The Exorcist III’s 30th Anniversary

The effect that William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) had on horror, and on cinema in general, is indelible. By today’s standards, it would have been a given that Warner Bros. would have used the film’s success to launch a franchise, but in the early '70s, the practice was a rarity. Nevertheless, develop a franchise they did, and 1977’s The Exorcist II: The Heretic bombed catastrophically, and has been cited by some as the worst movie ever made. Despite this, the studio was excited to give it another go. It took about a dozen years, a novel, several director changes, and a studio change, but eventually, author and screenplay writer William Peter Blatty would roll up his sleeves and bring his vision to life himself.

Blatty’s success with The Exorcist III (1990) comes, not from his directorial skills—his inexperience can be fairly obvious at times—but rather from his talent as a writer. The film wisely ignores the events of the previous film, instead picking up, essentially, where The Exorcist left off. Leaving the MacNeil family in the past, the film instead focuses on Lieutenant Kinderman (George C. Scott) and Father Dyer (Ed Flanders) and the friendship they’ve cultivated since the events of the first movie, 17 years in the past. It’s this friendship that really sells me on the movie; if nothing else, it’s a touching portrait of two older men supporting each other through a shared trauma. The dialogue between Kinderman and Dyer feels natural for friends that are adept at understanding each others' anxieties and defusing them without directly acknowledging their source. It's an understanding that seems to come only through years of practice. The villain, too—a role shared jointly by Brad Dourif as James Venamun and Jason Miller, reprising his role as Damian Karras—could rival any deranged, monologuing serial killer on the screen. Several times through the film, Dourif rants and raves, captivating viewers through his lunacy. 

Dialogue aside, The Exorcist III is able to generate scares largely without showing much in the way of gore—a stark contrast to the first entry in the franchise, which had a notoriously difficult time avoiding the dreaded “X” rating from the MPAA. Blatty’s creativity when it comes to the horrors imposed by the demon Pazuzu keeps viewers engaged so well, hardly anything needs to be shown. But where it becomes necessary, The Exorcist III doesn’t back down.

If this film has any legacy, it’s tied to the jump scare; The Exorcist III is actually rather conservative in that regard. However, Blatty was still able to orchestrate one of the most iconic jump scares in horror history.

A note about jump scares: I generally find them tired and overused. They’ll make me jump—don’t get me wrong—but afterward, I’m left feeling cheated. It’s a cheap and easy way to drum up the illusion of being scared and too often, filmmakers rely on them to mask the shortcomings of a poorly written script. There is, however, a right way to use the technique, as in the shark as Brody chums the water in Jaws (1975), the bum behind the dumpster in Mulholland Drive (2001), or the tall man in It Follows (2014). What sets these scenes apart for me is that they don’t manufacture the scare. Not over-reliant on a sudden blast of non-diegetic sound or tension-breaking false scares, nor hinging on special effects and camera tricks, the effective jump scare exists entirely within the agreed-upon physics of the film. If a scare is triggered by a knock on the door, for instance, but the knock had to be amplified ten times over in the sound mix, was the scene very good to begin with?

I’d like to avoid spoilers, but what I can say is that I attribute the success of the hospital hallway scene in The Exorcist III to a couple of factors. First, though Blatty does use a false scare, it isn’t done in a way that breaks all tension in the scene. It’s readily apparent that the tension wasn’t false—just the release was. Second, the scene lasts a staggering 4 minutes and 15 seconds, which is an extraordinary amount of time to hold your breath, but you’ll manage. Lastly, Blatty uses such an excellent combination of perspective, scene choreography, camera movement, and sound to really drive the scene home. It’s one moment that I believe his directorial inexperience proves an asset, simply because I don’t believe many other directors would have even attempted the set-up—in fact, his director of photography, Gerry Fisher, gave Blatty some pushback on the scene.  

Despite the development hell that prefaced production of the film, as well as the dramatic studio-meddling by Morgan Creek Entertainment as the production came to a close, The Exorcist III stands as a valiant reclamation of William Peter Blatty’s most enduring tale. Had he not returned to right the franchise after the second installment, I shudder to imagine the hellish depths to which the studios would have taken it. 

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Article written by Ande Thomas

Ande loves the intersection of sci-fi and horror, where our understanding of the natural world clashes with our fear of the new and unknown. He writes about monsters and foreign horror and can also be found over on Letterboxd.