Heretic

Father Merrin himself was afraid that he’d slip into admiration. 

Surely it'd be sacrilegious to prefer Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) to its 1990 George C. Scott-helmed follow-up, let alone the legendary 1973 predecessor. Exorcist II's effectiveness relies so heavily on the primacy of the transformation from the first film, a genre-defining performance-effects cocktail which it reproduces so shoddily by comparison–Linda Blair didn’t want to don demon make-up again, but there’s no excuse for the botched voiceover–the entire concept of a 4-years-later sequel is nearly DOA. It omits mention of Damian but retcons all sorts of out-there backstory about Father Merris’s time in equatorial Africa, strange at best compared to the prior film’s more measured treatment of the Assyrian/Babylonian mythology by way of Iraqi excavation prologue. The entire show hinges on spec-fic technology that a teenage, tap-dancing Regan now uses for “synchronized hypnosis" which allows everyone else to not only meet her demon but learn its name all along was... Pazuzu.

Ultimately: it is so laser-focused in the development of a more grandiose metaphor about human connectivity, in both its spiritual and technological valences, that I don’t give a shit. One of the more enduring gothic symbols is that of the swarm–the particular chaos of tens of thousands of insects working towards a paradoxical singularity, the hive as metaphor for the solipsistic multitude of any one human’s mind, as simultaneous referent for proliferated, embedded worlds both ontologically higher–the hive of the world, teeming with individuals–and lower–the hive of a single idea. It is perhaps our most tempting visual association for schizophrenia, psychosis, internal disarray which horrific media has long specialized in externalizing via limitless genre permutations, a readymade picture of fear actualized. Your thought process during an anxiety attack; a panicked crowd of strangers. 

Exorcist II stages its newly-telepathic characters as enduring such a swarm abstracted: their own locust thoughts brush up against the wings of others', and the shape, the personalities, of both become absorbed into something more singular all while they do battle with a demon whose powers are appropriately figured through literal insect swarms. In contrast to the more localized & spartan settings of its Georgetown bedroom predecessor, the film reckons with this exact kind of crowded modernity: planes, trains, automobiles, and skyscrapers, the fluorescent reflections, streetlights, payphones, and other electronic byways of an increasingly connected, hive-like modern world whose teeming infrastructure, while trivializing Biblical plagues ages ago, have resulted in fresh chaos emulating them: the stoic image of the first film’s famous streetlight shot is itself supplanted here by a violent car accident–too many people beelining for the same place, the same idea. Against this backdrop Regan herself evolves into a particularly modern saint, one who might break the panic induced by the locust mind of interconnectivity, the rare person who retains direction after the winds have brushed her. 

Now: Exorcist director William Friedkin himself in 2019 called this film ”the worst piece of shit I've ever seen. It's a fucking disgrace.” That's an ostensibly off-handed quip about a 40-minute pre-release slice of the end product which the hurricane winds of the internet have nonetheless swept up into a Wikipedia footnote mention for "The Worst Films of All Time," digital detritus likely reproduced so endlessly off- & online that it's remained gospel. Of the 37,000 users that have rated Exorcist II on Letterboxd–an invaluable film diary tool which itself masquerades so successfully as a buzzing social platform that it’s becoming more prone to hivemind shitposting & trend-chasing every day–barely a tenth have given it three stars or above, placing it far below horror films that are both overrated (like 2019's Doctor Sleep) and underrated (like 2018's Unfriended: Dark Web). I’ll continue to go to bat for E2 director John Boorman going forward–go watch Zardoz–but you don’t even have to take my word for it when it comes to his own taking up of our mass incapacity for metaphor: your Flower Moon best buddy (& newest Letterboxd user) Martin Scorsese already claimed a few years back that Exorcist II surpasses the original. Actually locating the source of that quote will send you into a shifting cloud of regurgitative, SEO-optimized secondary sources which obscure the actual context of his thoughts almost entirely. 

What kind of locust are you?