Director John Boorman (Deliverance, Hope and Glory) did not like The Exorcist feeling the movie was bleak, nihilistic, and exploitative of its child lead.
And with all of that Boorman agreed to direct the sequel to this movie. David Kittredge (Queer for Fear: The History of Queer Horror) tells the tale of how Boorman came around to the idea and with the best of intentions created a film that some consider to be one of the worst films ever made.
Kittredge starts by telling the story of Boorman and the story of the success of The Exorcist and how the studios wanted the director of the highly acclaimed and profitable Deliverance to head up the sequel to one of the most successful films of recent history.
But Boorman didn’t want to do it. He fought against his involvement in the film. William Peter Blatty and William Friedkin (the original writer and director respectively) had already passed on the film having no desire to revisit the story. But the studio saw an opportunity to make money with a sequel and would not let the project go.
An interesting examination of how John Boorman, a hot director coming off of a big hit with Deliverance, got caught up trying to make a completely original story as a sequel to one of the first blockbusters, The Exorcist, and ended up making one of the most reviled films of the late seventies.
Playwright William Goodhart was commissioned to write the script and created a psychological thriller involving a convergence of science, the occult, and religion that distanced itself from the original movie and intrigued Boorman into accepting the job of director.
After this they were able to assemble an all-star cast with Richard Burton, Louise Fletcher (fresh off her Academy Award winning performance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), Linda Blair, Max von Sydow, and James Earl Jones.
Once all of this was established the studio pre-sold the movie to theaters with a fixed release date and everything that could go wrong with a film started to happen.
The film had many problems. Rewrites started almost immediately, locations were scrapped, pseudoscientific equipment props were poorly made, locusts brought in from abroad started dying in droves, and illness plagued and delayed production. Two actors were hospitalized with gall bladder issues and Boorman contracted a life-threatening illness that delayed production for five weeks. The film was trying to be ambitious against an unmovable release date. The documentary tells the epic tale of how Boorman and his team worked to salvage the story they wanted to tell under increasingly difficult constraints.
Boorman had a vision for the film that, in the end, ignored what the audience expected from an Exorcist sequel. What could have been a successful stand-alone film was deemed a disaster as a sequel. Financially the film did well enough, but not great. But the rebuke from audiences and critics was forceful and damaging. The film is mostly seen as failing in its most ambitious endeavors and nearly ruining the career of John Boorman. Luckily his next film, Excalibur, was an ambitious big hit that satisfied fans and critics.
Rating: 8/10
Boorman and the Devil screened at the 2026 SIFF.
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Produced by Jim Fall, David Kittredge, Travis Stevens
Written and Directed by David Kittredge
Starring John Boorman, Louise Fletcher, Linda Blair,
Karyn Kusama, Mike Flanagan, Joe Dante
