Reclaiming the Reputation of THE EXORCIST 3: LEGION

Horror sequels to beloved franchises usually get a bad wrap, and for good reason. A truly remarkable, original film comes out that changes the dialogue of horror movies. People excited and crave more. Inevitably, ripoffs and cash-ins happen - look in any Redbox for an example. The originals become the mark of excellence and a high point of comparison, and the hangers-on clutch at straws trying to recapture a bit of magic (or just a bit of the money). But you always still have the original Halloween, Psycho, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc. to hold on to. It feels almost like a betrayal then when the classics are followed by totally-official, totally-canon, totally-disappointing sequels.

The Halloween franchise is an interesting case in how fan expectations play into horror sequels. Halloween 3 is currently enjoying a reappraisal among horror fans as an ambitious and totally-off-the-fucking-wall effort to expand the franchise in a less-literal way. Sure, it's not scary at all, but it was John Carpenter trying to take the franchise in a different direction. Originally, Carpenter had no plans to continue the Michael Myers character past the first movie, but fans demanded more of the slasher stuff. He wanted each Halloween sequel in the series to be an independent, annual anthological horror entry with a whole new story and cast. The studio forced his hand, and Halloween 2 happened. John Carpenter saw the writing on the wall, and didn't want another cheapo continuation. While not a bad movie, Halloween 2 feels almost like a pornographic, cheap thrill, which is why Carpenter didn't want to direct it. He eventually served as producer, and went behind the director's back to shoot the vicious kills in the movie, which were edited in (The director understandably didn't like this, but forget that guy because he's not John Carpenter). He didn't want to play the studio's game originally, but admirably he played damage control, which greatly improves Halloween 2. It's clearly a flawed movie conceptually, and feels far too literal and small to just have Michael chasing after Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis - House Arrest) all over again. When time for a third one came around, John Carpenter got his wish, and Halloween 3 happened. I'd rate this more as an ambitious failure than a diamond in the rough, but alternative film culture is attempting to reclaim it as the strange movie it is. It's got a killer John Carpenter score (one of his best), Tom Atkins returns with his mustache, and there's a few nonsensical but creepy deaths. The Michael Myers-less concept isn't its weakness; it stands as its sovereign movie. I'm no champion of Halloween 3: Season of the Witch (not featuring any witches, though is pretty kickass subtitle as far as those things go). However, I'm all about critical reappraisal, so I'm going to throw down for The Exorcist 3 instead.


When The Conjuring came out last year, people were really, really stoked about it. Critics were awash with praise for its gorgeous cinematography (notably its camera movement and use of light and shadow), careful characterization, and lack of cheap thrills like "pointless gore" (whatever that means) and fake-outs. It felt like a return to classical horror filmmaking. The era of The Haunting, The Shining, Rosemary's Baby, and yes, The Exorcist, was fondly recalled in many reviews, when true auteurs like Stanley Kubrick and Roman Polanski would take a shot at the genre, and walk away smiling with their wallets full. The genre has always had a disreputable cultural perception, but nowadays in particular. The era of "extreme cinema" soured a lot of critics who felt detached from the shallow characters and excessive bloodshed. These didn't feel like "movies" to them, so much as "torture porn." Of course, Eli Roth's whole point in Hostel, for better or worse, was that these shallow characters are supposed to be disposable, and you're supposed to just care for them in the sense that they're humans. Douchebag fratboy humans, but still flesh & blood, and undeserving of their fates. But these didn't feel like the classics. Someone pointed out to me recently that the only death in The Conjuring was the dog, which both amused me and annoyed me (leave the dog alone, dudes). It's certainly full of threats of violence, but not actual, life-ending violence. It's not that there's no actual violence in the horror classics, it's that it's relatively austere and doesn't feel "pornographic." Maybe that's what turned critics off, and turned them onto The Conjuring.

The Exorcist 3 enjoys the same refreshing tenor of "classic horror" that many people liked about The Conjuring. William Peter Blatty, the author of the original book The Exorcist and the screenplay, wanted to tell the story of Legion and got approval for his movie under that title. At some point after he finished principal photography, he was told the film would be released as The Exorcist 3: Legion, despite the very compelling fact that the original cut of his movie contained no exorcism rites. Technicality ruins everything, huh. Luckily Blatty was allowed to shoot these scenes and they weren't handed off to some goddamn scab, so the scenes are still inventively shot, and George C. Scott's performance is unaffected by this shift, so it doesn't have the bored, bitter tenor of say, Harrison Ford in the Blade Runner voiceover performance in that one cut of the movie.

Two cute old men sitting down to talk murder

A key strength for The Conjuring were the two sweet families at its center. The seemingly endless number of girls, parented by puppy-dog eyes Ron Livingston and the fragile, but unconditionally loving, Lili Taylor felt like a real family. The Warrens could have been played as stiff, somber jerks who come in and make this family take their spiritual medicine, are instead played as a loving couple who just want to help. Regardless of whether or not you believe the real-life Warrens were simply conning opportunists is irrelevant. The Warrens of The Conjuring are wonderful, selfless people, and are very human. They're easy to care about. This is also true in the The Exorcist 3 of the brotherly relationship between Father Dyer (Ed Flanders - Salem's Lot) and Detective Kinderman (George C. Scott - The Rescuers Down Under). They tease each other, make jokes about their respective home lives, and go see It's a Wonderful Life together. You kind of fall in love with these old men, and you immediately believe they have a decades-long history together. So when Father Dyer is killed by a seemingly-omniscient serial killer, in his hospital bed after a warm, jocular visit from his old body Kinderman, you feel it. Not to mention the fact that the killer somehow knows the perfect way to mock the pair's friendship with a bloody "IT'S A WONDERFULL (sic) LIFE" written on the wall of Dyer's hospital room. This shit got personal immediately, and we get to watch Kinderman fall apart over it for the rest of the movie in a locked-down hospital. It's a legitimately affecting moment for a horror movie, and helps your terror get grounded in something more emotional. It feels rare.

Brad Dourif going full demon

George's jagged glass voice and soft blue eyes make for a terrific horror protagonist, as seen as well in The Changeling, another seemingly-forgotten classic horror film. He's tough and angry when people don't respond seriously-enough to the threats around them, but gentle and kind when he can be. He perfectly rounds out Karl Malden's performance from the first, and full commits to the project, which is really goddamn admirable for a 2nd horror movie sequel. Apparently George really liked the script, which is understandable because it's resoundingly creepy and has some really great prose from the demon. This hospital has a high-security ward that houses an inmate who showed up mysteriously many years ago, and is responsible for the several murders that happen throughout the movie. The tampering from the studio results in a really strange, though initially startling, wavering in appearance of the demon. At first, Kinderman is shocked to discover the demon is inhabiting the body of his old friend Damien Karras (Jason Miller, the only returning cast member from the first), who "died" at the end of the first film. This isn't the first time that the movie's decision to retroactively stitch together the first and third movies weakens its integrity, but this specific decision is mostly saved by a powerhouse villain performance by professional-creep Brad Dourif (Blue Velvet). The demon wavers back and forth between displaying itself as its Jason Miller form and its Brad Dourif form, because the studio demanded an original cast member be brought in to "class up the picture" and legitimize it. So, the movie has to work these two performances together somehow, and it more or less works. Brad Dourif blows Jason Miller out of the water, though. Miller could have been cut entirely, or at least utilized differently. The sheer conviction in his performance is enough to distract you from the fact that there's really no reason this story has to be so tied to the original. The story goes that Damien Karras died in the first movie, after being possessed by the demon leaving Regan and committing suicide. This movie claims he was braindead, but the demon pieced his brain functioning together slowly. I guess if the demon can contort Regan's body in the first movie into impossible positions (well, impossible without killing the girl) it's possible that it can mend and repair a corpse back to life. That's how Jason Miller showed up at the psych ward - braindead and wandering around, and in these 15 years, the demon's been hard at work on him, trapping his soul in the purgatory of possession. This isn't the dumbest plot contrivance I've ever heard, but it's certainly "inelegant." I do not understand why the demon can't just be coming back independently into a new host. Or, if you have to keep Jason Miller in the movie, have Kinderman's mental hospital cells interview with "Karras" be hallucinations by the demon to fuck with him, and it's actually some other poor schmuck the demon has taken up residence in. There are options here, people.

Brad Dourif in X-Files, "Beyond the Sea"

A few years later, Brad would play a captive serial killer on one of the best episodes of The X-Files, "Beyond the Sea." What's impressive is that these two performances are actually remarkably different, though their context is remarkably similar. While his X-Files performance is imbued with humanity and weakness, and his final moments in the episode are truly heartbreaking, Brad's performance in The Exorcist 3 is powerfully sadistic and cruel, with barely a peek into human underneath the demon's facade. To hide every inch of sympathy and human compassion is really tough, and Dourif does it without coming across as either flat or cartoonish. Blatty brilliantly captures this performance through long takes with us taking on Kinderman's perspective during interviews of the demon. Dourif stares at the camera head-on and doesn't waste a moment while he frothingly plumbs the depths of his evil. It's emotional enough you totally forget the plot somersaults it took to get him there.

The movie is full of great scares that attempt to expand the horror canon without cribbing too much from the original. It'd be very easy to just have another possession and expand on the original's premise of a innocent taken by a demon. It's kind of obvious why the idea of doing just that appealed to the producers, who eventually forced Blatty's hand. The scares here are much more in line with a Manhunter or The House of the Devil. Hallucinogenic, demonic imagery with heavy string music. Slow-burns matched with sudden scares, and some disturbing, ritualized crime scenes left to be discovered. There's a slow-burn horror moment that's one of my favorite in all of horror history. A nervous nurse stalks the halls of the hospital at night, investigating noises, chatting with security guards. The threat in this is still nebulous at this point - is it a supernatural force perpetrating these murders? A cult? The demon of the first movie never went on an out-and-out murder sprees, and seemed much more interested in toying with humans than simply just dismembering them. Even the death of Ellen Burstyn's director friend in the original seemed only done to drive the possessed's mother insane. We're dealing with something different this time, which comes off as refreshing rather than missing the point.

The adherence to this single shot, with a few cutaways to the nurse entering a room to investigate, lets our mind scramble to predict what her fate will be. The harsh shadows up front, the numerous doorways, the seemingly endless hallway stretching onward. As well, there's so much around the nurses' station that's concealed in the frame. The shot lets us see how much this large space engulfs her. Subconsciously, we already know she's a goner, but we just don't know what's coming or when it will get here.

This reminds me of a scene in Ti West's House of the Devil, where a creepy bearded dude approaches the babysitter's friend who is waiting in her car outside the house. We have no idea what this guy's intentions are at this point in the movie, so his slightly-off banter with her is anything but just a nice chat with a pretty girl. Its prominence makes it ominous. 

AJ Bowen in House of the Devil

So when he pulls out a gun in a split-second move and blows her head all over the dashboard, it's not just startling in a cheap "jump scare" way. It's not necessarily even a pure jump scare, because he gave us all the time he could for us to prepare, but there's no proper way to do that. We don't know what's coming explicitly. It sort of lulls us into a false sense of security on a conscious level, while our subconscious is doing laps. This is typically the sort of moment that would have a false-scare, a cheap "cat jump" scare to just make you feel silly. Instead, we get a our fears perfectly met with a totally justifiable scare. It's fucking great how it toys with you like a killer would. A professional hitman would make sure the scene is accomplished quickly and without drama. A serial killer would thrive on the sadism of the moment. It's in scenes like this which let us share the perspective of both the killer and the killed, and it is so much more unnerving than a simple jump scare. 

There is a single cheap fake-out jump scare in The Exorcist 3 too, which I think is total bullshit when a demon is in the mix. We've seen the demon's remote presence cause birds to die in their nests, a crucifix to cry blood, a gust of wind to tear open shutters, and make you hear voices. Kinderman is alone in a clergy building, investigating strange noises. It could have just been the demon, and the scare would have been justified. Instead we get some crazy lady who jumps out of nowhere and apologizes for scaring Kinderman, and runs off. It makes no sense and still makes you feel silly. I'd rather have not had the unnerving buildup with a "payoff" like that.

The dead bird, crying crucifix, and sudden gust of wind with voices is what introduces us to in a brief, totally random scene to a young, blonde priest. All we learn about this priest is that he is scared of this shit, and nothing more. He doesn't even get a line. We'll mark this character down as the Deus Ex Exorcist of the movie, and I'm going to lay all the blame for the disappointing ending on his shoulders. This is where the movie goes off the rails, and where I stop blaming people for disregarding the movie. In its last 20 minutes, the movie shits the bed due to studio interference. I can't guarantee that Blatty's original ending would have been awesome - no one can. Apparently Morgan Creek, like a real butterfingers, lost the footage that was cut to make room for the studio additions. In 1989, it cost $4 million to shoot and edit in this idiotic ending, and I'm having a really hard time believing the original could have been worse. I'm going to relate the ending to the movie in as honest of terms as I can lay down.

"I hate Mondays!"

I'm pretty sure the movie Legion from a few years back literally based the whole movie on the ending of this movie. Both feature a possessed geriatric woman attempting to murder people. Kinderman rushes from the hospital to his home, where his improbably young daughter and wife are hanging out with some old nurse lady who shows up at the front door. They of course let her in, for some reason, despite the fact that they never were discussed as needing a nurse. Kinderman's wife and daughter are both at least 20 years younger than him. Love knows no age or something. So this crazy old woman tries to clip off the daughter's head, there's a hilarious physical struggle between 1000 year old George C. Scott and 1,500 year old possessed lady. While this is happening, Deus Ex Exorcist drops in with almost no warning and with no calling to save the day. It's fairly hilarious, but treated with the utmost sincerity of a man who acutely believes in the divine struggle between Heaven and Hell. Here's the scene:

Aw, I'm just kidding. That's a scene from Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, of course. But it feels roughly the same to someone without the greatest respect for the Catholic Church and all of the clergy, in any context. The priest is here, and I can't even remember the guy's goddamn name. I don't have the producer's notes on this stuff, but I'm guessing this character wasn't important to the plot (or even existed, frankly) before the exorcism plot was added. It certainly doesn't feel like he fits here at all, because he just kind of shows up after he got spooked earlier with the bleeding crucifix and such in his room. We have no insight into his character other than he's spooked by spooky things.

The ending isn't all trash though, otherwise I wouldn't be here. It's just a disappointment after how great the movie is, that's all. For one, the exorcism rite goes... poorly. It's hard to care about this guy, so it's pure dumb fun when he gets psychically mauled by the demon, who tosses him against the ceiling and tears him up. It's really brutal for a movie that's had most of the violence up until this point be off-screen or heavily implied. The descriptions of past violence by Brad Dourif are graphic, but they are not depicted graphically onscreen. This priest just really fucking gets it, and I feel like it's old Blatty's hatred for having to include this guy, so he makes it extra-brutal. Immediately after, Kinderman (after heroically defeating an octogenarian in battle) shows up to the scene just after the failed rite, with the priest bleeding out on the floor - Blatty could have easily mauled the guy off-screen. In the original (also scripted by Blatty), Merrin - someone we grew to really sympathize with, and see as a unique type of "badass" - dies off-screen in a heart-attack, which was forecasted in the first reel of the movie. It worked just fine and startled us, and didn't feel cheap because the real protagonist was Karras.

Before he gets torn up, though there's Hell-snakes, which is pretty dumb. Let's move on. This movie is awesome, shut the fuck up.

This scene is a mish-mash of great and not so great imagery, as horror endings tend to be. When you go for broke, sometimes you make a mess of things. These final scenes in supernatural horror movies are almost never scary anyway, because they're not subtle and you see far too much. The final stretch in Insidious is infinitely less scary than the lead-up, because the red-faced-man (if you've never seen the movie, I assure you this isn't racist) is all out in the open in the last act, and looking real computer generated. Earlier, he was allowed to prowl in the shadows, stalk the characters. The mystery of what a demon or ghost will actually do with you once they get you is much scarier than once you see that they're just going to summon snakes or whatever.

This hallucinogenic nature of this scene works overall, in that you see Kinderman in the totally-normal jail cell cut between the gaping hole to literal Hell in the floor. When you see what's down there though, it feels remarkably low-rent. This shot operates under the Italian school of zombie movies, which follows the logic that if you shove a bunch of homeless people and a bit of sacrilegious imagery in a room, it's spooky. It's not. Intangible threats are hard to make scary, sometimes, but have a much greater capacity for scares if used well. I'd rather face Michael Myers than Pinhead any day, because at the end of the day, Mike will only break your body. Pinhead wants your soul. The problem is graphically depicting these threats in a way that's not laughable. 

The movie has an alright resolution, though it suffers from the same problem the entire last two reels have - it moves just too goddamn fast. For a movie that's deliberately paced, it ends on this rushed, manic note. The previously mentioned killer-granny scene plays at lightning fast pace, which unsurprisingly doesn't make it more dignified. Blatty is banking on an audience with failing short-term memory. Karras breaks the trance for a just a moment, just a single moment - long enough for the true Karras to beg for Kinderman to shoot him, and for the old guy to oblige. I love the idea that the old cop isn't qualified for the rite, and that rite has failed anyway. The first movie had that too - the exorcism ritual apparently is total dogshit! Karras had to "kill himself" to save Regan, which strikes me as a sign your exorcist rite is only in like, beta. So, Kinderman killing the demon and putting his old friend to rest is pretty cathartic, despite all the ridiculousness. A monster needs to die this time. They're not trying to save a girl, they're trying to put Karras to rest after all his suffering. It's kind of an endorsement of euthanasia, but I wonder how Blatty would feel on that reading. Maybe he'd make an exception in the case of unstoppable possession.

The Exorcist 3 is not a perfect movie; it's not a clean tidy masterpiece everyone can agree on. Instead, it's an ambitious attempt to take the spirit of the original and create something wholly new, wholly independent, but evidently compromised by the moneymen. Thanks to Morgan Creek's fuckup, we might never see the original cut. We might never see the so-called Legion, so we have to judge what's in front of us, and I think we judged too harshly in 1990. Horror fans see themselves as resistant to bullshit. They want the real deal, even if it sacrifices budget or distribution or cultural notoriety. Horror fans also tend to be a forgiving bunch. A peeling shitty mask, a visible boom mic, or fake-looking blood might all be indicators of laziness in a "respectable," big-budget Hollywood production, but for most horror movies, it's all just flags of humanity behind the film. It separates art from cleanly-manufactured product. I think The Exorcist 3 succeeds remarkably at staying human, staying focused on what drives the characters and what keeps the audience invested. It deserves more acclaim than being known as the unfortunate afterbirth of a creative masterwork. Were it left to fend on its own, separated from the original, it might have taken flight. I like to believe it would have gained its own little cult audience. It might have some fraction of the love movies like Manhunter have. Instead, its association with the original is just used as an excuse to cast it off and leave it to be forgotten. And that's bullshit. 

Also it's apparently Jeffrey Dahmer's favorite movie, so it's got that going for it.

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