“I had no allegiance”: the cursed Paul Schrader movie smothered by its own ambition
At no point had Paul Schrader ever offered even the slightest hint that he was either interested or capable of being a hired gun in a major studio movie, which makes it equal parts fitting and cruel that when he finally bit that bullet, the end result was the biggest embarrassment of his career.
The concept of ‘twin films’ is a regular one that can largely be blamed on nothing but coincidence and two lightbulbs going off simultaneously in the heads of screenwriters on opposite sides of Hollywood, but the debacle that blighted Warner Bros’ desire to exhume the remains of The Exorcist franchise was something else entirely.
There hadn’t been a new entry in the spine-tingling series for over 20 years, and with good reason. William Friedkin’s original was a seminal moment for mainstream horror, becoming the genre’s first ‘Best Picture’ nominee at the Academy Awards and the highest-grossing R-rated release of all time.
As is almost always the case with horror, though, the law of diminishing returns quickly set in. However, the lure of the almighty dollar is impossible for any executive to resist for too long, with Schrader a surprising pick to helm a brand new story that functioned as a prequel to the 1973 classic.
With the right material, Schrader has proven himself to be an accomplished and talented filmmaker, but The Exorcist was not that material. Once shooting had been completed and the film entered post-production, the powers that be quickly decided that they’d hired the wrong man for the job.
Two Schrader-endorsed cuts were rejected, another editor was brought in without his involvement, and the entire thing was eventually scrapped. In a remarkable development, even by the industry’s unpredictable standards, the original director was removed entirely and replaced by Renny Harlin, who spent 12 weeks shooting what was effectively an entirely different movie, with only minimal footage and a couple of actors held over from the Schrader era.
After all that, Harlin’s Exorcist: The Beginning barely made a dent at the box office and took a battering from critics. Trying to squeeze every last penny out of an endeavour that had already failed miserably twice over, Warner Bros eventually released Schrader’s Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, which was marginally better but still crap.
Shortly after his version’s release, Schrader reflected on the “enormous amount of baggage” that came with tackling The Exorcist, which he was determined wouldn’t weigh him down. “The kind of baggage that would scare off a number of other directors,” he said to Alex Simon. “Because you can’t recreate The Exorcist, and you can’t compete with it.”
To his credit, Schrader admitted he’d “never been afraid of trying things other people say are impossible,” but his reach far exceeded his grasp on this occasion. “I had no allegiance to the Friedkin film,” he suggested in what was originally intended to be a positive but ended up as a massive negative once the people funding the production realised that what they wanted was actually a legacy story that ticked a certain number of IP-adjacent boxes, not an auteur-driven work that happened to take place in the same world.
