MAY 19: The Exorcist III

            Woe betide the horror sequel. Shameless cash-grabs, jumped sharks, studio interference, original cast members who have shuffled off this mortal coil and must be replaced, beloved fictional characters who have shuffled off this mortal coil and must be shamelessly resurrected, quick turns to comedy, non sequitur plots masquerading as a member of the franchise, sheer absurdity – the unnecessary horror sequel has had it all. And of all these lowly films, why have I spent the last six months with such a fascination for The Exorcist III? Is it the famous jump scare? The vague buzz about its reevaluation in the horror fandom community, possibly as a result of the Shout Factory released director’s cut that entered the world in 2016? The fact that the only thing I knew about this movie was that it had the zodiac killer in it for some reason? Regardless, at some point in the past six months, I announced my intention to watch The Exorcist III in the near future, my girlfriend said “why?” and it became something of an inside joke between us. Every time we’d try to think of a movie to watch, I’d suggest The Exorcist III and she’d say no thank you. But today, dear reader, I finally watched it.

            Yup, it’s a weird one.

            The product of a troubled production history, a combative relationship between director and producers, and seemingly six distinct ideas that all popped into William Peter Blatty’s head at once, The Exorcist III answers the question, what if you had to exorcise the Zodiac killer? That would be scary, right? Why the Zodiac killer, you may ask. Apparently the Zodiac killer was a fan of The Exorcist, which I can’t imagine Blatty felt great about. But then The Exorcist III went on to be a favorite film of one Jeffrey Dahmer. Poor Blatty can’t catch a fucking break. He’s inspiring serial killers every which way he goes! As my girlfriend suggested, maybe it was time to pivot to nature writing, or a nice romantic comedy.

            Anyway, Exorcist III picks up fifteen years after the original. Father Dyer and Lieutenant Kinderman, survivors from the original, have a cute, curmudgeonly friendship where they go to the movies together. This part of the film reads like Exorcist fanfic, as Dyer and Kinderman are perpetually the most competent people in the room but also crack wise and go on bizarre rants about carp. The fun can’t last, however. Kinderman is investigating a string of brutal murders that carry the telltale sign of the Zodiac Killer, er, the Gemini Killer, who was executed fifteen years ago. But different people seem to be committing the murders, and the victims have esoteric connections to the exorcism of Regan MacNeil. Sure would be a shame if some vengeful demon had yeeted the Zodiac Killer’s spirit into Karras’ dying body so he could finish his dastardly deeds. Could an exorcism be required?

            Actually, there wasn’t supposed to be an exorcism, but the producers insisted, so Blatty gave in and tacked on the priestly spectacle. Towards the end of the film, Father Morning, an angelic-looking priest who hasn’t interacted with anyone else in the film thus far, shows up as if divinely summoned to attempt an exorcism, which doesn’t go great. It’s one of the film’s many tonal weirdnesses which is both unfortunate for Blatty’s directorial vision and so deliciously off-the-rails that my inner bad movie stan clapped her hands in glee.  

Old lady on the ceiling, what is your deal?

            Tonal jumble that it is, the movie also feels weirdly relevant. It predicts hits-to-be like Zodiac, Silence of the Lambs, and the Hannibal TV series, a new interest in police procedurals and detective stories with a tinge of horror that would break big in the ‘90s. I could see Exorcist-as-procedural working well; after all, The Exorcist is a thinly disguised medical procedural where the miracle cure is a literal miracle. But this movie is without the tasteful restraint and whiff of prestige that made those later films successful. Instead, it is pure batshittery, and reads as a parody of a subgenre that didn’t quite exist yet. The long, self-serious monologues of the Killer, played by the voice of Chucky no less, dance gleefully over the line of taste straight into the ridiculous. There is also a feverish dream sequence set in heaven, an old person crawling on the ceiling for no apparent reason, scenes where a statue of Jesus opens his eyes or a young woman sits unawares as shears are put to her throat until a family member snatches her out of harm’s way. Don’t get me wrong, there are parts of this movie that are genuinely creepy. A priest receives a haunting confession. An elderly woman describes hearing the voices of the dead on a nonexistent radio. And there are moments of genuine humor too, especially when Kinderman and Dyer are bantering. But the spine of this movie is sheer silliness, and the result is a mess, albeit a fascinating one.

            This is very much an old man kind of movie, relishing in Kinderman’s curmudgeonliness while his family and coworkers are relegated to the sidelines or to the butt of his jokes. People are angry at each other most of the time, as if it’s some kind of Michael Bay flick, and Kinderman occasionally hits Nicholas-Cage-in-the-Wicker-Man-remake levels with his spasms of rage. The stylish self-seriousness of the original film is intact, a link between the slick satanic prestige pictures of the past and the shiny horror-thrillers of the then-future. From the stairs to the brick buildings to the foggy shots of Georgetown, this is stylistically recognizable as an Exorcist film. And like the original Exorcist film, it is deeply invested in its authority figure protagonists, who it holds in highest esteem, especially the departed Karras who becomes a tortured saint.

            In other words, it’s plenty of what I didn’t care for in The Exorcist o.g. but filtered through the fever-dream nuttiness of that special horror sequel magic. Some reappraisals have called this a hidden masterpiece and, honestly, nah. But a trashterpiece that accidentally heightens the absurdity of the original, foreshadows a dawning subgenre while carrying it to the brink of madness and back, and hits the sweet spot of earnest self-seriousness and all-out silliness. Yeah, it's worth checking out.

Demons love to desecrate churches, you see 

Vibecheck: The original, without the demon face, with more old people and more dream sequences.

Scare Factor: There are some good creepy moments and a justifiably iconic jump scare but, overall, too confusing to be that scary.

Pairs Well With: Any of the above-mentioned films-to-follow, or tbh Brad Dourif’s Gemini Killer gave me big Silent Night Deadly 2 vibes. It’ll be the battle of the exposition eyebrows. Garbage day indeed.

But how gay is it?: Aside from the much-lauded bromance and the usual queer energy of bodily possession, Blatty’s priests are, and remain, super homoerotic.

Girlfriend’s Corner: So, storytime: recently I became close friends with a woman who works as a professional film and TV critic. This friend and I have bonded, among other things, over our shared love of artsy horror movies, as a means to help us (as, like, broadly-defined humans) understand our own fears, as a medium of transgressive expression, and more than anything as a unique lens to understand our shared experience as trans women who, while transitioning relatively early, still were forced to spend our entire childhoods pretending to be boys.

Now, one trope my friend is very interested in viz a viz this last point is possession. I myself am ambivalent about the trope, with exceptions (Eggers’ The Witch being a big one), but my friend has a point: in a certain way that we (trans people) try not to talk about too much around cis people who might misunderstand us, transition does kind of feel like some entity from a different place taking control of your body and mind until the person you once were has withered away into a half-memory. (Of course, in this case, the “entity” is the person we’ve always known ourselves to be and have been forced to repress by systemic transmisogyny, and the “host” is the hollow construction of masculine tics we put together to try and cope in a world that hates trans women.)

It might come as no surprise, then, that my friend adores The Exorcist, a movie I am thoroughly lukewarm toward. In it, she sees a compelling, terrifying, visceral possession narrative rendered thoughtfully and artfully in a distinctive style, and she sees a parallel to the experience of trans women being forced to go through male puberty: a twelve-year-old girl suddenly becomes inhabited by a grotesque creature that does horrible things to her body and poisons her mind against itself. And while I found the characterization in the movie rather thin and recoiled against its very traditionally Catholic sense of morality that sees human sexuality as itself inherently perverse, I do think I need to come back to The Exorcist some time; my friend has convinced me that there’s a reading out there that could give it some real value and resonance to me.

Anyway, none of that means I want to watch The Exorcist III, a movie that sounds like the toilet. I don’t want to risk my taste in film overlapping with Jeffrey Dahmer’s, and it seems so deeply uninteresting. I am glad I spent my afternoon yelling online instead.