Editor’s note: This review was originally published on October 24, 2025 out of the 2025 Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. Yellow Veil Pictures will release the film at NYC’s Quad Cinema on Friday, August 28, with expansion to follow.
David Kittredge delivers a dazzling reflection on the career of John Boorman in the documentary “Boorman and the Devil,” a robust reframing of the legendary director’s “Exorcist II: The Heretic,” as strange and poetic as the disastrous 1977 production itself.
These days, Boorman’s much-maligned sequel to William Friedkin’s supernatural masterpiece is best known as a string of memes. You’ve got James Earl Jones dressed as a giant locust. Linda Blair tap-dancing her demons away. Even the film’s core concept of The Synchronizer, a baffling psychic invention from the script that not only vexed audiences but forced unionized crew members to debate whether the thing was a light or a prop.
An embarrassment of riches for behind-the-scenes factoids, “Exorcist II: The Heretic” is a lot more than a punchline and as memorable as any real train wreck. If you already like the 1977 movie (and I’ll tell you right now, you should!), then “Boorman and the Devil” might not make the argument that it’s objectively good as fiercely as you’d like. But for those who hate “Exorcist II” or just haven’t seen it, Kittredge provides a sparkling on-ramp to New Hollywood history and Boorman’s astonishing career. (Note: The film also features IndieWire’s Jim Hemphill as a talking head.)
92 years old now, Boorman debuted in black-and-white with “Catch Us If You Can” (1965), before canoeing to the Oscars with Jon Voight in “Deliverance” (1972) and blasting off into batshit space with Sean Connery and a fur bikini for “Zardoz” (1974). At the top of his game when he was offered the chance to direct the original “Exorcist” over Friedkin, the British cinephile declined, and embraced his own original and audacious visions instead. By the time the studio system circled back to Boorman on “Exorcist II,” Hollywood was amid a revolutionary wave of sequels (h/t “The Godfather”), and Boorman saw putting the tortured interior of a traumatized character on screen too tempting to pass up.
Is that “the devil” this documentary’s title is referencing? Sequel ideas that are just too hard to make? Yes and no. “Boorman and the Devil” makes its mark by giving the imaginative and singular Boorman the opportunity to reflect on the near-biblical levels of regret and masochism that went into making any of his movies. Narrating when necessary, Kittredge correctly positions “Exorcist II” as an abject failure by normal industry metrics. It didn’t make its money back, and it certainly didn’t win any awards. But for those crafting it with Boorman, the nightmare is more painful and more poignant than that.
When Stanley Kubrick was offered this job, he declined on the basis that the only way to make a good “Exorcist” sequel was to add more violence and gore. In the new documentary, Boorman admits that Kubrick was right, but he also stands by the spiritual successor he wanted to make as an idea that might’ve soared without the pressure attached. To get the full effect, you’ll want to watch Boorman’s movie on your own. Still, Kittredge gives you all the basics you need to understand how this project spiraled so out of control. In the script (credited to William Goodhart but revised ad nauseam by Rospo Pallenberg, whose job on set was never clear), “Exorcist II” sees Regan MacNeil (Blair) go from being a possessed child battling a demon with her mother in Washington D.C. to a strong woman working with a psychiatrist and a new pair of detective-priests to vanquish the evil Pazuzu on her terms for good.
That’s a journey Boorman envisioned as more light than dark, but it lives on in him as the excruciating lesson that made him finally “respect” his audience. Despite Warner Bros. buying “Exorcist II” in a blind bidding war (meaning, they paid for it upfront based on a short description and the talent attached), the budget ballooned from $12.5 to $15 million, and the schedule slipped relentlessly. Far from Herzog in “Burden of Dreams,” Boorman didn’t fall victim to hubris. Rather, his dream dissipated into a torrent of mismatched expectations, bad luck, and fear that the project might really be cursed by an unseen force.
In 1977, Blair was among the highest-paid film actresses out there. She frequently came to set late, while her co-star Richard Burton (who had just divorced Elizabeth Taylor… for the second time) routinely left early. Opposite them, and fresh off her own Academy Awards success, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” star Louise Fletcher was always there on time, but admits in the doc that she didn’t really “get it.” Blair appears, too, offering critical context for where she was in her career and with keen insight into what it’s like for actors to star in movies both notorious and successful.
Illnesses and accidents impacted the cast and crew of “Exorcist II: The Heretic” in a menacing and inexplicable cycle. Most notably, Boorman went to the hospital when sand from one of the soundstage’s got into his lungs and he contracted a case of San Joaquin Valley fever. Production stopped for five weeks, but that was only one plague. From Blair nearly falling off a building to marketing problems that spread nationwide, “Exorcist II: The Heretic” almost seemed to punish Boorman for his talent and enthusiasm. Speaking to Kittredge, he still embraces the unexpected and troubled result as some of his most beautiful work. Still, Boorman agrees “Exorcist II” would have been better without Friedkin’s ghost attached. (Oh, he was alive when this came out. He was just madder than Lucifer the sequel got made.)
Particularly incisive points made by contemporary directors, like Mike Flanagan and Karyn Kusama, give Kittredge’s thesis about Boorman a philosophical leaning that ought to be mandatory viewing for any director facing their own self-made circles of hell. Even better, “Boorman and the Devil” presents Kittredge as his own kind of agonized creator. Romanticizing old anecdotes through illustration and packing in details, the documentarian pours his soul into Boorman’s for a possession that’s warmly and memorably religious. It’s a disappointing shock to learn this title doesn’t have distribution after months on the festival circuit, but the curse of “Exorcist II” wouldn’t have it any other way.
Grade: B+
“Boorman and the Devil” premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival and last screened at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.
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