Darkness falls

The arrival of the new Exorcist movie does nothing to allay the suspicion that the horror franchise is cursed. Sudden death and strange happenings surrounded the making of the original film nearly 30 years ago. But that's nothing compared to events when plans for a prequel were put in place.

Veteran director John Frankenheimer, originally slated to helm Exorcist: The Beginning, died before filming could commence. His replacement, Paul Schrader, made the film only to have the studio refuse to release it because, allegedly, it wasn't gory enough.

Enter Renny Harlin, director of such movies as Cliffhanger, The Long Kiss Goodnight and Cutthroat Island (a film which he, as well as audiences, would probably rather forget).

Was he nervous about the curse of The Exorcist? "Well, I don't know about curses or whatnot, but I was involved in a car accident at the beginning of shooting and had to do most of the film in a cast, so maybe there's something to it," he says.

The Exorcist is one of his favourite films of all time. With the prequel, he wanted to illuminate issues left unexplained in the original, including how the priest who performs the exorcism became involved in such matters.

When the studio decided it didn't want to release the Schrader movie, they invited directors to go and look at the movie. "They wanted suggestions of how, with a couple of re-shoots, they could add some suspense element into the film," he explains.

"I saw the film and my opinion was that I didn't want to start interfering with another director's film, and that I didn't know how to add things to a film that had a very definite structure and feel.

"So I said that I'd only be interested if they made a whole new film. I thought, 'they'll never pay for that' and that I'd never hear from them again. Then a few weeks later, they called me up and said, 'we've decided to redo the whole thing, are you interested?'."

Harlin admits being caught off-guard when the producers agreed to remake the entire movie taking his new approach. And he realised there was no way that he could satisfy all the fans of the original Exorcist.

"It was just an impossibility," he says. "Together with the fact that they'd already made the film once and everybody knew that. We had a real uphill battle. At the same time, I was a huge fan of the original film, so I thought it was exciting to do in terms of trying to explore where all those things in the original film came from."

Rather than completely reconceive the movie, he kept the basic element of Father Merrin and his loss of faith and the possession in an African village. It wasn't an ideal situation but, with only two months to prepare, was the best that could be done.

He sounds as though he's prepared for Exorcist followers to take issue with some of the changes in the new film. "Fans of the first have made their rules about possession and exorcism, and how it works," he says.

"But if you study a little more and go beyond the film, you realise there are lots of different kinds of possession. For instance, in our film the kid gets touched by the demon, or infected by him, without getting fully possessed.

"There are endless differences like that. So we've varied from the first film. It's not one person getting possessed and you watching them for an hour and a half like the first one. We felt we couldn't do that; it would be making the same film that was made in the 70s."

Some of the cast of Exorcist: The Beginning made the film twice, including leading actor Stellan Skarsgard, who plays the young Father Merrin (played in the original film by Max Von Sydow). "He was a friend and he was concerned," admits Harlin.

"He wanted to know what we would do and why and how and so on, but he became very much part of the screenwriting process. We worked together very well.

"In the previous version, his character is very introspective and very passive. In this version, he has a traumatic back story and is more of an active character. They are two totally different kinds of film, and he enjoyed acting in both of them."

So does Harlin actually believe in possession after making the movie? He doesn't know, is his honest answer. "But in the research we did we found that the church employs over 300 exorcists. The Pope has his own exorcist, so they certainly believe it.

"I don't know if you'd call me religious. But I was brought up to believe in God and maybe demonic possession would be an explanation for some of the evil things that people do."

* Exorcist: The Beginning (15) opens in cinemas tomorrow.

Published: 28/10/2004