Near the end of David Kittredge's documentary Boorman and the Devil, 85-year-old filmmaker John Boorman says, "I think that my failure is probably to be overambitious in the films that I have made. I am always trying a bit too hard."

Delivered in a calm, thoughtful, measured manner, those words land with particular force and poignancy given that the subject of Kittredge's documentary is Boorman's widely disparaged 1977 film Exorcist II: The Heretic, which very nearly crushed his burgeoning career under the combined weight of blistering critical notices and audience derision. Of course, fifty years of hindsight provides a lot of perspective, and what was once universally rejected is now the subject of a feature-length documentary that played at the Venice Film Festival. I should note, however, that Boorman and the Devil is not a full-throated defense of Exorcist II. Rather, it plays as a detailed history of its production and reception, framing it as a daring, possibly hubristic, attempt to produce something blazingly original within the complexities of a shifting Hollywood studio system that was on its way to abandoning unique, challenging, auteur-driven experiments in favor of audience-driven blockbusters.

To tell this story, Kittredge, whose only other feature was the low-budget indie Pornography: A Thriller (2009), secured interviews with a number of significant contributors to the film: Boorman, actors Louise Fletcher and Linda Blair, co-writer Rospo Pallenberg, Steadicam operator Garrett Brown, second assistant director Victor Hsu, first assistant cameraman Ronald L. Vargas Jr., and Melissa Skoff, who worked as Boorman's secretary. He also gets perspective from film critics Bilge Ebiri and Stephanie Zacharek; directors Karyn Kusama, Joe Dante, and Mike Flanagan; and film historians Joseph McBride and Jim Hemphil. Interestingly, at the end of the film, Kittredge poses to each of these contributors the "one question [he's] never been able to fully answer: Is Exorcist II: The Heretic a good movie?" There is a wide range of responses, from awkward, qualified praise, to at least one outright "no," to a determined assertion that it is a masterpiece. That is the kind of film Exorcist II is.

Kittredge has clearly done his homework, and he goes through the film's history in workman-like fashion. He unfortunately succumbs to the current documentary trend of using clever-ish animations to illustrate stories being told by the interviewees that are almost entirely unnecessary, but otherwise structures the film around the telling of a great yarn by those who were there. He first gives us the outline of Boorman's career from the early 1960s until the late '70s, which included both major hits (1972's Oscar-nominated Deliverance) and disasters (1974's science fiction oddity Zardoz, which deserves its own documentary), and then moves into the unique circumstances that led to decision to make a sequel to William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973), which at the time was one of the most successful Hollywood films ever made. Boorman's decision to take the sequel in a completely unique direction, discarding virtually everything thematic, narrative, and stylistic associated with Friedkin's film, was both brave and foolhardy. We get a lot of great anecdotes about the film, including Louise Fletcher talking about the late actor Richard Burton walking off the set at exactly 6:00 every day per his contract, regardless of where they were in shooting. Boorman gets the lion's share of screen time in talking about the production, but others sketch in all kinds of colorful information that help us understand why the film turned out be such a glorious mess.

Boorman admits that, prior to his experience with Exorcist II, he had never really considered what the audience wanted, which is why he felt so free to take the film in such a decidedly offbeat and unexpected direction. Instead of making another spiritual horror film, he made a quasi-mystical psychological epic that replaced realism with artifice and the spiritual-scientific divide with some kind of bastardized merging of the two. At the time, it was all but impossible to appreciate the film's accomplishments against its failures, and if Boorman and the Devil is to be commended for something, it is the manner in which Kittredge is able to hold those two opposing forces in some kind of balance. Those who find Exorcist II to be an abject failure will probably not revise their opinions, but they will likely find more to admire in Boorman's daring than they had previous conceded (I place myself squarely in this camp). At the same time, Kittredge doesn't pander to the film's revisionist admirers who want to reclaim every aspect of it as masterful and misunderstood.

Boorman and the Devil also works quite powerfully as a portrait of the pains of artistry and rejection. Boorman clearly suffered enormously in the wake of the film's rejection critically and commercially, such that he desperately tried to "fix" it by hastily re-editing it and changing the ending while it was still in theatrical release (something that Michael Cimino attempted to do three years later when his magnum opus Heaven's Gate, a studio-produced disaster for which Exorcist II feels like a warm-up, bombed with critics). Listening to Boorman, nearly five decades later, talking of his experience and recognizing in his voice and his eyes that he still feels the sting of rejection for what he felt was a triumph will be a deeply emotional experience for anyone who cares about art, successful or otherwise.

Copyright © 2026 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © Yellow Veil Films