Editorials
A Tale of Two ‘Exorcist’ Prequels; Which One is Better?
The franchise that followed the original The Exorcist was always an unusual one. The second film was critically panned upon release and hasn’t fared much better in the intervening years. The third entry was more effective and frightening, but it was only tangentially related to the original film. One of the most interesting entries of the series, a spin-off film called The Ninth Configuration, which followed a minor character from the original, isn’t usually even considered a genuine part of the series.
And then, of course, there is the prequel. Or, more appropriately, the prequels. How did they come about, what went wrong, why are there two of them, and which is ultimately the superior film?
Let’s take a look at Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist and Exorcist: The Beginning.
William Wisher Jr., co-writer of the first two Terminator films, was originally asked to come up with a new story for the Exorcist franchise; his reaction to that request, in the interview book The Anatomy of Fear: Conversations with Cult Horror and Science Fiction Filmmakers (written by Kathleen Fernandez-Vander Kaay and myself), was to say, “Not only do I NOT want to do that, I don’t think the world needs another one of those.”
He changed his mind, however, after a small mention from the first film popped into his head. Describing a plot point about The Exorcist, Wisher said, “In the original book and 1973 film, the Church calls Merrin because he’s the only guy they can find who has previously performed one of those things. And I went, ‘that’s the story’; it’s 1946 in Africa, he’s just come out from the Second World War, and like fifty million people died – it’s easy to set up that he’s lost his faith in God, and he goes to this village because he’s running away. And he meets this poor child, and in helping him, and fighting the devil, and facing his own demons, he gets his faith back.”
Armed with that idea, he wrote the script, and a seemingly brilliant package was formed when writer/director Paul Schrader signed on to direct the film. A smart writer creating back story based on elements from the original film, all brought to the screen by an iconic director. What could go wrong?
“That was the weirdest project I have ever been involved with in my life, and it’s a heart breaker,” Wisher said, referring to the very strange and oddly public trouble the film went through. That trouble started when James Robinson, owner of Morgan Creek (the studio that financed the film), saw the cut of Paul Schrader’s film Dominion and said outright that he wasn’t going to release it. However, because the intellectual property was valuable, they weren’t just going to shelve the movie. So the company made other plans.
“They made two movies out of that movie,” Wisher said, “and Paul Schrader directed the movie that I wrote, shot it, edited it. Finished it. But that movie got shelved and Renny Harlin was hired. Jim Robinson didn’t like Schrader’s movie of my script, he said it wasn’t enough of a horror film.”
Thus began the production of the second film, helmed by Harlin, with a new script by Alexi Hawley that strangely contained nearly every single beat and plot point of the Schrader and Wisher version. Wisher described watching the new version as “one of the oddest experiences in my life. Like they had taken the script, broken it into 3×5 cards, threw them in the air, mixed them with a bunch of new cards from some other writer, then stuck them back together in random order and shot that.”
When Harlin’s film was completed and released as Exorcist: The Beginning, it did not find favor with audiences or critics. It was dismissed as a bundle of half-hearted jump scares and awkward action sequences strung together with passing nods to the original film in the series but little else to distinguish itself. Mainstream audiences weren’t interested in seeing it, and horror aficionados were insulted by its lack of ambition. It made its budget back but barely broke even after advertising, and the film currently has an 11% freshness rating at Rotten Tomatoes.
The production company saw that perhaps there was a silver lining to the problematic public issues the film suffered from; the moviegoing public already knew there was another, fully completed version of the film, so why not release that one as well? Dominion finally saw the light of day as a DVD release, and possibly for the first time in history, two distinct versions of the same story made around the same time, produced by the same company but from different filmmakers, were both commercially available.
Dominion was by no means a huge success, either. Even ignoring the fact that it premiered on DVD and therefore would not make as much money, the film itself suffered from pacing issues, questionable special effects, and an overall feeling of a lack of investment in the subject matter. Though the spiritual and psychological aspects were more pronounced in the Schrader version, the filmmaking itself left something to be desired.
So which film is the superior film? “I prefer the quiet, emotionally disturbing nature of the first one we made, over the overt horror story they finally released,” said Wisher, perhaps unsurprisingly. He did note something interesting, however, regarding his struggles with James Robinson about the nature of the film itself: “I kept telling him The Exorcist wasn’t a horror film. It was a disturbing film. It’s a slow, cold, creepy, terrifying thing, but it’s ultimately about faith and God.”
Neither of the films were particularly well-received, so it wasn’t as if audiences flocked to the Schrader version as the superior movie upon its DVD release. Perhaps the reason for the financial failure of both prequels can be addressed by the absence of what made the 1973 film such a success.
Paul Schrader has always been a smart and engaged writer and director, and his Calvinist religious upbringing led to him creating some excellent filmic observations of the struggle of faith, from the script for The Last Temptation of Christ to Touch. Almost all his films deal in some way with man’s struggle against his own base desires, and his scripts for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull were made into epic classic films. He has not, however, always had a flare for visual storytelling, often directing films with a cool distance and stillness.
Renny Harlin, on the other hand, has a visual flourish that nearly always comes through, no matter the subject matter or budget. From A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master to Die Hard 2 to The Long Kiss Goodnight, Harlin has delivered films whose imagery and fluid movement are always impressive. He has not, however, had to tackle something as heady, reverent, and emotionally devastating as The Exorcist, and that isn’t exactly his forte. Both versions of the prequel to The Exorcist were lacking in aspects because each was missing the half that the other was better at; that is why the original film will always be remembered and revered.
William Peter Blatty, the writer of the book and the original film, was the smart, passionate man of faith that brought the story to vivid emotional life. William Friedkin, the director of the original, was one of the most skilled and daring visual storytellers of his day, a risk-taker who formed a surprising but strong bond with Blatty to create one of the most iconic works in film history. If nothing else, the dueling versions of the Exorcist prequel, and their lack of connection to a wide audience, remind us how difficult it is to find a pairing like the original’s.
I’m relatively new to the Bloody Disgusting family, but I feel the need to admit something that you might find disturbing, distasteful, and downright disappointing. Basically, and with the utmost respect for your feelings, I’m of the opinion that Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead is the best entry in the entire franchise.
To be clear, I like Sam Raimi’s original trilogy well enough, especially 1987’s Evil Dead II, but the zaniness can’t help but neuter the horror for me. They’re fun movies! I’m entertained by them, but I’m just drawn to Alvarez’s meaner, gorier, and more tonally unrelenting take on the same material.
A new Evil Dead film is now in theaters, and just as 2023’s Evil Dead Rise followed this same brutal vibe, Evil Dead Burn is continuing that wet slide into utter carnage.
Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
Evil Dead (2013)
Commentators: Fede Alvarez (director/co-writer), Rodo Sayagues (co-writer), Jane Levy (actor), Lou Taylor Pucci (actor), Jessica Lucas (actor)
1. The family watching in the basement at 3:11 includes producer Rob Tapert’s son and a local actor from New Zealand, the one with the disfigured face, who has survived two separate plane crashes.
2. The decision to flip the opening shot (post title) upside down came in editing as Alvarez recalled being unsettled by a shot from Raimi’s original Evil Dead. “Something that really impressed me about the original was all the camera work, and there’s a moment… where Bruce [Campbell] runs from one side of the room to the other, and the camera looks back and upside down.”
3. It was composer Roque Banos who came up with adding the siren sounds. His inspiration came after living in Los Angeles for a short time and hearing many, many sirens.
4. It was Pucci’s idea for his character, Eric, to have a beard and long hair – partly as a visual nod to the film’s 1970s vibe, and partly because “you never have to do anything” with it.
5. “In any good story you have one of the main characters taking a bad step in the beginning,” says Alvarez as David (Shiloh Fernandez) fails to simply turn around and apologize to his sister Mia (Levy). “He makes another mistake,” adds Levy when he ignores her pleas for help after she’s been assaulted by the tree, but Alvarez says that choice is far more understandable.
6. Pucci is asked if it was his choice to be playing with the deck of cards on the porch swing, but he says it was Alvarez’s suggestion. The director adds that he had just tried impressing Pucci with a card trick – turns out they’re both amateur magicians – and Pucci carried it into the scene. It’s also a nod to the original film.
7. The clock at 14:56 is the actual one from the original film.
8. Most of them agree that the blood would send them packing in real life well before the book would. They’d be curious about the latter.
9. “It smells like burnt hair” was improvised by Pucci.
10. The script called for dead crows in the basement, but Tapert suggested they try something different, so they went with cats. A dead one had been found “in an alley” somewhere, and they took a mold of it to craft additional prosthetic cat corpses.
11. All of the closeups of people touching the book feature Alvarez’s hands.
12. Mia’s front yard vomit consisted of cold soup.
13. Early scenes of a wet and angry Mia were preceded by her doing sprints or jumping jacks offscreen to make her seem more exasperated. She was so amped up while driving the car that Alvarez, who was hidden in the backseat, was scared “while Jane is going crazy.”
14. Levy recalls Alvarez suggesting a similar scene from Wild at Heart as a reference point for her own performance after crashing the car into the pond.
15. They shot the film mostly chronologically, and that left producers a little concerned as they were seeing a lot of character drama. “They didn’t know what we were doing, and they were really anxious to get to the horror.” Those concerns were put to rest when they saw the dailies for the assault and bunkbed scene that follows.
16. It was Tapert who suggested they include the tree vine assault, and Alvarez was happy to see it used as more than just a shocker. “Being raped is her being injected with the devil,” says Levy, and he adds that it moves the story forward rather than just disturb.
17. The shower burn was the first bit of graphic mutilation that the writers conceived when they started working on the script.
18. The attempted escape in the Jeep after Mia is burned originally included a shot of David trying to call for help on his cell phone only to be stymied by a lack of service, but Alvarez took it out. He doesn’t think the audience needed it, and he didn’t want it to knock viewers out of the scene’s intensity.
19. The flooded river at 35:16 “is a real river.” It’s the same one the Jeep passes through at the beginning, and they simply waited for a heavy rain and then filmed the result.
20. Alvarez asked the sound department to come up with a unique sound for the Deadites, and the result was the crackling, “bug in a jar” noise.
21. “This was the hardest thing ever,” says Levy at 37:54 as her character projectile vomits blood onto Olivia’s (Lucas) face. They did four takes of the scene with Lucas having to be completely rinsed off and reset each time.
22. That’s not digital trickery at 39:32 as Olivia’s reflection gives an evil grin. “This was a timing thing because the mirror had to go away from me, and as it went away from me I had to actually do that face.” We see mostly the back and slight side of her outside of the reflection at this point, and the result is a cool little shot.
23. The bathroom encounter between Olivia and Eric originally ended with her hitting her head, but Raimi watched the dailies and asked Alvarez to milk the horror and gore a little bit longer.
24. “So everyone actually kills each other,” says Levy, “Mia never kills anybody in this movie.” Alvarez adds, “That’s the whole beauty of the story; Mia is the only innocent person, she’s a victim all the way.”
25. Alvarez recalls that one of Raimi’s “three rules of horror” is that “the innocent must be punished.” Does that contradict the point immediately above? Maybe, but she went through hell, and at the end of the day, are any of us actually innocent?
26. He acknowledges that the film, like many horror movies, is filled with characters making questionable choices, but he defends most of them as being understandable given the context.
27. “It’s my first sex scene,” says Levy at 1:31:11 as her character licks Natalie’s (Elizabeth Blackmore) leg. “This one was her stunt double’s leg.” She adds that “Kiss me, you dirty cunt!” is the favorite thing she’s ever said.
28. Natalie’s attempt to rinse her hand wound was originally written to include a black worm coming out of the gash, “but we didn’t want to be too supernatural.” Mr. Alvarez, my good man, have you seen your own movie?
29. Alvarez sees the theme of the movie as accepting that sometimes the only way out of a problem is through it – and here that means killing your friends before dismembering or burning their bodies. A good lesson for us all, really.
30. Eric’s laughter at Natalie saying “My face hurts” was real as Pucci found the line – one that Alvarez added on the fly – to be very funny given the situation and the fact that both of her arms are gone.
31. “Those woods were really, really creepy,” says Pucci, and Lucas adds that their New Zealand filming location was near a Maori burial ground.
32. Mia, gasping for her life in the hole with the plastic bag over her head, was apparently Levy’s audition scene.
33. They see Mia’s resurrection – the real Mia coming back to life after her brother’s janky defibrillator attempt – as a reward from beyond for David finally apologizing to her like he should have done from the start. I don’t mind saying that this is an odd take given how clear this film (and franchise as a whole) makes it that there’s absolutely no good supernatural entity looking out for these characters. Characters in these movies are absolutely and utterly fucked, and they should probably just accept that. Alvarez ultimately concedes that you can also just believe that the defibrillator actually worked.
34. For those who missed it, the necklace chain on the ground at 1:16:51 is in the shape of a skull as a nod to the scene in the original film where Ash (Campbell) goes for a necklace and sees a skull.
35. The machete comes through the wall at 1:20:10 and slices Mia’s leg, and they used Natalie’s prosthetic arm for the shot – it’s getting cut at the elbow.
36. They went through various versions of the Abomination Mia (Randal Wilson), including one that was made up of all five of the friends.
37. The original ending saw Mia walking on the road, but they cut it. The image still made it into the one-sheet poster.
38. The end credits feature extremely bloody shots filmed at high speed and meant to reference various beats from the film itself in tighter, close-up detail that viewers might have missed.
Quotes Without Context
“You kind of want to put the rape idea in people’s minds.”
“The car, of course.”
“I would definitely open the book.”
“Swimming through the swamp was fun.”
“Duct tape fixes everything.”
“How come David is such a bad boyfriend?”
“This kiss, I was really suffocating her.”
“I’m such a perv.”
“It’s like Beetlejuice.”
“Fede kept telling me this is my Bruce Willis moment to pump me up.”
Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.
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