The two prequels to The Exorcist

Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist (2005) Paul Schrader
Exorcist: The Beginning (2004) Renny Harlin

I remember when each of these movies came out and I remember not being interested in seeing either of them.

It was only recently that I discovered the story behind them and it's really interesting.

Morgan Creek hired Paul Schrader (screenwriter of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull) to direct Dominion. When the movie was almost complete they saw it and got nervous. The studio didn't think it would be succsessful so they set the film aside and hired another director to start over and make the movie again. Their new choice was Renny Harlin, director of Die Hard II and Deep Blue Sea. Morgan Creek wanted more of a horror movie and that's what Harlin gave them.

I saw Harlin's The Beginning first. I have to say: it isn't a bad movie. In fact, it's scary and suspenseful- a true horror movie with lots of violence and gore. Most of the actors are good, especially Stellan Skarsgard as Father Merrin. He doesn't look like Max Von Sidow when he was younger, but he looks enough like him that you can imagine that he is the younger version of the character.

The main problem with The Beginning is the special effects. I've read people complaining about CGI before. Over at Final Girl, Stacie Ponder has pointed out its problems in a number of her reviews. I don't watch a lot of recent horror or sci-fi movies so I haven't seen as much, but from what I have seen- including Harlin's Deep Blue Sea- I have to agree.

Just as the sharks in DBS looked dumb and fake, the hyenas in The Beginning look ridiculous. It's only been seven years and already the movie looks dated because of them. Also. at the very beginning of the movie, there's a scene of a battlefield with victims crucified upside-down and you can tell that all of it is done with computers. It's distracting. And all of these "horrific" images have zero impact.

The day after I watched The Beginning I saw Dominion. It's weird because both films have a lot of the same actors and the same sets and the stories are similar. Both films have Stellan Skarsgard as Father Merrin, the CGI hyenas (though Dominion- to its credit- doesn't use them as much), and an unneeded scene of the delivery of a stillborn child.

Another element that both movies share is the backstory. During WWII, Father Merrin is the priest in a small village and a Nazi orders to name the villager who killed one of his soldiers. Father Merrin can't or won't so the Nazi instead orders Father Merrin to select ten villagers to be executed, otherwise the Nazis will gun down everyone in the village.

The way that this scene is handled by each director highlights the main difference between both movies. Harlin inserts fragments of this episode as flashbacks- anytime the movie slows Harlin uses the image of a young girl being shot in the head. It all seems so tacky and corny and cheap.

Schrader plays out the episode in its entirety at the beginning of the movie and it's much more powerful that way. But Schrader does something even better: he ties this incident in with the rest of the movie. It isn't just something that happened to Father Merrin that makes him doubt his faith. It's connected to other events and, in fact, brings the entire movie together.

Harlin's movie was released in 2004 and got bad reviews and didn't make much money. Because of this, Morgan Creek allowed Schrader to finish and release his version, which got better reviews and did a little bit better at the box office.

William Peter Blatty, the writer of The Exorcist and the writer and director of Legion: The Exorcist III said that Exorcist: The Beginning was his "most humiliating professional experience", but that Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist was "a handsome, classy, elegant piece of work".

I don't know about that. First, for all of its many faults (I'm thinking of the scene where the British officer goes crazy and sees his butterfly collection come to life), The Beginning isn't a terrible movie. Its main problem is all the CGI effects.

And Dominion isn't classy or elegant though I'll say it is handsome. It was Schrader who filmed the horrible chilbirth scene that's featured in both movies. And he overuses CGI and special effects too, just not as badly as Harlin does.

But basically, Blatty is right: Dominion is the better movie. If you get the chance, though, watch both (they're on Netflix). I don't think it matters which one you see first. And the stories are different enough that one won't ruin the other.

Just want to mention a few other things-

One of the main characters, Father Francis, is played by different actors. Gabriel Mann plays him in Dominion but he wasn't available to return for the re-shoot so he was replaced by James D'arcy. The funny thing is, both actors are terrible. Gabriel Mann is probably the worst of the two but I liked him better for some reason.

Harlin uses a few elements from tth original Exorcist: the statue of Pazuzu from the Iraq prologue, the St. Christopher medallion, and the clock pendulum (the pendulum is used incorrectly- in the original movie it was a sign that Father Merrin was getting older and wouldn't survive the battle this time; there was no reason to feature it in The Beginning- Harlin just wanted to use an element from the original).

Dominion features a weird dream sequence. I don't understand it but, in its way, it wasn't too different from the dream sequence in The Exorcist, and the neat thing was, the sequence included a quick shot of the white-faced demon from the original.

Also, during the credits for Dominion I happened to notice that the music was done by Angelo Badalamenti, the man who does the music for David Lynch's movies. I was surprised because Badalamenti's music is pretty distinctive I'd think I would've noticed it during the movie but I didn't.