John Boorman generously details the mortifying experience of making a sequel to 1973 hit horror The Exorcist, which was widely and unfairly panned

David Kittredge gives us a thoroughly enjoyable, detailed account of the catastrophe that was John Boorman’s 1977 film Exorcist II: The Heretic, the deeply ill-conceived and widely derided follow-up to The Exorcist, a bizarre but ambitious fantasy supernatural rhapsody, brimming with unintentional comedy. Yet it was visually bold and even brilliant, pioneering in its use of Steadicam; Linda Blair and Max von Sydow were persuaded to return; Richard Burton was cast as a troubled priest, and Louise Fletcher as a psychiatrist whose weird “mind-reader” contraption was entirely ridiculous. At the first film, people screamed. Now they screamed with laughter.

According to an apocryphal tale gleefully repeated by William Friedkin, director of the first film, the sequel resulted in an enraged audience one night turning round and booing Warner Brothers executives in the back row of the cinema, and then chasing them out of the building and down the street. Boorman desperately recut the film with the sillier bits removed. But the damage was done.

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