was also an extremely funny guy. Remember that he made an impression when he appeared on You Bet Your Life, with Groucho Marx, where he stated that he would use his earnings from the game to stop working for a few months and write a book. The book wasn’t The Exorcist, but some comic novel, that eventually got him spotted by Hollywood, thanks to Blake Edwards. They both wrote the first sequel to The Pink Panther, A Shot in the Dark, and most of the elements that are integral to the series, like Dreyfus and Cato, were introduced in that episode (Clouseau was only a minor character in the original). And he also wrote What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?, which is quite unfairly forgotten.
Not to mention The 9th Configuration, which is largely a meandering social comedy of some sort, set in a military mental hospital, and about PTSD and the horrors of war. Yet it ends with Stacey Keach killing an entire gay biker gang who are about to rape a fellow (male) patient with his bare hands. And then he dies, and subsequently provides, albeit in a subtle way, literal proof that there is a god, and an afterlife. [Spoilers]
That nurse scene should be taught in film school. It’s bloody brilliant.
The nurse scene does not lose its edge, even with time passing. I think about it when I’m in a long hall late at night, doesn’t matter where I am.
I am so glad to see that this movie now has the respect and reputation it deserves. It’s a fine horror movie, a very good adaptation, and there is not one bad performance in it.I remember some reviews, when it came out, decrying the lack of exorcism or gory special effects, which was silly. Because that’s not the story the book and movie are telling. Personally, as much as I like The Exorcist, I rewatch Exorcist III more often. George C. Scott was so great (as was Lee J. Cobb in the first movie, and he would have been fine in this, but… Scott was a perfect choice).Seriously – anyone here who hasn’t seen this needs to fix that right now.
One of my life mottos: never trust horror fan reviews of any horror films because horror fandom tends to watch their favourite pop culture media with a very patronising and condescending eye. Like, I have to add a full integer to every horror in IMDB to know how good or bad it is.
Interesting. My experience is exactly the opposite. I find horror audiences to be some of the most forgiving out there. Horror fans will watch absolutely shitty movies that were executed terribly, but if the concept was decent, they’ll still give it a decent rating.
I LOVE Exorcist III. It’s one of my favorite horror films and, in my opinion, grossly underrated.The Gemini Killer isn’t swapping bodies in the final scene or throughout the movie. It’s one body – that of the late Father Karras, whom the Gemini possessed (with a little help from his “friends”) after Karras’ “death” via a tumble down the now infamous stairs next to the Car Barn (and a gas station) in Georgetown. He explains all of this to Kinderman and the audience – I don’t see how it is confusing. He’s locked up for being crazy and from his padded cell he (The Gemini) is able to possess the elderly and continue his “work,” i.e., killing. To Kinderman (Scott), he looks like an aged Father Karras – to the audience, we can see him as The Gemini or Karras, depending on who is in “control” of the body at any given moment.
Anyway, the movie is amazing and a worthy sequel to the original (which I can’t say about any other movie in the franchise and don’t expect to say about the most recent endeavor).Also, the short-lived Exorcist television show (only two seasons) was also a lot of fun and had a lot of promise. I was sad to see it canceled. That being said, go watch Evil if you want to scratch that itch – it is incredibly entertaining and fun and (fortunately) hasn’t been canceled yet.
I’m starting to suspect Red Letter Media drives the internet.
To quote the great Swedish punk band Randy, “In 1990 came Exorcist 3,Based on the novel legion by William Peter Blatty.It was not as bad as I thought it would be,Not as good as the book but it was still worth to see.”