A Riveting Film on John Boorman’s Doomed ‘Exorcist’ Sequel Shows the Devil Is in the Details

By any conventional, shoulder-shrugging perspective, David Kittredge’s “Boorman and the Devil,” which opens at the Quad Cinema this week, is a 112-minute documentary about the misconceived, totally calamitous making of John Boorman’s “Exorcist II: the Heretic,” which the ticket-buying public all but spat upon when it opened in June 1977.So by any boilerplate, “Joe Popcorn,” judge-a-book-by-its-cover standard, Mr. Kittredge’s film sounds like a massive downer, a disaster film minus any hint of edge or excitement. A movie guaranteed to sink your spirit in soft mud.This would be wrong. Mr. Kittredge’s film, which took roughly eight years to assemble, is actually a black comedy of errors. If, that is, you have any understanding of how life and happenstance can arbitrarily decide to transform your life — or your job or a love affair or a start-up business…anything aspirational — into a living hellscape. If you understand that life can be not only “unfair” (a John F. Kennedy observation) but oddly ruinous and torturing, and that bad luck sometimes runs in streaks, “Boorman and the Devil” is not only funny — it’s hilarious.I didn’t fully realize this when I first saw “Boorman and the Devil” last September at the 2025 Venice Film Festival. Back then I was chuckling here and there but more astonished at how terribly things went for Boorman and his cast which included Richard Burton, Linda Blair, Louise Fletcher, and James Earl Jones when it comes to both perception and esteem. This misbegotten film, which cost $14 million to produce, actually earned $30 million at the end of the day, which made it modestly profitable.But when “BATD” played a few weeks later at Brooklyn’s Nitehawk Cinema under the aegis of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, the crowd was frequently laughing at the litany of blunders and misfortunes as Boorman attempted to shoot this artistically ambitious mess during the summer and fall of 1976. The crowd wasn’t snickering — they were flat-out chortling and guffawing. The critics I saw it with in Venice were too subdued, you see. Reviewers almost never give in to raw emotion, but the Brooklyn horror crowd “got it.”The doc’s basic thrust is that laughter is the only sane response when fate and the gods have allied against you, when a bad luck streak not only won’t stop but gets worse and worse. Mr. Boorman did this to himself, of course. No less a presence than Stanley Kubrick had advised him to play his cards like a B-movie whore — just reconstitute the original “Exorcist” elements and shovel in even more howls and shrieks, and spewing of green vomit. But no. Boorman had to make his idea of a respectable, artistically ambitious film about…locusts and metal headsets and “synchronized hypnosis.” (See? Right away you’re telling yourself you don’t want to see the John Boorman film.)The basic plot was about the teenaged Regan McNeil (Linda Blair, whose character remembers nothing of her 1973 ordeal with the demon Pazuzu) sharing her feelings and intuitions with her therapist, Dr. Tuskin (Louise Fletcher), and also with Father Philip Lamont (Richard Burton), a priest tasked by the Vatican to determine what happened to the late Father Merrin (Max von Sydow). Except the Vatican doesn’t want to know from green vomit. They don’t want to accept any obscene scenarios about a raspy-voiced young girl yelling crude taunts. The problem, synchronized hypnosis-wise, was that watching characters stare at each other with shiny metal headsets on and trying to convey some kind of heaviness proved a flatline experience.“Boorman and the Devil” is one of the wisest, deepest, most poetic-minded, most eloquent, and most satisfyingly assembled “inside baseball meets human vulnerability” documentaries that I’ve ever seen. It’s a really smart film. It soothes you by making you feel as intelligent and perceptive as the poor veterans recounting their “Heretic” misfortunes.Mr. Kittredge doesn’t just cover the whole, chapter-by-chapter saga of the film’s physical shooting, followed by the deeply embarrassing release. He also assesses John Boorman’s entire career while examining his personal passions and tendencies.The most intriguing aspect is an atmospheric recreation of the fascinating Hollywood milieu of 1976 and ’77 which marked the closing chapter of the whole sprawling saga of New Hollywood, which began in ’67 (“The Graduate,” “Bonnie and Clyde”) and ended with the super-successful, game-changing release of “Star Wars” in May ’77.Excepting Burton, who passed in 1984 at the age of 58, Mr. Kittredge has interviewed pretty much every living and since-deceased person who worked on the film, starting with Mr. Boorman, the project’s bruised but resilient godfather. The John Boorman interview apparently happened in 2018, as he tells the camera that he’s 85. (Born in 1933, Mr. Boorman is now 93.) Ms. Blair (who turned 67 last January) and Louise Fletcher, who died three years ago, are given a healthy amount of screen time; ditto uncredited screenwriter Rospo Pallenberg and Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown.A stimulating array of peripheral participants and observers are also heard from — directors Joe Dante and Jeff Kanew, critics Bilge Ebiri and Stephanie Zacharek, and author and former Variety reporter Joe McBride. Plus there’s footage of a story about a sneak preview screening in Pasadena, passed along by “The Exorcist” helmer William Friedkin which is hilarious. The professional-grade sketchings of key episodes during the film’s making are truly exceptional. Mr. Kittredge’s doc belongs in the pantheon of an opposite category — cinematic chronicles about the making of movies that went horribly awry. How ironic it is that a movie this rich, insightful, compassionate, and enticingly human-scaled is a study of one of the most notorious artistic and commercial failures in Hollywood history.

A Riveting Film on John Boorman’s Doomed ‘Exorcist’ Sequel Shows the Devil Is in the Details

A Riveting Film on John Boorman’s Doomed ‘Exorcist’ Sequel Shows the Devil Is in the Details

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