The serious point is that Schrader did spend a fortune on Exorcist: The Beginning — $40 million of Morgan Creek’s money — and duly got sacked for his efforts. Or lack of them, depending on whose story you believe. Expecting a blockbuster brimming with shocks and blasphemy, the producers were horrified when Schrader presented them with an Exorcist film almost entirely devoid of foul sex and squeamish gore. They promptly gave the material to Renny (Die Hard 2) Harlin, and $35 million later released Exorcist: The Beginning to some of the most abysmal notices in cinema history. Barely six frames of Schrader’s movie survived.
Chastened by the reviews and possibly weary of the fight, Morgan Creek recently allowed Schrader to reassemble his final edit (financed from his own pocket) with a cynical eye on a possible DVD release. The Brussels premiere of Paul Schrader’s Exorcist: The Original Prequel is the first time it has been projected on screen, and expectations are sky-high. One of Hollywood’s most admired auteurs has won back the right to put his signature on the most controversial franchise in the horror canon, and the feeling in the auditorium as the opening credits roll is that he will poleaxe the dumb Goliaths who stole and silenced his thunder.
Frankly I can understand now why James G. Robinson, the head of Morgan Creek, inwardly shrieked when he first saw the movie in an LA editing suite in the autumn of 2003. Schrader’s film bears scant resemblance to the refrigerated thrills of William Friedkin’s terrifying 1973 masterpiece. The tone is philosophical, the fright moments are virtually nonexistent and the plot is decidedly grown-up.
The film hinges on the opening scene in 1944. Stellen Skarsgard plays a young Dutch priest called Father Merrin who is forced by a Nazi officer to pick ten of his parishioners to be executed, or the entire village, including himself, will be shot. The finger-pointing is traumatic. The evil speaks for itself. Three years later, the guilty ex-priest has reinvented himself as a dour archaeologist. He discovers a pristine 5th-century Christian church in the Kenyan desert and below it an ancient crypt with all the trappings of satanic worship.
Merrin is profoundly baffled by the weird proximity of these temples of good and evil. The local tribesmen are deeply spooked. Hyenas howl. The small garrison of British soldiers develop twitchy fingers. And a meddling emissary from Rome (Gabriel Mann) strikes the match that inflames the supernatural tinder.
Key members of the cast inevitably go crazy. “Is it the work of Satan or the work of man?” ponders Skarsgard’s haunted Merrin, who Exorcist fans will know grows into the venerable Max von Sydow in Friedkin’s chiller. At the heart of the film is a struggle for the soul of another young child, this time a sick and deformed African boy who is possessed and creepily transformed into a picture of health while the locals take evil bites out of each other.
You can’t deny the novelty of thought: notably the idea that evil can “cure” a diseased boy as effectively as it can destroy a community. But I can’t see this film exciting the millions of Exorcist admirers with vested interests in soiling their underpants. And neither, crucially and controversially, did Morgan Creek.
Father Merrin’s Catholic crisis of faith is as slippery as Graham Greene’s. The duel with the Devil in the church bowels, complete with polystyrene wall masks and wobbly gargoyles, is as stilted as Paradise Lost. And the seminal twist — that you can revisit the black choices of your past and make them better — fabulously backfires when Merrin succumbs to Satan’s temptation and is thrown back into the horror of the first scene. This isn’t the box-office game plan that Morgan Creek had banked on in 2003. It’s an unsubtle cerebral nightmare.
What on earth did the company expect? Schrader is famously left of centre. His latest films (Affliction, about a failing cop; and Auto-Focus, a tragic-comic portrait of Bob Crane, a 1960s sitcom star and porn addict) are not mainstream joys. His scripts for Scorsese (Raging Bull and Taxi Driver) are some of the most uneasy films yet made. Feel-good is not in his vocabulary, and neither is the word sensation.
I put it to Schrader that his Exorcist prequel isn’t a horror film at all. He agrees. “Maybe that was the root problem,” he gasps, lighting up a cigarette. The 60-year-old director is short, stocky and grizzled, and so are his answers. He is delightfully bullish about his film, but the wounds of rejection are still fresh. He winces away from some questions. “No matter what the cause, getting fired is not good for your reputation or your selfesteem,” he sighs.
It all looked rosy enough when the Exorcist prequel fell into his lap shortly after John Frankenheimer died in 2002. It didn’t seem to matter to Morgan Creek that Schrader hadn’t made a major studio picture for 20 years. “When they come calling, that’s a very seductive package you’ve got there. Big distribution, big budget, big advertising. If you have been in the independent world as long as I have, that’s very attractive.
“But as Stellen (Skarsgard) said at the press conference ‘You hire Paul Schrader and you wonder what the f*** happened to your film’.”
Actually, what Skarsgard said via recorded message is: “I wondered why they would hire a director like Schrader, who is known for his psychological films, to do a big-budget franchise movie with me in the lead? I wonder what their motives were, and what they were thinking? Maybe they weren’t thinking at all. I hope it’s f****** brilliant.”
Skarsgard is the best thing about the film, and the only significant actor to survive Renny Harlin’s knife. It meant more tortuous months on set for the Swedish actor but at least he was paid. Did Schrader have any idea of the problems ahead?
“I always knew there would be blood on the floor. I just didn’t know it would be all mine. But I never lost faith. What worried me most about Renny’s film is that it was going to be sort of good. In fact I went to see it with William Blatty (the author of The Exorcist) and the worse it got the better I felt. He, conversely, just felt worse. By the end of the film he was cursing and yelling in the lobby. I was smiling saying, ‘Maybe my film has a chance after all’. The great battle now is to see if it can assume some sort of life.”
I’m curious about The Exorcist’s strange and thorny grip on Schrader’s life. He was hugely religious as a young man, and the grey blur between moral rectitude and shocking depravity is a hallmark of his best work. In my view, The Original Prequel is a triumph of patience and guts over possessed accountants. It has a lyricism quite foreign to the visceral genre of the franchise. The fact that Schrader is in Brussels (mixing deadly drinks) with his editor and cast is very much a sign of their faith in him, rather than anyone’s faith in the film. If there’s a magnetic north to this unlikely quest, it lies with William Friedkin’s original. Schrader at least has the grace to acknowledge it.
“Like everyone else I’m a great fan of the Friedkin film. I’ve got the same sort of paranormal anxiety that everyone has occasionally. I’m not as religious as I was in my youth, but I’m still a churchgoer (Episcopalian) and I really do believe that Satan is here. One of the things that attracted me to Caleb Carr and William Wisher’s script for my film is that it didn’t try to play in the same arena as the original. The conventions have been copied and parodied so much that there’s almost no way to touch it. The metaphor is extraordinary: God and the Devil in the same room arguing over the body of a 13-year-old girl. It doesn’t come much purer than that.”
