Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on May 20, 2005, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
While the final Star Wars movie dominates theaters nationwide, another cinematic drama in which the players struggle with and succumb to the dark side is playing out on significantly fewer screens. I’m not just talking about how Father Lankester Merrin (Stellan Skarsgård) wrestles with his faith and Satan in Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist, but the fact that, as most fans know, Morgan Creek rejected Paul Schrader’s version of this project and replaced it with Renny Harlin’s crasser Exorcist: The Beginning. Schrader’s movie is finally getting big-screen exposure with a limited break more befitting an art film—which, truth be told, is appropriate. While Dominion has a great deal more integrity than Beginning, it’s also not hard to see why Morgan Creek rejected it for wide summer release.
That has less to do with Schrader’s achievements or lack thereof than with the basic nature of the material. In both versions, the focus is on Merrin’s spiritual crisis, his turning away from God and his eventual reclamation of his spiritual values when he is forced to confront evil. Heady stuff, which is part of the challenge for a filmmaker, as it’s the sort of interior drama better served by the written word than a feature film. (It’s no surprise that Dominion’s final screenwriter was a novelist, The Alienist’s Caleb Carr.) Beginning tried to compensate by throwing in gratuitous shock tactics that became more ludicrous than scary; Schrader keeps the focus personal, and thus Dominion is more successful as a drama than a horror film.
The action remains centered in British East Africa in the late 1940s, where Merrin flees after a horrible encounter with the Nazis during WWII. One of the key differences between Schrader’s film and Harlin’s is that the latter tried unsuccessfully to amp up the drama by keeping this incident mysterious, presenting it only in flashbacks. Schrader, correctly believing that knowing of it is crucial to understanding Merrin’s character from the beginning, makes it the opening scene, and it does have impact, albeit undercut by the weak performance of the actor playing a Nazi official. Merrin ends up in a small desert village working as an archaeologist, where he discovers an ancient Christian church buried beneath the sands. Further digging reveals that it was actually intended as a sort of stopgap for a house of Satanic worship beneath it, and it’s not long before the devil has emerged to take possession of a local boy.
Another important distinction between the two prequels is the identity of the possessee. In the Harlin film, he’s a young boy—or at least we think he is, until a badly misconceived twist ending. That child falls victim to another, more shocking fate grounded in real-world violence in Schrader’s movie, which instead casts the afflicted as a physically crippled adolescent. One of Schrader and writers Carr and William Wisher’s most intriguing inspirations is that Cheche (Billy Crawford) actually seems to get “better” as the demonic influence takes hold, his twisted limbs straightening and his features achieving a serene beauty. In the visual medium of film, though, that idea is better for irony than scares, and when Cheche starts speaking in an altered voice, blaspheming and taunting Merrin, it’s too familiar to have much scary impact.
Part of Schrader’s point, in fact, seems to be that what humans can inflict upon one another is more disturbing than the potential for the devil to take over human souls. Cheche’s possession is almost a sideshow set against the dominant threat of violence in the village between the resentful native Turkana tribespeople and the occupying British. And the most horrifying moment comes when one Turkana man turns against his own, a setpiece that, to the other characters, suggests God’s absence as strongly as anything happening to Cheche. “Is this how the almighty rewards those who have kept faith with him?” a villager asks Merrin in the wake of this violence, and the priest’s terse answer is “Yes.”
That brief statement says it all as far as Merrin’s cynical attitude is concerned, and Skarsgård is persuasive in a more interior interpretation of Merrin than he gave in Beginning. But while casting Merrin as a character who is acted upon for most of the story makes a certain aesthetic sense, it’s not the most dramatic approach, and Merrin also takes a back seat for too long to the events surrounding him. He spends a good deal of time debating issues of faith with Father Francis (Gabriel Mann), a young priest called in to oversee Merrin’s excavation of the church, and Dr. Rachel Lesno (Clara Bellar), a Holocaust survivor running a clinic in the village. Both Mann and Bellar do good, grounded work here, with Bellar’s characterization more believable than Izabella Scorupco’s misconceived Beginning counterpart.
The most impressive performance, though, may well be that of Crawford, a pop singer who has never acted before but is thoroughly convincing, aided in both his disfigured and “healthy”/possessed guises by fine KNB makeup FX. Their prosthetics don’t tip the movie over into overstated “horror” territory, and indeed all of the technical contributions help Schrader evoke an air of realism, including John Graysmark’s production design and especially the cinematography by Vittorio Storaro (who shot both versions). Although the evident digital postproducing of Dominion results in a flattening of the image, Storaro’s use of light and shadow remains first-rate in a film that’s all about those elements of the human soul.
And so the long cinematic history of The Exorcist (one assumes) comes to a close. Thanks to Dominion’s escape from the shelf, the series is going out on a higher note than it might have, even if it’s not as frightening or as completely satisfying as the original’s devotees might hope. But it’s an honorable piece of work, and like the equally troubled, initially maligned but since rediscovered Exorcist III, Dominion might achieve a following of its own and—similar to Merrin—find a measure of redemption.
