31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 14: Exorcist: The Beginning

2004.

The only thing worse than making a flop is making a flop twice. Many movies are only released after extensive reshoots, it's very common. But I cannot think of many examples of a studio throwing out an entire finished film and starting over from scratch. Even the notorious case of the two Justice League cuts were still extensive revisions of just one movie. However, with Exorcist: The Beginning, Warner Bros made a movie, took it out to the trash, made a different movie, and then ended up releasing both versions within a year of each other.

And then they both flopped. Congrats, you failed twice.

A question that probably should have been asked before making any Exorcist prequel is whether this franchise was still viable in the mid-2000s at all. These days The Exorcist from 1973 is still a well-respected classic. But I remember back when I was a kid, it had a strong reputation as the “scariest movie OF ALL TIME”. Warner Bros re-released The Exorcist to theaters in 2000 hoping for a big impact. Unsurprisingly in retrospect, it did not compete well with more expensive, slicker, and gorier horror movies of the time like House on Haunted Hill or Final Destination. These days, I rarely hear The Exorcist called anything like “the GREATEST horror movie ever made”. It seems like The Shining has overtaken it in terms of prestige.

Still, the mid-2000s were a time obsessed with digging up old IP, so why not do a prequel? Warner Bros and the production company, Morgan Creek, decided to make a movie about the backstory of the titular exorcist, Father Lankester Merrin. That version, which was released in 2005 as Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, is not the movie we’re discussing today. That’s a movie directed by Paul Shrader. Shrader’s movie though was thought to be too cerebral, not bloody enough, and frankly too boring for the studio's tastes. So, they hired Renny Harlin to start the production over from scratch, making 2004’s Exorcist: The Beginning.

Admittedly, this is very confusing, we have two Exorcist prequels, with the one made first coming out second. I cannot think of any other time in history something like this has happened. Let me know though.

Both movies have roughly the same plot. Stellan Skarsgård plays Father Merrin, one of the few cast members to stay the same through both shooting schedules. Both versions are set in Kenya during the British colonialism era, where an ancient church is uncovered with an evil past. Both movies have themes of crises of faiths, ethnic violence, and of course, demonic possession. Only Renny Harlin’s movie is much dumber, much blunter, and I’d say, it’s the better one. I heard that Dominion was the better one, and no. Sometimes stupid is better.

I watched both Exorcist prequels back-to-back out of curiosity. Watching them, it feels like Morgan Creek was just setting money on fire. These decisions make no sense to me. Harlin’s movie uses none of the footage of Schrader’s. He reshot entire scenes that play identical roles in both films. Many sets are re-used, but many are not. For example, they built the ancient church interiors twice. These are not cheap sets, they’ve very elaborate, but none of the props are re-used. Harlin’s version also has worse production value. Paul Schrader uses a lot of dolly shots and crane shots. I guess those were unavailable for the second shoot, so Harlin’s movie is more static and frankly worse-looking. And it’s still better than Dominion.

Exorcist: The Beginning in general goes for the dumber and grosser option every chance it gets. It opens on a huge ancient battlefield where hundreds of soldiers have been crucified upside-down. That's the tone the movie wants through its entire 1 hour 54 minute running time. The Devil makes a man’s face rot away. A little boy gets eaten alive by hyenas. The final reveal of the final boss demon is a straight call-back to possessed Regan from the 1973 movie, with the same facial cuts. This possessed woman (Izabella Scorupco) mocks Father Merrin by opening her shirt and dry-humping him. She becomes a Deadite from The Evil Dead, and who doesn’t love Deadites?

I’d also say, that while Dominion is trying to be classier, it just isn’t. These are both exploitation movies that feature stillborn babies covered in maggots. Who are we kidding? Dominion has entire classroom of children murdered. Sorry, that's awful, and unnecessary. Exorcist: The Beginning is never that miserable.

It is fascinating that after Exorcist II: The Heretic was so widely reviled for being too weird, both Exorcist prequels reused ideas from that movie. Why does the Exorcist franchise, which started out with a wealthy White family in Georgetown, keep returning to Africa? Neither movie comes up with an answer.

Race is real problem in both of these films. Father Merrin has a dark backstory where SS officers murdered his congregation in occupied Europe. To these prequels' credit, they cleverly show that the position of British soldiers in Kenya is very similar to Nazis, both employing arbitrary reprisals as "justice". However, these movies also treat the Africans as exoticized mindless savages. It is really telling that both movies have a Nazi’s German non-diegetically translated into spoken English for the audience, but no African language is even given English subtitles. War criminals are maneuvered to be less foreign to us than innocent Kenyans.

Still, I can forgive Exorcist: The Beginning more, just because it has far less ambition to be anything other than dumb. It has shower scenes. It has jump scares. It is so stupid one actor flubs a line and says the evil church was built in “5 AD”, before Jesus even went through puberty. Nobody much cared to be anything other than lowest common denominator nonsense, and there are fun points. We got bug demons and a face melting and cleavage. That’s good enough. The final battle takes place in the cave where Satan fell to Earth after his war in Heaven. Why not?

I could imagine some hypothetical best possible movie that uses the strengths from both versions. If Morgan Creek had just done reshoots and added gore, a much better Exorcist prequel could have been made. But that never happened. So until some fan-edit comes out to stitch these films together, Exorcist: The Beginning is the one to see. I'm glad that Dominion did not stay in the trash forever, but it loses this one.

Next time we travel to 2005, the year of Family Guy crawling out of the grave thanks to DVD sales, "lovely lady lumps", and our next movie, House of Wax.