Re: the exorcism in exorcist III

Welcome! New fans here are always great. 😀

The answer I’d like to tell you is: The Demon (Pazuzu or whomever… is up for debate in another thread here) simply has lots of demonic powers and exhibits them in different ways and on different occasions; hence the differences of such between those found in THE EXORCIST, and now in THE EXORCIST III (there is no “II” in this trilogy… if you ask me, and many, many other folks around these parts!). As for why he was scared, everybody’s different and acts differently from time to time; Morning might be typically brave, but here just buckles under the pressure; hard to say. As for what the demon did to him, that’s his face getting pulled off. You didn’t recognize that? 😛

Now as for the real answer to all of this:

Morgan Creek shoe-horned this exorcism sequence, and thus, this particular exorcist — Father Morning — into this film. These elements weren’t even present or conceived of until it was decided, “A William Peter Blatty film featuring peripheral characters from the first film needs an exorcism! And let’s get Jason Miller in there somewhere, too! Who cares that Lee J. Cobb and O’Malley are unavailable… The more original actors in this film the better — the closer it will resemble the original Exorcist film. Every little bit helps!” In short, the exorcism and exorcist therein are really and truly pointless when you consider the kind of story Blatty intended to make before Morgan Creek at the last minute deemed it not scary enough and… made the film their own, as they did more than a decade later with that other “not scary enough” Exorcist sequel, the original prequel that this time already had an exorcism so they decided, “let’s just remake the whole thing.” The Exorcist III was just a warm-up for them in dumbing-down. But unfortunately for The Exorcist III, Blatty’s original version of the film is history — lost — whereas with Paul Schrader’s scrapped prequel, it got both a theatrical release and a DVD.

I hope I’ve helped. 🙂

M.I.K.E.