“Once the wings have brushed you, is there no hope?”

I love Exorcist II: The Heretic.

There, I said it. It’s liberating. I have voiced the most shameful secret any horror fan could harbor. I and others like me can now march in the streets with our locust flags flying high, in pride.

I adore this loony, insane, beautiful mess. And a mess it is. Universally reviled, considered one of the biggest turkeys in cinema, Heretic holds up for me as an unintentional comedy and as a weird, original, meta-philosophical bit of art house cinema. It is the perfect example of the 1970’s excesses of visionary egomaniacs with relative carte blanche to make vanity masterpieces, or disasters.

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