Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist

So Paul Schrader made this somewhat elegiac Exorcist prequel, and the studio rejected it and hired Renny Harlin to preside over a rewrite/reshoot, which was released in 2004 as Exorcist: The Beginning. And then that film’s poor critical and commercial performance led them to try to squeeze a few bucks out of a limited release of Schrader’s version less than a year later. And neither of the films is good. And I find the whole debacle very confusing.

Why did Schrader sign on in the first place? The specific commercial demands of an Exorcist sequel are entirely at odds with the kind of films he makes, and William Peter Blatty’s experience with studio meddling on The Exorcist III (“Uh, Bill, where’s the exorcism?”) presaged Schrader’s fate with startling clarity.

And who is this supposed audience clamoring for a backstory on Father Lankester Merrin, who led the exorcism in the first film? There are now three films with conflicting accounts of his spiritual fisticuffs in Africa after WWII, and none of them were successful by any reasonable measure. All due respect to Max von Sydow, but if I were Jason Miller, whose Father Damien Karras was the heart and soul of The Exorcist, I’d be justifiably miffed at getting passed over for the prequel treatment not once but three times by the guy from the final act who just happened to be on the poster.

Anyway, when Morgan Creek finally decided to release Schrader’s film, and someone for some reason thought Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist would be a good name for it, they gave Schrader a paltry sum for the remaining post-production work. Among the tasks that required extreme resourcefulness was the score, and as luck would have it, Schrader’s son was a big fan of Dog Fashion Disco, a band of Maryland goobers whose primary musical ambition was to live inside the first Mr. Bungle album. In the unlikely event that the Washington, DC metropolitan area’s finest circus ska metal troupe knew who Angelo Badalamenti was, they might have been as bewildered as anyone to see themselves share a film score credit with him. I bring all this up to point out that since Dog Fashion Disco’s publishing company retains the band’s original name, the closing credits to Paul Schrader’s Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist include the words Hug the Retard, LLC.