Hollywood can sometimes provide absurdly entertaining real-life stories, some that appear that have come straight from the pen of the most imaginative screenwriter. One such case occurred when Paul Schrader, the screenwriter and director known for grand works such as Taxi Driver, American Gigolo and Cat People, attended the premiere of the film Exorcist: The Beginning in 2004. This horror film, directed by Renny Harlin, was one of the more ambitious projects of Warner Bros, conceived as a prequel to The Exorcist one of the most influential horror films of all time and a box office hit that redefined the term "blockbuster" in its time.
Schrader happened to be seated next to William Peter Blatty, the writer whose novel was the basis for the first Exorcist. After a few frames, Schrader noticed that Blatty began to fidget nervously in his seat, and as Harlin's film approached its end, this escalated into teeth-grinding and, finally, foaming at the mouth. An uninformed observer might have interpreted Blatty's behaviour as a symptom of the same demonic possession that the writer had described in his novel, but Schrader knew that there was a far more prosaic explanation behind it - impotent but justified rage.
At that moment, Schrader felt quite uncomfortable, as watching the film was evoking joy with the same intensity as it was evoking anger in his neighbour. Schrader, perhaps the only one in the audience, greeted the film with a smile on his face, despite sharing everyone’s opinion on the quality of Harlin's work.
Schrader had, for Warner Bros, shot a prequel to The Exorcist a year before Harlin, under the working title Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist. But the working copy of the $30 million film did not please the producers due to the lack of violence, horror scenes and action. Instead of doing what would have been normal practice in such cases - re-editing the film or possibly shooting a few more scenes - they shelved Schrader's film and hired Harlin to shoot a completely new film, this time worth $50 million.
At the premiere, Schrader realised that Harlin's version - made entirely in line with the producers' wishes, that is, in line with the conventions of today's Hollywood "horror films" - would experience such a box office and critical failure that the producers would be forced to exhume his version just to wash away the shame. And that's exactly what happened, and Schrader's version has recently appeared in select cinemas and video stores.
The main character of the film is Father Lancaster Merrin, the Catholic priest portrayed by the legendary Swedish actor Max von Sydow in the original Exorcist. Here, his character in his younger days is played by Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård. After experiencing a traumatic event in the Netherlands during World War II, he began to lose his faith and devoted himself to archaeological excavations. One of them takes him to Kenya, then a British colony, where an ancient Christian church has been discovered in a remote province. Merrin soon discovers that an even older pagan temple lies beneath the church. At this point, members of the expedition, residents of the nearby town and the indigenous tribe begin to witness a series of unusual and dark events. Some of them are related to Chechee (played by Billy Crawford), a disabled native child who is going through a miraculous healing process at the time.
Although Dominion shares the location, time and basic plot elements with The Beginning, even the most casual viewers will notice that these are completely different films. The main reason for this is not the fact that some of the actors are different, but the approach. While Harlin understood his film as an opportunity to spend $50 million on megalomaniacal scenes of action and senseless bloodshed that only occasionally connect to something resembling characters and a story, Schrader, as in some of the horror films he had previously directed (like Cat People), understood the genre as an opportunity for a cinematic essay on some serious themes. Thus, Dominion is much closer to drama than horror, at least in the sense in which Hollywood sees it today. Instead of confronting the audience with irrational evil through head-turning, vomiting and similar shock effects, as Friedkin did in the 1970s, Schrader does it through Merrin's tormented face, which had already seen similar horrors in the war. Skarsgård is quite helped in this by the youthful Gabriel Mann in the role of the Catholic priest whose idealism and good intentions will serve as a path to hell. Schrader understood Dominion as a classic story of the struggle between good and evil, so he used the desert environment to make the film look as similar to classic Westerns as possible.
The result of Schrader's efforts is impressive, and Dominion is, as could be expected, light years ahead of Harlin's fiasco. However, the film is far from perfect. Some of the special effects are not "ironed out", and the choice of music is, to put it mildly, far below the standards set by Mike Oldfield in the famous original. Clara Bellar, whose character of a doctor tormented by memories of Nazi concentration camps had great dramatic potential, was quite disappointing, almost as much as Isabella Scorupco in Harlin's version.
Dominion might not have looked so good if another film hadn't been so bad, nor if it had won sympathy thanks to the madness of the producers. But despite this, it deserves recommendations as a refreshingly old-fashioned, intelligent and entertaining example of a genre that Hollywood is so persistently doing wrong.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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