Every Exorcist Sequel Has Steered the Series Into Another Dead End. Why Do They Keep Getting Made?

David Gordon Green’s The Exorcist: Believer opens Friday, nearly 50 years after the release of The Exorcist, yet, in one sense, it will be as if no time has passed. Believer is the sixth film in the Exorcist series but the first to feature Ellen Burstyn as Chris MacNeil, the fretful mother of the demon-possessed Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair), since the 1973 film, a blockbuster adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s bestselling novel directed by William Friedkin. And all of those other films that didn’t feature Burstyn? By all reports, Believer pretty much pretends they never existed.

There’s good reason for this: While a case can be made for every Exorcist film (some more easily than others), the horror movie franchise has had a bumpier road than most. After Exorcist II: The Heretic in 1977, each Exorcist sequel and prequel has effectively served as a hard reboot that erased what came before. You might blame the demon Pazuzu—he’s bad news, as Exorcist films have reinforced over and over—but the real answer is more complicated and longer and more interesting, a series of stories of talented filmmakers attempting to extend the Exorcist story by putting their own stamp on it only to meet resistance, second-guessing, and a hostile public.

Conceived at a time when sequels rarely made more money than the original films that spawned them, Exorcist II began as a quickie, low-budget cash-in. “What we essentially wanted to do with this sequel was to redo the first movie—have the central figure, an investigative priest, interview everyone involved in the exorcisms, then fade out to unused footage, unused angles from the first movie,” producer Richard Lederer told author Barbara Pallenberg in her 1977 book The Making of Exorcist II: The Heretic. That plan didn’t last long, but Warner Bros. might have wished it had by the time The Heretic arrived in theaters.

By that point, the sequel had, to say the least, evolved. Inspired by the writings of Teilhard de Chardin—the priest and archaeologist who inspired the character of Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) in the original film—screenwriter William Goodhart created a story around the idea of humanity evolving into a kind of “world mind.” Though Deliverance director John Boorman passed on directing The Exorcist, he accepted the assignment to direct the sequel in part because he saw in Goodhart’s script a chance to say something different, more hopeful, than the William Friedkin–directed original.

That didn’t prevent Boorman from doing an uncredited rewrite with the help of Rospo Pallenberg (husband of Barbara) or from putting his personal spin on the project. The Heretic is sandwiched between the sci-fi oddity Zardoz and the florid King Arthur retelling Excalibur in Boorman’s varied filmography. Like those movies, it’s the work of a director unafraid to go big or indulge a passion for strangeness. Filled with globetrotting and destructive spectacle, it bears little resemblance to the claustrophobic original. Its elements include the now chipper and teenaged Regan (played by a returning Blair) wearing a headband that allows her to synchronize her brainwaves with others’, a Richard Burton performance as a tortured priest of Shakespearean proportions, and James Earl Jones dressed up like a locust.

Its unabashed weirdness, philosophical ambition, and visual artistry have made it a cult favorite. (I count myself among the adherents.) But Exorcist II: The Heretic baffled audiences in 1977 and still regularly turns up on lists of the worst movies of all time. In an interview with Nat Segaloff, author of the recently published The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear, Blatty himself called it “the worst movie ever, ever made.” So it makes sense that Blatty would try to wrest back control of the Exorcist-verse. That began as an attempt at a new film collaboration with Friedkin. When that fell apart, Blatty turned its story into the 1983 novel Legion. And when the time came to turn Legion into a film, Blatty, who had director approval, ultimately decided to direct it himself.

Unsurprisingly, The Exorcist III essentially ignores Heretic. Instead, it opts for its own variety of batshittery. Released in the summer of 1990, Blatty’s film stars George C. Scott as Lt. Kinderman, the cop character played by Lee J. Cobb in the original. Disturbed by deaths that match the pattern of an executed serial murderer known as “The Gemini Killer”—deaths that include a boy Kinderman had befriended via a youth outreach program and Kinderman’s best friend, Father Dyer (Ed Flanders stepping into the role played by real-life priest William O’Malley in the original film)—Kinderman seeks to get to the bottom of the mystery. This leads him to a psychiatric hospital whose dungeon-like lower level is home to a mysterious patient, played interchangeably (and confusingly) by both Brad Dourif and Exorcist star Jason Miller, who returns (sort of) as Father Damien Karras, the character who was presumed dead by self-defenestration at the end of the first Exorcist.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense. It also ends up having many of the same outré virtues as The Heretic. These include a drawn out, masterfully executed scene that concludes with what might be the greatest jump scare ever put to film—a notorious decapitation involving a nun and garden shears—and a let’s-go-for-it dedication to eccentricity that extends from George C. Scott’s rage-fueled performance to several Lynchian supporting characters to cameos from Fabio, U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, TV host Larry King, Hoyas coach John Thompson, and his former player Patrick Ewing (as the Angel of Death). And that’s in the ostensibly more commercial version that made it to theaters, where it debuted in the top spot at the box office before, like The Heretic, sinking into obscurity, where it was remembered only by a small but passionate following. (Chillingly, the movie’s most famous defender is Jeffrey Dahmer, who played the film for some of his victims.)

Perhaps understandably feeling that their Exorcist film might be more viable (and less vulnerable to claims of false advertising) if it contained an actual exorcism, production company Morgan Creek demanded considerable reshoots. A 2016 Blu-ray release features a director’s cut assembled by Blatty from both original footage and VHS copies of dailies, the originals having been unceremoniously discarded. By contrast, it takes much less effort to check out two visions for the fourth Exorcist film. Both were released in theaters (though one only in a few, and briefly) and are readily available for home viewing.

Here it gets a bit confusing. Morgan Creek began developing an Exorcist prequel in the mid-’90s. A screenplay by William Wisher (Terminator 2: Judgment Day), which expanded upon a reference to a young Father Merrin having performed an exorcism in Africa, went through a couple of directors (including The Manchurian Candidate’s John Frankenheimer, who withdrew due to health issues and died shortly after) and picked up a co-writer (The Alienist author Caleb Carr) on its way to Paul Schrader. Schrader’s lifelong interest in intense issues of faith, evident in everything from his screenplays for Martin Scorsese movies such as The Last Temptation of Christ to his own First Reformed, made him an intriguing choice. Indeed the film was filled with first-rate talent, from star Stellan Skarsgård (as Merrin) to cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. But Morgan Creek deemed the film unreleasable, thanks in part to a climax dominated more by dialogue and ideas than action. (The possibility they’d never seen a Schrader film before can’t be ruled out.)

So the studio decided to start from scratch, or close to it, bringing in action specialist Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2: Die Harder, The Long Kiss Goodnight) to take a stab at an Exorcist prequel that, despite a screenplay still credited to Wisher and Carr, kept only the broadest strokes of the Schrader version’s plot. And though Harlin retained Skarsgård as the film’s star, the resemblance between the cerebral original and the action-packed new version pretty much ended there. Harlin’s film, now called Exorcist: The Beginning, debuted to mediocre reviews and so-so box office in August 2004.

Then, in what seems to be a first, Schrader’s cut got its own chance less than a year later when Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist received a limited release before appearing on DVD. There aren’t too many directors who have less in common than Schrader and Harlin, so Dominion and The Beginning ought to be a study in contrasts. And they are, just not a particularly compelling study. The films are far from either director’s best work. If anything, the existence of both suggests an Exorcist prequel would be dull no matter who attempted it.

Yet, despite every offshoot running into a dead end (arguably the most successful was a not-bad but little-noticed TV series that ran for two seasons between 2016 and 2018), the franchise keeps rolling along. Exorcist: Believer is the first of a trilogy of films directed by Green as a follow-up to a trilogy of Halloween sequels. I had mixed feelings about those movies but was still eager to see what Green, whose work I’d admired greatly in the past, did with The Exorcist. Would Believer, I wondered as I settled into my seat for the Chicago press screening, be the first Exorcist film since the original to take a frictionless path from the screen to the hearts of the masses? The answer: After showing the first 20 minutes of the film without audible dialogue, twice, the theater pulled the plug. Pazuzu strikes again?