A new documentary is reviving John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic, and it does so with the kind of mix of affection and disbelief that has followed the film for decades. Boorman and the Devil, a two-hour look at the movie, draws on interviews, archival footage, clips and animation to revisit a sequel that was never meant to play like one.
The timing matters because interest in the film has not faded even as its reputation hardened. The documentary gathers recollections from people who made it, including Louise Fletcher and Linda Blair, and it places their memories against the larger fact that Warner Bros. gave Boorman serious backing to follow The Exorcist. That studio gamble is part of why the film still draws attention today: it came out of an era when big companies were willing to trust gifted directors with enormous freedom.
Boorman was never fully on board with the original film’s reputation as a horror benchmark. He admired its technique, but he also thought its treatment of a child’s suffering was sadistic and exploitative, which helps explain why Exorcist II: The Heretic became, in his hands, a sequel in name only. The result was a silly, occasionally spellbinding fairy tale that seemed determined to give audiences everything they did not want, and that oddity is exactly what the documentary keeps bringing back into focus.
What gives Boorman and the Devil its charge is not just the material on screen but the attitude of the people remembering it. Several crew members look back with bemusement and pride, and Fletcher and Blair recall the production fondly and candidly, even though the film was savaged by reviews and long treated as a notorious flop. That split between embarrassment and admiration is the engine of the documentary, and it is why the movie’s afterlife is still larger than its box-office reputation.
Nearly 50 years later, Boorman still considers Exorcist II: The Heretic some of his finest work, which leaves the central question intact rather than solved: what, exactly, in that film still matters to him so much? The documentary does not close that gap so much as widen it, and that is what makes this return to the Movie Brats era worth the running time.
