A Clear Invitation to the Dance

The Exorcist marks its fiftieth anniversary this year, and while I’m sure Warner has plans to roll out its 4K upgrade of William Friedkin’s Catholic chiller just in time for Halloween, Shout! Factory is stoking the hellfires with this week’s drop of The Exorcist III, the novelist William Peter Blatty’s own run at directing an Exorcist picture.

Not that Blatty wasn’t already a filmmaker in his own right by the time he started shooting this – though it went into production as Legion, the title of the novel on which it’s based, and which itself was Blatty’s attempt to continue the story of The Exorcist a decade or so after the publication of his bestselling 1971 novel. Legion became The Exorcist III pretty much the moment 20th Century Fox picked it up – which led to production company Morgan Creek commissioning an entirely new subplot featuring Nicol Williamson as a priest called Father Morning who turns to save George C. Scott’s Lt. Kinderman with a climactic exorcism. The logic was airtight at the time: How do you write a sequel to The Exorcist and not have an exorcism in it?

The answer, of course, is that Blatty hadn’t written a sequel to The Exorcist, not really; on the page, Legion is more of a fellow traveler, a story that unfolds in the wreckage of the lives destroyed by the events in Georgetown all those years ago. The MacNeils are gone, the investigation is more or less closed, and Kinderman and Father Dyer – now played by Scott and Ed Flanders, replacing the absent Lee J. Cobb and William J. O’Malley –  are the only ones left, crabbing about movies and the kids today as if they’re old war buddies. And when Dyer is murdered, most spectacularly, by someone who appears to be replicating the spectacular murders of the long-dead Gemini Killer, Kinderman sets out to catch the copycat and bring him to justice. How hard could it be?

It always seemed odd that Blatty should be so successful as a horror writer; like George A. Romero, he was an old-school yukster at heart, fond of shaggy-dog stories and absurdist jokes delivered with a Borscht Belt patter. His books are filled with goofy philosophical digressions and a fondness for eccentricity; the title of his 1996 novel Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing sums up his personality perfectly. He could conjure a nightmare if he wanted to, but I always got the sense he would have been happy telling stories in a piano bar somewhere. His directorial debut, The Ninth Configuration – an adaptation of his roundabout 1966 novel Twinkle Twinkle, “Killer” Kane – feels a lot like that; surely The Exorcist III, by virtue of its pedigree, would be a little more serious.

Except that it isn’t, and that’s why I love it so. Even though both The Exorcist and John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic both cast long shadows, in their ways, Blatty managed to make The Exorcist III a singularly weird experience, a movie that can contain one of the most frightening scenes in the history of the horror genre, cameos from Larry King, C. Everett Koop, Fabio, Patrick Ewing and The Lennon Sisters – I had to look them up – and somehow also find room for a monologue in which Kinderman shares his dread of the fish his wife is keeping in their apartment bathtub. And that’s before we get to the real hook of the picture, which is that Jason Miller’s Father Damien Karras survived the events of the first film – sort of – and is somehow connected to the resurgent Gemini murders.

That’s where the real drama begins, as Kinderman confronts a Karras who isn’t Karras, and Blatty swaps out Miller for Brad Dourif, who gives one of those go-for-broke performances that either defines an actor forever or haunts him until his dying day. It works brilliantly, if you were wondering, and the movie turns into a bracing, beautifully written debate between Kinderman and not-Karras on the nature of good and evil – a conversation Blatty had clearly been having with himself for his entire adult life.

We also find out what happened to Karras at the end of the first movie, and learn quite a bit about the real Gemini, and all the while people are still being murdered in inexplicable, horrible ways … but the movie is very much about this dialogue, and the question of what it takes to walk with faith through a world where God may not exist, but cruelty and demons incontrovertibly do. It’s the same question Blatty was asking the first time around, and he’s no less sure of the answer.

Is this the best Exorcist movie? It sure feels that way when the credits are rolling. And weirdly enough, that studio-mandated exorcism sequence does give the film the climactic punch it lacks in Blatty’s original version, reconstructed in 2016 as Legion and included on previous Blu-rays from Shout! Factory in North America and Arrow Video in the UK. Blatty’s version tweaked the novel’s conclusion, adding a coup de grace that gives both Kinderman and Karras the closure they’ve earned; the theatrical cut keeps that, but adds a layer of phantasmagorical wildness that might not have been Blatty’s idea but feels organic to the plot: It’s one last attempt by whoever’s pulling the Gemini’s strings to drive Kinderman – an avowed atheist –into ultimate despair. Of course it’s over the top.

Still, if you prefer to watch Legion it’s right here on its own Blu-ray disc, the 2K restoration supported by an audio conversation between Blatty and supplements producer Michael Felsher and Felsher’s comprehensive documentary Death Be Not Proud. The 4K restoration of Exorcist III gets an UHD platter all its own, and that new restoration is also included in 2K on a Blu-ray that includes the wealth of archival extras included on Shout’s 2016 special edition – mostly pulled from Fox’s marketing department, along with a few minutes of deleted scenes and bloopers.

As for the restoration, like most of Shout’s work it’s an excellent upgrade, with the additional resolution bringing fine detail in exterior locations and the Gemini’s cell in equal measure, and newly restored 5.1 and 2.0 DTS-MA soundtracks that respect the original mix by not going too far over the top until it’s absolutely necessary.

Speaking of which, that scene looks absolutely glorious in 4K, the grain intensifying as the zoom speeds up in an absolutely skin-crawling fashion. For a few glorious minutes, it’s as if Brian De Palma made an Exorcist movie, and Blatty’s ability to stage and execute the scare remains miraculous. Or devilish, I suppose. It’s hard to tell sometimes.

Fun fact: All four Exorcist films are now available in multiple versions: Friedkin did the whole Version You’ve Never Seen thing with the original film for a 2000 release, John Boorman reworked Exorcist II in the ’70s while it was in its initial release, and of course there are two entirely different prequels, Paul Schrader’s Dominion and Renny Harlin’s do-over Exorcist: The Beginning, about which very little need be said besides “well, those are also movies”. I assume we’ll see them all roll back into circulation as the Exorversarry draws near, but … well, those are also movies. Gimme the original flavor on one and three, and I’m good.

Oh, and speaking of prequels ...

I also wanted to throw in a quick plug for the first season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which Paramount rolled out onto Blu-ray last week in a very fine three-disc set. You may recall I wrote about the show last summer, but the Blu-ray has some really charming special features – produced by Tracy Martinson of Shoot the Moon Creative Group – that shouldn’t be left uncelebrated.

Fans will appreciate the galleries of deleted scenes – ten minutes’ worth, for the penultimate episode All Those Who Wander! – and a convivial commentary track on the pilot from creator Akiva Goldsman and star Anson Mount. The inclusion of the complete original Trek episode Balance of Terror (restored in HD, with the original visual effects intact as far as I could determine) on disc three is a nice compliment to the Strange New Worlds season finale A Quality of Mercy, too.

But where the set really excels is in its featurettes, all of which capture the professional but slightly giddy vibe that radiates from the new series. Pike’s Peek is basically a home video shot by Mount as the once and future Captain Pike gets ready to start production in Toronto – quarantining with his partner and their dogs, checking out the set, goofing around with the producers and his co-stars and quietly freaking out that he’s being paid to be in a Star Trek show. It’s almost 20 minutes long, and I could have watched another hour without breaking a sweat.

Next up is World Building, a ten-minute deep dive into the workings of the massive AR stage that creates the background environments on set rather than in post-production. (They call it the Holodeck, of course.) Again, some might be bored by this but I couldn’t get enough of it; it’s fascinating to learn the system is synchronized to the camera rather than the cast, meaning the actors have to tune out the massive distraction of a shifting, tilting backdrop while performing – but it looks perfectly stable in the finished shot. Technology is awesome, people.

Exploring New Worlds is the centerpiece, a nearly hour-long run through the whole season, pivoting onto the appropriate cast member for each episode. Celia Rose Gooding gets the most screen time, since as a rookie cadet Uhura serves as the audience surrogate, but everyone gets a few minutes in the spotlight; Ethan Peck talks about how weird it was show up without his Vulcan prosthetics for a dream sequence in Spock Amok – which I continue to believe is a joke title that stuck – while Australian actor Jess Bush, who plays Nurse Chapel, is similarly wrong-looking without the character’s platinum-blonde wig and American accent.

There’s also a lot of detail about the way this series strives to recapture the spirit of Original Flavor Trek while updating the science and design for a contemporary audience. And finally, a brief blooper reel offers slips and flubs, but really serves to show us how much fun it is to be making this show. I want to go to there, I really do.

Disc One also opens with trailers for Paramount’s Star Trek: Discovery and Reacher Blus and 4Ks (in the case of Reacher, anyway) that makes their special features an essential element of the marketing pitch; I’m delighted to see studios realizing people still care about this stuff, especially us nerds.

The set is available in a standard package and in the very spiffy steelbook pictured above; the discs inside are identical. A 4K edition has already been announced for release May 16^th, and may well be worth the wait. But this set is plenty fine.

The Exorcist III is now available on 4K/Blu-ray combo from Shout! Factory. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Season One is available on Blu-ray from Paramount Home Entertainment. Hit it.

Also! Congratulations to Kevin Ahoy and Jeff Mather, winners of shiny Blu-ray copies of The Whale courtesy of Elevation Pictures. I'll be reaching out tomorrow to get your mailing addresses. And thanks to all of you for being subscribers, whichever tier you choose to support. It's good to know you're out there.

In Sunday’s paid edition: John Frankenheimer’s Black Sunday and Matthew Robbins’ Dragonslayer offer an intriguing window into the past. Subscribe, and find out how they do that!