Cast
Stellan Skarsgärd (Father Lankester Merrin)
Gabriel Mann (Father Francis)
Clara Bellar (Rachel Lesno)
Billy Crawford (Cheche)
Julian Wadham (Major Granville)
Ralph Brown (Sergeant Major)
Israel Aduramo (Jomo)
Andrew French (Chuma)
Antoine Kamerling (Kessel)

A passage recently deciphered from the fragmentary, controversial, and completely fictional “Dead Sea Scrolls of Hollywood”:

And lo! It happened upon this time, being over two score and ten years since the advent of the chronicle of The Exorcist, and two sequels having not given the masses the sustenance of horror that they craveth, that the Lords of Warner Bros. and Morgan Creek Productions decreed that a new sequel shall come amongst the people and give them great joy and sendeth much gold into the coffers of the Brothers Warner. These lords gaveth the task unto Paul Schrader, a scribe of renown who hath written Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ and directed Auto Focus and Cat People.

But when Schrader did return unto the Lords of Warner Bros. and Morgan Creek and showed unto them his completed film, there was much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, and they spake: “What hast thou done? Thou hast made a film that we darst not release! For look you: it has no scares, no pea soup, no spinning heads!”

Whereupon Schrader respondeth: “But Lords, did I not tell you that I would make a psychological thriller, not a film full of entrails?”

“Mindst not what we hath said, but hearest what we sayeth now: Your film is banished! We shalt hire another to direct it anon, and mayhap he shall givest the film that we desire!”

So saying, they cast Paul Schrader out from their dominions and re-opened the treasury to maketh a new film. And they decreed that Renny Harlin would direct, and a new screenplay be written, and some actors be recast, but the story and sets would remain as they were. And so a miracle which passeth understanding was brought about: the fourth Exorcist film was made twice. And there was much confusion among the people. And nobody made any money.

The affair of the fourth movie in the Exorcist franchise, a prequel chronicling Father Lankester Merrin’s first encounter with the demon Pazuzu in Africa, is one of epically weird proportions. Paul Schrader shot a complete film, which the suits at Morgan Creek rejected for not being scary enough. They then hired director Renny Harlin to make an essentially new film based on the plot of Schrader’s, but with a new script and several significant cast changes. Harlin’s film came out in August 2004 as Exorcist: The Beginning, and did adequate business with abominable reviews. Morgan Creek, apparently wanting a bit more cash for their $80 million double-movie investment, expended a little extra budget to put Schrader’s version into limited release in May 2005 (opposite Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith, so you can be forgiven if you didn’t notice it) and onto DVD in October of that year under the title Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist. This leaves viewers with a unique opportunity to see two versions of the same story, shot back-to-back with similar casts, identical sets, but from different scripts and different directors with fundamentally different visions.

Harlin’s Exorcist: The Beginning received savage reamings from audiences and most critics, however I must admit that I enjoyed it as a schlocky but glossy mix of outright horror and archaeological adventure. It isn’t a smart movie and underplays the character drama of Father Merrin’s apostasy and doubt, but it has energy, ferocity, and some grotesque images. And it does count as a true prequel to William Friedkin’s Exorcist with numerous references to the classic movie and a tone that feels like the direct lead-in it’s advertised as.

Schrader’s version promised to be better. After all, how could it not be? Harlin’s resume is chock-full of clunky action programmers like Cutthroat Island and Driven, while Scrhader has a legendary reputation for tough character drama, both as a writer and director. Since Morgan Creek tossed out Schrader’s film for focusing more on character than terror, it sounded as if Schrader’s film would prove to be a genuine intellectual horror movie and an example of the myopia of the Hollywood spectacle-driven mentality that chose to shove his version aside for Harlin’s amusement park dark ride approach.

However, that’s not the case. I find it difficult to believe that I am actually going to write this, but it is the devil’s own truth: I like Renny Harlin’s Exorcist more than Paul Schrader’s. Perhaps Pazuzu has possessed me as well.

Ah, Pazuzu (seen to the left in a seventh-century B.C.E. bronze cast)…the prince of the Babylonian demons who still annoy the modern world, and bane of the life of the Dutch clergyman Father Lankester Merrin, the exorcist of the title. Both versions of the prequel tell the story of the early days of Father Merrin, during a crisis of his faith brought on by a bloody incident in World War II that caused him to abandon the cloth and pursue the life of an archaeologist. The tortured ex-priest takes over a dig in Africa that has uncovered a fifth-century Christian church in the Byzantine style. Bizarrely, Christianity had not pushed that far south into Africa at the time, and even more bizarrely, the builders of the church appear to have deliberately buried it immediately after its completion. Merrin and a young enthusiastic priest, Father Francis, explore the church and find catacombs beneath it enshrined to the demon Pazuzu. The builders must have made the church to trap an evil beneath it. When demon hyenas start to appear and strange illnesses strike the nearby tribe, it looks as if the evil has escaped. As tensions between the British colonial army and the local tribes mount, Merrin faces Pazuzu’s possession of a local youth.

To such an extent the two films have the same story, but in theme and style they stands leagues apart. Schrader’s movie starts with Merrin’s internal conflict presented clearly for the audience. In snow-swept Holland at the end of the German occupation, a Nazi commander forces Merrin to select ten people for his congregation for execution, or else the Nazis will murder everyone. Trapped in a horrific no-win situation, Merrin makes his fateful choice. By starting the film with this scene, which Harlin dispenses piecemeal via flashbacks in his version, Schrader clarifies that the struggle in Dominion is less Demon against Man than it is Man against Himself, with evil as an internal force. It is an effective scene and begins the film with promise.

Harlin’s opening scene, however, moves evil into the external world but has a greater visual impact: a priest in fifth-century Africa discovers a massacred Byzantine army where every soldier has been crucified upside-down. What follows remains on this same level of in-your-face shock and externalized supernatural horror. On the flipside, Schrader’s character-oriented study quickly starts running out of energy after its opening. Say what you like about Exorcist: The Beginning, but it sure tries to keep you interested. Dominion hopes you’ll care enough about the struggles of Merrin and his annoying sidekick Father Francis to hang around even though very little happens around them. The menaces that show up around the dig and in the African tribe appear slowly and don’t build in intensity toward a sense of apocalyptic dread, and the character conflicts cannot provide an adequate compensation for the lack of scares. The finale is an absurd miscalculation that has Merrin trying to bore...I mean argue...Pazuzu to death. Scharader’s ending is actually a more positive one than Harlin’s, but it seems like a hasty wrap-up that offers no satisfaction at all to the implications of the internal sturggles of Father Merrin. Harlin’s ending also wrapped-up Merrin’s conflict with maximum haste, but at least it had energy, bloodshed, and a sense of inexorable doom. Schrader just has a floating swami in a diaper arguing about good and evil.

The performances are one of Dominion’s biggest weaknesses. Skarsgärd bolsters the cast with his strong turn as Lankester Merrin (as he does in Harlin’s version, although in a completely different way), but has little support from the other actors who turn in barely competent performances. Clara Bellar is especially poor as the camp doctor with a Jewish concentration camp past. The character is much better written than her replacement in Exorcist: The Beginning, but Bellar’s performance has no passion to it.

Which brings us to the most unusual character in Dominion, and the greatest difference in plot between the two versions of the film. The possessed figure in Harlin’s film is a young child. (Or is it? The re-written script has a mystery angle and plot twist that are absent in the earlier one.) In Scharder’s, the possession happens to a young man, Cheche (pop singer Billy Crawford), who turns from the deformed outcast of the tribe into an idealized Adonis as Pazuzu takes deeper hold of him, until he can announce with frightening confidence, “I am perfection.” The concept is a clever reverse of the original Exorcist, where the possession corrupts and deforms a healthy young girl. Pazuzu heals and elevates his victim this time, and it puts a confusion in the mind of those around him. A superb idea, but hard to carry out and make it frightening. And the movie doesn’t succeed at the task. 

Some problems with Dominion lay in its unfinished nature. Schrader shot the movie and presented it as a rough cut before Morgan Creek yanked him from the project and chose to shoot it all over again, so Schrader’s movie never underwent the normal post-production phase. Some scenes in the film would probably have gotten re-shot if this version hadn’t been rejected outright. The special effects look horrendous, but they were no doubt hastily added to the film for its limited release and therefore received only a minimum of budget expenditure. The score is a patchwork of music tracked from Trevor Rabin’s score to Exorcist: The Beginning, fifteen minutes of new music from Angelo Badalamenti done as a favor to Schrader, and inappropriate pieces from metal band Dog Fashion Disco. The lack of post-production work may account for the poor photography, which has an overly bright and flat appearance as if it were never color corrected. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro shot both versions of the prequel, so he probably shouldn’t shoulder the blame (Exorcist: The Beginning looks wonderful). The entire film feels rough and no doubt would have been improved if Schrader had the chance to carry it to completion, but it still wouldn’t be a good movie.

Schrader bears the largest share of the responsibility for why Dominion fails. However, the lower-key naturalistic approach toward which Morgan Creek reacted so negatively was the approach they initially favored when they brought Paul Schrader onto the project. Although their balking at the completed film makes sense—it’s boring and not in the least bit frightening—it is the type of film they asked for in the first place based on a script which they had approved. Schrader has spoken about Morgan Creek’s change of attitude—which he calls “buyer’s remorse”—in an interview:

When they [Morgan Creek] went out and bought the Lexus, they bought the Lexus. It was only once they got home that they kicked themselves and said, “I should have bought a Hummer. I wanted a Hummer all along.” Then they go back and buy a Hummer. That’s why there was not a great deal of argument between me and [producer] James Robinson, because he was moving past me, he was moving on to another film. He was headed to the Hummer dealership, and there wasn’t a whole lot to talk to me about [it] because I was busy trying to sell him that Lexus.

An astute observation, although I would alter the metaphor: Harlin’s movie is a junky sports car with a gaudy and cheap paint job, and Schrader’s movie is a Rolls Royce without an engine. I wouldn’t want to buy either one, but in the end I would select the car that actually runs. Call me crazy, or maybe I’m just possessed.

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