New Exorcist II Documentary Battles Decades of Mockery — SkimNews
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- Timothée Chalamet recorded a pre-show message at London's Prince Charles Cinema asking audiences not to laugh "like Max Cady" at older films, citing a "disconnect" when scenes of sex, violence, outdated language or technology jolt modern viewers
- The Prince Charles Cinema, which predominantly screens older films, now plays Chalamet's message alongside its traditional John Waters welcome asking patrons to turn off cellphones
- John Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic — bankrolled by Warner Bros for a then-unprecedented $14m — collapsed at the US box office after opening-week audiences responded to its grand, fantastical approach with confusion and laughter rather than the scares they expected
- Boorman desperately re-edited the film mid-release to give it a darker ending and excise its most-mocked moments, but Warner Bros ruled replacing US prints too costly for a film it had already written off as a sunk cost
- Boorman and the Devil, a new documentary in cinemas this week, attempts to rehabilitate Exorcist II by spotlighting its pioneering Steadicam work and cinematography, though most of its own sympathetic interviewees still concede it's a bad film
- Boorman, now 93, sits for lengthy interviews in the documentary defending his vision but acknowledging he still carries "the old wound" of decades of audience mockery
- Tommy Wiseau's The Room proves the opposite trajectory: the 2003 drama became a cult hit through mass laughter at its bad acting and plotting, and Wiseau himself now personally introduces Prince Charles screenings to A-lister-style adulation
Why it matters: The Prince Charles Cinema is now pre-recording celebrity messages specifically to police audience behavior at repertory screenings — an unusual intervention that signals how seriously repertory operators take the break in immersion that 'performative laughter' causes. Boorman and the Devil's release gives a 93-year-old director a platform to publicly contest a 'worst-of-all-time' verdict he has carried for nearly 50 years, while The Room shows that identical laughter, applied to a film that leans into its own awfulness, can become box-office gold.
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