With the recent barrel-scraping Exorcist: Believer movie and the 50th anniversary of the original, it’s probably a good time to own stocks in The Exorcist. Or maybe not, given the box-office returns of Believer, as uninspiring as the film itself.
In any case, the documentary The Exorcist Untold is a timely release, no doubt intended to capitalise on a wave of Exorcist hype that failed to really materialise.
Perhaps it’s just the fact that I spent October and November watching all the past films and all the many commentaries and other special features available in the Blu-Ray boxset, but there doesn’t seem to be much to justify this new documentary’s existence. It’s always a pleasure to hear any of the myriad hair-raising behind-the-scenes stories, or to see footage of director William Friedkin being a psycho asshole (you can entertain yourself by picturing Friedkin and writer William Peter Blatty as Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar, respectively), but all we really have here is a lot of archival footage and a story that you could just as well hear on the Blu-Ray special features, in any of several books, or some retrospective article online somewhere, or best of all, in Mark Kermode’s definitive documentary The Fear of God.
That’s not to say that The Exorcist Untold is bad; it gets everything right. It’s just that everything has been got right before, and there seems to be little reason to shell out any money for this documentary in particular. Other than for the sake of its release date, why does it exist?