Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist

With the verdict swiftly in on Renny Harlin’s ‘Exorcist: The Beginning’ – to quote the immortal words of Bill Hicks: “piece of shit, say it and walk away” – the clamouring began for Paul Schrader’s original version to be released. Only to meet with a perplexing degree of critical indifference when it finally debuted on DVD under the unfortunately clunky title ‘Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist’.

Despite one essential (but minor) problem, ‘Dominion’ is far superior film to ‘Beginning’. The performances are generally better (Skarsgård has real gravitas in Schrader’s film whereas he sleepwalks through Harlin’s), the pace is more measured, the philosophical enquiry into the nature of good and evil is more pronounced (which isn’t to say it’s on the level of the original – it just seems more pronounced in ‘Dominion’ because it isn’t there at all in ‘Beginning’) and the exorcism is creepily effective and certainly the second best in the whole series.

Let’s clear up the matter of that one essential problem. Special effects. Mercifully, the budgetary limitations that denied Schrader a proper stab at post-production visual effects doesn’t debase the exorcism sequence. That could have been the film’s death knell. What it does spoil is some shots of wild dogs menacing Merrin as he goes to the aid of a leper shunned by the other tribesmen. Merrin looks properly fearful but sadly what he’s reacting to resembles some crazy version of Basil Brush with a crack problem and a grudge against humanity. Elsewhere, what should have been a heavenly radiance illuminating the firmament during the exorcism, calming the bloodlust between the British troops and the indigenous populace and bringing a traumatised and suicidal character back from the brink, just looks cheap and twinkly.

Schrader’s use of this device piles on the sanctimony a little too much, suggesting divine intervention. It’s one thing to have a priest – a servant of God; a vessel for HisHis will – casting out Satan, it’s something else to hint that He is opening the heavens and giving Merrin a bit of a helping hand. So much of ‘Dominion’ revolves around Merrin’s crisis of faith. Merrin has to come back to belief, to faith, himself.

Still, better this and the cooling of tensions between soldiers and tribesmen than the horrible blood ‘n’ guts for the sake of it massacre that blights Harlin’s film. And better still the nature of exactly who is possessed.

SPOILER ALERT

Forget the cheap emotional manipulation of Harlin’s version: it’s a little boy who’s possessed! No, it’s Merrin’s would-be girlfriend! In ‘Dominion’, we’re introduced to Cheche (Billy Crawford), a leper in his late teens shunned by the tribespeople for his deformities. His face is twisted into a perpetual grimace. He resembles somewhat the death mask that haunts Karras’s dream in the first film. No surprises that he becomes possessed. But ‘Dominion’ isn’t about surprises – it can’t be; the perameters in which it can operate were established by Blatty and Friedkin thirty years previously – it’s about inevitability.

Merrin is concerned with Cheche’s salvation; Rachel is convinced he can be healed medically. His possession seems to mock their hubris. Particularly since Merrin’s nemesis Pazuzu, making his first appearance, stage-manages the onset of his possession as a miracle. He heals rapidly and without a trace of scarring from an operation on his limbs. His deformities seem to disappear. He consents, at Father Francis (Gabriel Mann)’s behest, to baptism. Merrin, still in denial of his faith, leaves Francis to it. Francis quickly discovers that Cheche is possessed: his appearance transforms into an image of homo-erotic beauty. “I am perfection,” he sighs. His movements become graceful, panther-like, and finally supernatural as he glides into and out of sight.

Francis determines to perform an exorcism; but when he is brutally and terminally prevented from doing so, the task falls to Merrin.

SPOILERS END

There is something that ‘Beginning’, for all its faults, achieves to a small extent; and ‘Dominion’ realises perfectly: for the climactic exorcism to work dramatically and contextually (the context being the dynamic established in Friedkin’s film), it can’t just be about a demon being cast out of a possessed individual’s body; there also has to be an inherent and narratively established antagonism between exorcist and demon which goes beyond their immediate differences of theological affiliation.

“He will lie,” Merrin warns Karras in ‘The Exorcist’, “but he will mix his lies with the truth.” ‘Dominion’ (and ‘Beginning’ much less effectively but at least Harlin picks up on it) demonstrates that Merrin has learned this through bitter personal experience. The demon attacks Merrin using his complicity in Nazi reprisals, his wavering faith, his sexual attraction to Rachel. There is doubt in Merrin’s soul and the demon hammers away at it. Merrin looks genuinely tormented, genuinely frightened during Schader’s account of the exorcism. This is his testing ground; this defines whether Merrin loses his faith altogether, or whether it strengthens. This is where the Father Merrin of ‘The Exorcist’ is forged.

“You have made an enemy of the demon,” one of the tribesmen tells Merrin at the end of ‘Dominion’. “He will pursue you now.” Think of that blood-curdling roar from the upstairs room of the MacNeil house as von Sydow arrives: “MERRRRRRIIIIINNNN!!!”

‘Dominion’, not Harlin’s weak revamp, is the true beginning.

Exorcist: The Beginning

Nearly a decade and a half between ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ and ‘The Exorcist III’. Nearly as long again between ‘Exorcist III’ and ‘Exorcist: The Beginning’.

In 2002 Morgan Creek lined up ‘Exorcist: Dominion’, with John Frankenheimer slated to direct. The script was by William Wisher and Caleb Carr and took as its starting point the throwaway line in ‘The Exorcist’ that Merrin once performed an exorcism in Africa – “something to do with a young boy”. Their script was a mood piece: reflective and sombre. It detailed Merrin’s abandoning of the priesthood after being forced into complicity in a Nazi atrocity in the war; his crisis of faith; and his encounter with ancient evil in a buried church. Liam Neeson was onboard to play the younger Merrin.

Then Frankenheimer fell ill and died shortly afterwards. Paul Schrader stepped into the breach at the eleventh hour. Stellan Skarsgård replaced Neeson. French actress Clara Bellow was cast as Rachel, the doctor Merrin strikes up a friendship – and very nearly a romantic relationship with – at the archaeological site where he comes face to face with his otherworldly nemesis. British character actors par excellence Julian Wadham and Ralph Brown played the Major and Sergeant Major of a British outpost whose colonialist views and heavy-handed presence exacerbate tensions with the indigenous population.

When Schrader tendered his cut of the film, Morgan Creek voiced their unhappiness. They wanted something faster paced; something scarier. They permitted Schrader one preview, denied him sufficient resources to complete special effects work and used the negative audience response to have him ousted. In late 2003 the studio announced that an extra budget was being raised for reshoots. Renny Harlin was on board to direct the additional material.

A few months later, however, the official line was that Schrader’s film was being junked in its entirety and was being entirely reshot, from a reworked screenplay by Alexi Hawley - now entitled ‘Exorcist: The Beginning’ – with Harlin directing from scratch. Skarsgård returned, as did Wadham, but Bellow was replaced by former Bond girl Izabella Scorupco.

I’ll be considering Schrader’s version tomorrow. For now, let’s examine Harlin’s film on its own merits. This’ll make for a short paragraph.

The cinematography’s not bad.

Told you it’d be short. Now let’s examine the flaws. Firstly, Hawley’s script strips away all the psychological nuances of Wisher and Carr’s screenplay, reorders certain events and ramps up the melodrama to the nines. The reordering of events particularly damages the film where the flashback to Merrin’s forced involvement in Nazi reprisals is placed late on in the film and followed almost immediately by a clash between British troops and armed tribesman which degenerates into wholesale slaughter, which in turn is superceded by the exorcism itself. In other words, Merrin is shown to have lost his faith as a result of witnessing military brutality, then to regain it after witnessing more of the same.

After a fairly restrained (but still frequently clichéd) first half, Harlin embraces Hawley’s melodramatic contrivances wholeheartedly and throws in a visit to an asylum, a couple of graphic suicides and …

SPOILER ALERT

… a ludicrous switcheroo ending revealing that it’s the doctor (here renamed Sarah) who’s been possessed and not the young boy hitherto seen flailing about Regan-like on his bed. Remember that Merrin’s backstory is the exorcism being depicted here (“something to do with a young boy”). Using the possessed boy as a red herring and following up with the exorcism of an adult woman constitutes a discontinuity from the original film which is all the more jarring given that Harlin loots visual tropes and leitmotifs from ‘The Exorcist’ left, right and centre: a pendulum stopping, a statue of Pazuzu, wild dogs snarling, a startled woman holding a candle, a medallion falling, a bed juddering and moving seemingly of its own accord.

SPOILERS END

The worst is yet to come. Morgan Creek rejected Schrader’s film for not being scary enough: his exorcism scene is at least creepy. Harlin’s is just risible, packed with enough sloppy stunts and dodgy CGI to make the average episode of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ look like an exercise in documentary realism.

It would be a cheap jibe to round off this post by saying that ‘Exorcist: The Beginning’ sucks cocks in hell. But that’s pretty much all it deserves.



SOURCES
‘Exorcist: The Beginning’ – production timeline on Mania.com

And let my cry come unto thee / Exorcist week on The Agitation of the Mind

A couple of years ago I picked up the ‘Exorcist Anthology’ box set, dirt cheap: all five films, indifferently packaged. A raft of special features bulking out the original, directors’ commentaries on ‘Exorcist: The Beginning’ and ‘Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist’ and sod all apart from trailers on ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ and ‘The Exorcist III’.

Beyond watching the original for my write-up last Halloween, the box set sat on the shelf gathering dust. A week ago, I blew the dust off it and sat down for an ‘Exorcist’-fest. The power of Christ knows what compelled me.

William Friedkin’s ‘The Exorcist’ is visceral, cerebral and still controversial, one of the key American studio films of the ’70s – a stand-out in a decade littered with great American movies. It would be all-too-easy (and lazy) to describe the other titles as a mixed bag, beset by script and production problems. Not to mention unfair, since Friedkin’s film wasn’t exactly plain sailing in its production. Just like William Peter Blatty’s novel was essentially a compromise from his original concept of the material.

In fact, the entire ‘Exorcist’ saga is shadowed by controversy, compromise, meddling and ill-fortune.

Over the next few days I’ll be looking at each film in turn, tracing the story from the genesis of William Peter Blatty’s groundbreaking novel (it has its roots in an actual case in 1949) to production company Morgan Creek’s rejection of Paul Schrader’s prequel and astonishing decision to remake it entirely under the less-than-guiding hand of Renny Harlin in 2004.