Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)

Exorcist II: The Heretic arrives in 1977 as a metaphysical thriller assembled by John Boorman from the theories of Teilhard de Chardin, a swarm of locusts, and a biofeedback device called a synchronizer. Its ambitions are theological and psychic, never social. Whatever progressive sensibilities it carries are incidental, the residue of casting decisions made in a Burbank office, not an argument the screenplay wishes to advance.

The casting offers the usual faint signals. James Earl Jones plays Kokumo, a Black African scientist studying how to prevent locust swarms, and his race is never made a subject of anything. The locust research is agricultural science, not an environmental argument. Louise Fletcher's Dr. Gene Tuskin was written as a man and changed to a woman after the fact, a swap that carries no thesis about women in medicine. An autistic girl appears early, and Regan reaches into her mind to grant her speech. The film treats this as a psychic miracle, not a statement about neurodivergence, and the girl's mother is overjoyed in a way that settles the matter.

The screenplay does lecture, though its sermon concerns collective consciousness and psychic powers as a spiritual gift that will one day belong to all humanity. Church politics and demonic metaphysics fill the frame. Economics never enters it, and there is nothing here about bodies, desire, or history. What remains is a film of enormous theological ambition and negligible cultural awareness, executed so poorly that the premiere audience reportedly laughed. The locusts, imported from England, died at a rate of one hundred a day. They had the better exit.