The veteran filmmaker has proposed a radical new hermeneutic for understanding the 1977 sequel’s historic failure, tentatively suggesting that audiences may have wanted to be frightened.
In a cinematic revelation that threatens to upend the foundational epistemology of the Hollywood studio system, director John Boorman has finally illuminated the catastrophic reception of Exorcist II: The Heretic; speaking with the weary gravity of a man who has stared into the abyss only to find the abyss entirely devoid of tension, the auteur confessed in a new retrospective documentary that his picture's box-office immolation was likely caused by a complete lack of scares. It is a stunning concession that forces us to reevaluate the structural teleology of the cinematic sequel, demanding that we ask whether a film explicitly marketed as a continuation of the most terrifying cultural event of the twentieth century was, perhaps, obligated to elicit even a momentary quickening of the pulse.
To grasp the sheer magnitude of Boorman’s miscalculation, one must look not to the pedestrian metrics of ticket sales, but rather to the enduring architecture of human suffering; much as John Milton’s Paradise Lost navigates the inevitable fall of man, and the esoteric sixteenth-century woodcuts of Hans Burgkmair document the agonizing triumph of death over the mortal coil, Exorcist II stands as a monument to human hubris, albeit one with slightly less thematic coherence than the second season of MTV’s Rock of Love with Bret Michaels. We, the tragically under-read viewing public, had long assumed that the film’s hypnotic blend of psychic synchronization devices and James Earl Jones dressed as a giant locust was an intentional subversion of the audience’s base desires, an avant-garde rejection of the jump-scare; alas, Boorman has now confirmed it was simply a mistake.
The academic establishment has already begun the agonizing process of rewriting their syllabi to accommodate this paradigm-shifting admission, mourning the loss of a text that had sustained thousands of impenetrable dissertations.
We had spent decades teaching graduate seminars under the assumption that the film’s total lack of dramatic tension was a Brechtian distancing effect designed to alienate the bourgeoisie; to hear that he simply forgot to make it scary is devastating.
Boorman’s confession leaves the cineaste community to grapple with a terrifying new reality in which a director’s intent is precisely as pedestrian as it appears on the screen; one can only hope this brutal demystification does not inspire other auteurs to step forward, lest we discover that the makers of Jaws: The Revenge were genuinely unaware that great white sharks cannot roar.