The Secret History of Movies #12

(Spend it All, 1972, d. Les Blank)

(Affliction, 1997, d. Paul Schrader)

For We Are Many

What people don’t think about when they think about the Exorcist movies is that there are five of them. They don’t think that the Saw films exceed Exorcist films by only one. They don’t now consider that the new Final Destination movie actually makes that franchise even with the Exorcist series. The reason that no one regards the five Exorcist films as any kind of regular horror franchise must be because the sequels, as an extension of the Friedkin/Blatty original, are so wildly scattershot. William Peter Blatty is the original creator, and he only sanctions two of the four follow-ups: Exorcist III, which he wrote and directed himself, and which, regardless of the studio imposed ending, still bears his unmistakable, oddball Catholic stamp; and Dominion, the 2003 prequel written by William Wisher and Caleb Carr and directed by Paul Schrader. That leaves John Boorman’s batshit Exorcist II: The Heretic and Renny Harlin’s alternate universe prequel, Exorcist: The Beginning (clever!) unaccounted for.
The battle (a tad grand, I know) between those films Blatty approves of and those he doesn’t is at the root of the series’ let’s-try-this-again awkwardness, and apparently constant state of reboot. This is true even if Blatty, specifically as a figure making these movies, outside of his role as the creative force behind Exorcist III, doesn’t matter so much. What matters is that Blatty wrote the original novel and, years later, a sort-of sequel called Legion, which followed Boorman’s film and acted as though – and quite rightly, too – it never existed. So it would follow that Blatty’s own film adaptation of Legion would ignore Exorcist II (and would carry over only supporting characters from the original, unless you count Jason Miller’s Father Karras, which you can, but also can’t, depending on how you feel). What matters is in 2002 or 2003, the studio that hired him looked at Paul Schrader’s Dominion and were, for some bizarre reason, so put off by what they saw that they scrapped the post-production and turned the Wisher-Carr script over to Renny Harlin(!), who rejiggered quite a bit, and ended up making a movie which tested so badly that the studio, Morgan Creek, gave Schrader a little money to finish Dominion, and then said “Fuck it, we’ll just release both.” Which is sort of admirable.

Now, clearly, none of these films would have been made if The Exorcist, the original one, hadn't been such a hit, so the desire for financial gain was the catalyst. So take that, corporations, I'm on to you. But beyond that, the artistic drive to make these sequels -- and I think it's fair to say there was more artistic drive behind most of these sequels than any of the Saw or Final Destination films -- seems to be based entirely on a misunderstanding of Blatty and Friedkin's film. Let's kick things off with some of John Boorman's comments about Exorcist II: The Heretic, made several post-mortem years later in this interview:

The film that I made, I saw as a kind of riposte to the ugliness and darkness of The Exorcist – I wanted a film about journeys that was positive, about good, essentially. And I think that audiences, in hindsight, were right. I denied them what they wanted and they were pissed off about it – quite rightly, I knew I wasn't giving them what they wanted and it was a really foolish choice. The film itself, I think, is an interesting one – there's some good work in it – but when they came to me with it I told John Calley, who was running Warner Bros. then, that I didn't want it. "Look," I said, "I have daughters, I don't want to make a film about torturing a child," which is how I saw the original film. But then I read a three-page treatment for a sequel written by a man named William Goodhart and I was really intrigued by it because it was about goodness. I saw it then as a chance to film a riposte to the first picture.

To begin with, to say that The Exorcist is a film about torturing a child...fuck off. Deliverance is a film about torturing Ned Beatty. How does that feel, John Boorman? Not so good, probably. But I guess because Boorman doesn't have any Ned Beattys, he can't really feel it as intensely.
Second, and more importantly, is his implication that The Exorcist somehow isn't about positivity or goodness. Perhaps he's forgotten the ending, but Damien Karras goads the demon into leaving Regan, the young girl, and possessing him, Karras, at which point Karras sacrifices himself by jumping out a window, removing the demonic threat from the girl, and from the house. This is good. This is positive, if you understand that defeating a demon at the expense of the life of a good man is a victory, which Karras clearly believed it was. And so did Blatty, so much so that his fear that the victory inherent in Karras's sacrifice would be misunderstood, misinterpreted, or just plain missed, that he would eventually recut the film, add scenes that Friedkin has taken out, for the "producer's cut" that came out in 2000. I did, and still do, believe that this was a mistake, because this version of The Exorcist simply doesn't work. But apparently Blatty was right to have these misgivings, because on the DVD commentary for Dominion, Schrader says that...well first he says that the conceit of Dominion, as devised by William Wisher and Caleb Carr, that the possessed character would be an ill person who got better while the world around him went mad, was ingenious, but a poor engine for a horror film. All this does is prove that Schrader has a depressingly narrow view of what horror can be, but never mind. What he says that's more relevant is that he wants his film, which focuses on the crisis of faith of Father Merrin (played originally by Max von Sydow in the first two films, here, and in Renny Harlin's take, by Stellan Skarsgard), to be a journey for the lead character. Presumably this journey is about Merrin for some reason getting over the hump of his crumbling faith to find God anew. Remember that. And as bit of an ancillary example, to just give some evidence that Blatty's fears were not for nothing, I'll note that Edgar Wright, in one of the DVD extras for Hot Fuzz, describes Karras's death in the original film as Regan "compelling" Karras through the window. So, Karras sacrificed nothing, and was instead murdered. This is exactly the idea that Blatty didn't want people to carry away from the film.
This sort of thing makes me wonder if the whole world hasn’t gone mad. Schrader seems to believe that the journey in Dominion – and I like his film – isn’t simply a retelling of the one in The Exorcist. In other words, Karras/Merrin loses his faith and only regains it when confronted by a cosmic evil. Oh, excuse, Karras/Merrin/and also Lamont from Exorcist II loses his faith and only etc. Every single Exorcist film revolves around a crisis of faith (or never having it and then finding it, as it’s unclear if Lt. Kinderman in Exorcist III ever believed, prior to that film’s action) that is resolved by facing off against demonic forces, yet Boorman and Schrader act like they just invented bread. This is Blatty’s whole thing – well, obviously not just his, but his own devout Catholicism has been expressed through stories that employ some variation of this idea. See also The Ninth Configuration, novel and film, in which skepticism is confronted not with an ultimate evil, but with an ultimate good. So the idea that Boorman’s film is a “riposte” is simply inane – his film is, at best, a restating.

And anyway, at least Schrader had the decency to make a good film. Boorman's is ridiculous, with a brief nice moment here and there, and a cast that seems gathered together to prove that if Friedkin could get Von Sydow and Ellen Burstyn and Lee J. Cobb, then he could get Von Sydow and Louise Fletcher (more or less fresh off her Oscar win) and Richard Burton and James Earl Jones! Blatty talks about seeing Exorcist II and laughing from the beginning, though for me the journey from "This is just stupid" to actually laughing was a bit longer. I didn't find anything really hilarious in Boorman's film until Linda Blair, here about eighteen years old, starts to be sort of (but not really?) possessed again, and she makes just the cutest face:

Look! She's like a little bunny rabbit making its angry face!

So that movie didn't work, though it set the template followed by all subsequent films, save Blatty's own, in that it focuses on, or locates its secrets thereabouts, Father Merrin's life in Africa prior to the events of The Exorcist. Merrin isn't even mentioned in Blatty's Exorcist III, and my understanding is that even Jason Miller's presence in that film was enforced by the studio. Butchered ending notwithstanding, Exorcist III is a terrific film, strange and funny and genuinely frightening -- that long hallway scene with the nurse is a classic -- as well as ultimately moving, though not as hopeful as Legion, Blatty's novel (which he himself was planning to diverge from, anyway), with a strong and idiosyncratic cast headed up by George C. Scott, who reportedly loved what Blatty was going for. It really is the only sequel that counts for me, and I think it's the series' bizarre, jumbled, see-what-sticks nature that allows for that kind of disconnect from all the other films.

The backstory behind the two prequels, recounted earlier, is really sort of amazing. I've heard that Stellan Skarsgard had some reservations about repeating the role he'd just completed for Schrader under another director after Schrader was fired, but Schrader urged him to do it because what other actor would have the same story to tell? Who else has played an entire role for a basically finished film, only to be told that movie isn't cutting it, here's a new director and a reworked script, now go do it again? This would all be even more interesting if Renny Harlin's Exorcist: The Beginning had anything at all to recommend it. Harlin is sort of a punchline, but I'll freely admit that he's made some fun trash. The problem here is, nobody wanted his movie to be trash, exactly. They wanted it to be commercial, but this is The Exorcist we're talking about here, so it had to be serious. Well, apparently when Harlin goes serious, he also goes hopelessly dull. There's nothing that's even absurd enough to really justify watching it. Actually, no, there is the bit at the end when the possessed woman (Izabella Scorupco) is running through a tunnel at a stationary Skarsgard, windmilling her arms in a way that is I guess supposed to ward of Catholicism, but then just as she's about to get to Skarsgard, Catholicism punches her in the face. Killing her, I hasten to add. This would count as a botched exorcism in my view, but it ended up getting Merrin the gig in Georgetown, so I guess we all have different standards.

What's really strange is watching the Harlin and Schrader films back-to-back, because it's pretty hard to imagine what Morgan Creek saw in the Schrader film that so put them off (or that so convinced Schrader that he was somehow not making a horror film). It's well-made, just on a basic competency level, which Harlin's film can't always boast, but it's also suspenseful, eerie, mysterious, it has violence and gore, which is the sort of thing you'd imagine, not having seen either film, Morgan Creek wanted Harlin to cram back into the story, and a performance by Skarsgard that is real and moving, and actually acting. In the Harlin version, he clearly does not give a shit. The novelty that Schrader supposedly convinced him would be enough to carry him through turned out to be not so powerful, and he just wants to get through this ridiculousness. In the Schrader film, though, he cares.
And even if all these sequels are just weaker versions of what The Godfather Part II did, which was to underline all the important stuff from the first movie, Dominion approaches the ideas introduced in The Exorcist differently. Here, the demon (played by Billy Crawford) doesn't present itself as some ragged and wounded, disease-ridden creature, but as something beautiful and androgynous -- in other words, not so much Satanic as Luciferian ("I am perfection," it says at one point). There is a real Biblical, and Miltonian, power to this that could have perhaps been exploited more completely, but is certainly better and more interesting than we've gotten elsewhere. In Exorcist II, the Catholicism takes a backseat to some moronic science fiction contraption, and in the Exorcist: The Beginning, it's a plot point. But in the other three, the Friedkin, Blatty and Schrader films, the horror and the struggle with religious faith and ritual are inseparable. The suffering -- the "torture of a child" -- is part of it, the hell and nightmares, the sacrifice and triumph, are all part of it.

This is why only three of the films succeed; well, that, and because the exorcism subgenre is, as I've said before, extremely narrow, and when you perfect it right out of the gate, as Friedkin and Blatty did in 1973, the only thing that will allow a new film to stand on its own is style, intelligence, and craft. Three out of five isn't bad, I suppose.

Seriously, though, John Boorman, you're a good director, but come on, man.

Cat People: Both Parts Must Die

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In theory, I do not mind remakes. My thinking is that remakes are essentially no different from the restaging of plays, except that they cost a lot more, and are frequently in no way necessary. Even so, if a filmmaker can bring something interesting to an already-told story, then why kick up a fuss? Over the years, we've had at least two excellent versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, David Cronenberg has improved on Kurt Neumann's already highly entertaining The Fly, and John Carpenter successfully returned to the source material, a novella by John W. Campbell, that was largely ignored in Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby's tremendous The Thing from Another World. So there's reason to be at least not quite so relentlessly negative when another remake is announced. Wait and see, be positive, all that shit. (Furthermore, the arguments against any and all remakes tend to sound like thoughtless and impotent rage. One I hear a lot is that the remake will rake in a truckful of cash, and all these young kids won't even be aware of the original, but I got news for you: superior the original may well be, but those young kids wouldn't have given a damn about it anyway.) Of course, there are any number of films -- like 2001, for instance -- whose hypothetical remakes would probably cause me to vomit in annoyance, but my exception for those films, I have to admit, is essentially arbitrary, and hypocritical.

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Where things get really hairy, however, is when the filmmaker behind the remake begins talking shit about the original. Even if the original is bad, it's a classless move, and frequently the original has at least something going for it, or nobody would want to remake it in the first place. In his collection of film essays and criticism, Harlan Ellison's Watching, an enraged (of course) Harlan Ellison, speaking on the topic of homage, throws out this:

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Was any attempt made by concerned parties, to hire a spiritualist who might pierce the veil and get Val Lewton's reaction to writer[sic]-director Paul Schrader's quote in the May-June issue of Cinefantastique, just prior to release of Schrader's remake of the 1942 Lewton-produced Cat People, that "Val Lewton's Cat People isn't that brilliant. It's a very good B-movie with one or two brilliant sequences. I mean, we're not talking about a real classic"?

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I first read that passage well before I'd seen either version of Cat People, and for whatever reason, at the time, Schrader's words came off far more snide and harsh than they do now. I mean, he does say the original is "very good", and that it has "brilliant sequences". But what particularly sticks in my craw now is the patronizing attitude towards B-movies, which I think a man like Schrader, who has a deep and abiding love for film noir, should have gotten past in the 1960s, at the latest. What, does he think the only film noirs that are truly great are those that were afforded A-movie budgets? In any case, I would be very curious to hear Schrader's thoughts on the subject now, given how history has not only elevated Lewton's Cat People, but relegated his remake to the bargain bin.

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Of course, history often gets things wrong. I've read enough great novels by forgotten writers to know that. But history was pretty much on target this time around. Personally, I would rank Lewton's Cat People somewhere in the middle of the nine horror films he produced (with massive creative and stylistic input) between 1942 and 1946, but that should be viewed less as a middling take on the film than as a testament to the very high regard in which I hold Lewton's work as a whole. Cat People was the first horror film Lewton produced at RKO, and with it the template was already clear: psychologically based horror, whether it featured supernatural elements or not, with sharp, literate writing, gorgeous, shadow-cloaked cinematography, moral complexity, ambiguity, and powerful sequences of suspense and terror. Lewton didn't cut his teeth on horror, and made these films because he was assigned to; he approached the genre as an outsider, a state of affairs that often yields fascinating results (see also Tom Alfredson, whose first horror film was the exquisite Let the Right One In, the American remake of which is coming soon).

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Summarizing Cat People at this stage strikes me as a bit pointless, and besides I hate that shit, but suffice it to say it tells the deceptively simple story of the sexless marriage of the mysterious and ethereal Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) and lunkheaded good egg Oliver Reed (Trent Smith). The "sexless" part stems from Irena's considered belief that her Serbian ancestors were evil witches, who were able to take the form of cats, primarily (only?) when in the throes of sexual passion. So because she loves Oliver, she refuses to have sex with him. Oliver takes this all pretty well, only taking the step of referring his wife to a psychiatrist (the great Tom Conway, who had all the on-screen class and charm of his more famous brother, George Sanders, but none of the off-screen assholism). Though Oliver's a sweet guy, he eventually drifts, after having a touching conversation with his co-worker Alice (Jane Randolph) about how, until his relationship with Irena, who he loves, he'd never been unhappy.

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Lewton, Tourneur, and screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen keep the truth of Irena's condition -- is it psychological, or is she really what she says she is? -- ambiguous, almost to the end (all the way to the end, according to some, but it's pretty hard, lack of on-screen cat transformations notwithstanding, to psychologically explain away certain moments, and sounds), and one of the things that's so fascinating about the film, and about the performances of Simon and Smith (some would say he's wooden, but I say he's playing the character) in particular, is that often the film plays, or could have played, straight, as a snapshot of a crumbling marriage, and of Irena's mental breakdown, the kind of breakdown that would warn all concerned parties to hitch the next train out of town, before she starts shredding everything around her, cat or not cat. This is a result, no doubt, of Lewton making a horror film only because he had to, and making it about cat people because RKO already had the title. Later Lewton films would be more straightforward (though no less complex) entries into the genre, but with Cat People he was injecting his real-world concerns, interests, and phobias (he didn't like cats, or being touched) into material that, in less sophisticated hands, would have played out as a half-assed, low-grade pulp knock-off of the kind of werewolf movies that were popular at the time.

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Which is sort of funny, when you think about it -- as I said, Cat People was handed to Lewton by RKO, who said "Here's your title, now make a movie." A lazier producer would, without question, have told a thinly veiled werewolf story. That's not the story Lewton told, but guess who did tell that story? Paul Schrader. In his film (written by Alan Ormsby), Nastassja Kinski's Irena doesn't know about her true nature, and has to learn, Lawrence Talbot-like, about the family curse that dooms her to a life of cat-transformation any time she meets a guy she'd like to do sex to. Except that, apparently, this has never happened to her before, since not only is she a virgin, but she's never turned into a cat before, which means she's never experienced sexual desire before. From the standpoint of narrative logic, this makes no sense. Whatever Lewton's reasoning was (and I strongly suspect his reasoning had nothing to do with my current point), having his Irena know full well what she was not only made her a much more interesting character, but also obliterated a whole host of storytelling problems. Schrader's film rejiggers quite a few elements of the original story, saving it from being a "pointless" remake, but it perhaps should have either rejiggered fewer, or more. I can't tell which, but Schrader being Schrader, and 1982 being 1982, there was no way anyone involved in the remake was going to dump the sex-makes-her-a-vicious-cat angle. So maybe lose the idea that she's not aware of it, but of course that would have meant losing the character of Paul (Malcolm McDowell), Irena's brother, whose entire purpose, from what I can tell, is to be the one who tells her about their family origins. Well, that, and to introduce a nonsensical incest subplot (the only way they can have sex and not becomes cats is to have sex with family members, you see), which isn't consummated in any case, a fact that mitigates the film's already fairly high sleaze factor by a smidge.

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But, you know, the thing is, Schrader's Cat People isn't really all that bad. It's not. It is, in fact, a good deal better than I remembered. Kinski is wonderful, McDowell is very good, there's a nice energy and pacing in the first half or so, and, occasionally, strong images, such as those that accompany the astonishingly Last Temptation of Christ-like opening credits, and the shot of blood slowly splashing over Irena's white shoes, on its way to a floor drain. Also, the panthers in this film are very striking, which I mean sincerely. But it's still just a sexed-up, 1980s-style tweak on the werewolf legend, and, in fact, one could easily say that Paul Schrader's Cat People is just Tony Scott's The Hunger, but for werecats. Or rather, one could, if not for the fact that The Hunger came out one year later. So facts have defeated that point, but one thing I think can't be argued is that Schrader's film broke no new ground in horror cinema, and in a number of ways it's in lock-step with the formula of the genre as practiced in the 1980s. For example, Ed Begley, Jr. has the thankless role of the unfunny funny guy, which means you know he's doomed, and indeed he is. There are also a great many tits, which I have no problem with, and even, ahm, blooming from this particular story they come off as gratuitous. It's also a fairly gory film, so with your stock victims, your tits, and your gore, you have all the trappings of a more or less typical 80s horror film. No trails are blazed, whereas that's exactly what Lewton was doing in 1942. Even back then, no one was pulling as far back from genre tropes as Lewton was, and no one was creating so much dread by showing so little. And that restraint, of course, was just the tip of the iceberg.

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Which, again, I have no problem with -- the tits, gore, and lack of trailblazing, I mean -- and I wouldn't even bring it up (okay, I might, but not like this) if not for that Schrader quote in which he condescends to B-movies. Words hurt, Paul Schrader, and if you're going to express an ignorance of the true meaning of the term "B-movie" -- an ignorance I can't believe you ever actually possessed, even in 1982 -- you're probably going to be called out when you make one, which is what your Cat People is, at least going by your definition of "B-movie", which is very narrow and reductive anyway. So "trashy", I guess, is what both you and I are going for here. And no, I don't believe Paul Schrader will ever actually read this. I just got caught up in things.

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The other funny thing about all this is that you can sort of sense Schrader straining to bust out of those trashy binds, and that's not a compliment. One thing about B-movies, whether they were trashy or not, is that they often had a sense of pace, something that completely deserts Schrader's Cat People in the last half hour. The film shrugs off the sense of narrative fun and excitement it had been riding, in favor of a last quarter that just drags interminably, all to make a point about being trapped by sexual desire, which was already there anyway, and was already there in the Lewton film, too.

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Again, though: Schrader's film isn't that bad. And I wonder, if it hadn't been a remake, if history wouldn't have been kinder to it (I'm sure it has its rabid defenders, but it's unlikely they'll turn the tide). But of course, it is a remake, and that's the curse of of such films -- without the film being remade, the remake would never exist, would never even be conceived of, and unless what's being offered is of especially high quality (a not inconceivable notion, as I've shown), the remake will come and go in a blink. Profitable, maybe, but not much else can be hoped for. It's a tough road to hoe, when you think about it, especially on the screenwriting end, which must be a just about entirely thankless task. But give it a shot anyway, if you happen to feel like it. I won't bitch. Just, you know...show some respect.

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Show Your Patriotism...

...by jumping over to Krauthammer's place at 10:00 AM, EST, where The Oldest Established Really Important Film Club will be discussing this month's pick, Paul Schrader's highly unusual Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. I'm sure it will be a lively conversation, as always.