2025
At no point at any time in my life did it ever occur to me to see Exorcist III. And yet! Here we are!
Apparently written and directed by William Peter Blatty, based on his novel Legion, this picks up seventeen years after the first Exorcist and completely ignores the second one (which I have not seen, but from all accounts it seems like the right choice). Lieutenant Kinderman (the truly, truly marvelous George C. Scott) is investigating murders that match the methods of the Gemini Killer, who was executed seventeen years ago.
But the real glorious beating heart of this movie is the friendship between Kinderman and Father Dyer. It’s the anniversary of Father Karras’s death, and both of them are pretending they’re fine, but they clearly need each other’s company. They meet up to see It’s a Wonderful Life for the 37th time. They bicker about lemon drops. They talk about everything except what’s really bothering them until Dyer finally gets Kinderman to open up about the case.
It was funnier than I was expecting! Not horror-comedy funny, but the wit and humor in their conversations and in the dialogue in general is what I didn’t expect. Kinderman is constantly making jokes that are too smart for everyone around him. He quotes Macbeth (“And tomorrow, and tomorrow…”) when someone tells him the autopsy results will be ready tomorrow. He tells his colleagues when they don’t follow his train of thought, “I was signaling beings on Mars. Maybe they’re listening.” His humor is dry and literary and completely wasted on his coworkers.
But Dyer gets it. They have this easy rapport. Dyer reads Women’s Wear Daily in his hospital bed and when questioned about it says, “Am I supposed to give spiritual advice in a vacuum?” When Kinderman asks another priest if he has a favorite picture, the guy deadpans, “The Fly.” These priests match Kinderman’s weird energy in a way his cop colleagues never could.
Kinderman has an entire deadpan monologue about his mother-in-law keeping a live carp in his bathtub to keep it fresh before cooking it and he doesn’t want to be there and see that fish. It’s absurd, but what he’s really saying is that he doesn’t want to go home. On this day, of all days, he needs his friend.
Later, when Dyer is in the hospital, Kinderman shows up with a stuffed puffin he claims to have found on the street. You see him in the hallway getting into character for a second before storming in saying, “What’s this nonsense?” It’s one of the sweetest things I’ve seen one man do for another in a horror film. Two older men who clearly love each other.
The movie shifts between this warmth and genuine creepiness. There’s an old woman crawling across the ceiling in the background of one scene while the camera stays focused on a conversation in the foreground. This is the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night, like those scenes in Hereditary. (If I had to name this, I guess I’d call it “human beings not …humaning?”) There’s a hospital hallway sequence that’s one long static shot of mundane night shift work….so long and so mundane that you know something is coming, but when it does, it’s still surprising and effective. Brad Dourif (Grima Wormtongue, woo hooo!) is in an isolation cell as Patient X, delivering theatrical, unsettling monologues with gleeful showmanship.
Except I watched the director’s cut, which is restored from VHS footage, so the quality jumps around—some scenes are beautifully clear, others are grainy and awful. Which meant I didn’t realize until I looked it up afterwards that it wasn’t just Brad Dourif in that cell. Apparently, it switches between him and Jason Miller, two different actors playing the same possessed body. I thought it was just one guy the whole time because the picture quality was so inconsistent, I couldn’t tell.
There’s also a dream sequence where Fabio appears as an angel. Samuel L. Jackson shows up as a blind man. There’s a bizarre moment where a doctor practices a speech alone in his office, reading from notes, before Kinderman walks in, and he has to pretend he’s just casually telling him this information. And near the end, when a possessed nurse is about to decapitate Kinderman’s daughter with garden shears, it’s the grandmother who saves her, yanking Julie back by her ponytail while the two cops in the room, one of whom is her father, just stand there impotently.
The director’s cut is Blatty’s original vision before the studio made him reshoot the ending. It’s restored from VHS footage so the quality shifts occasionally, but it’s worth it to see how he intended it to end—bleaker, more final, just Kinderman making an impossible choice. The theatrical version apparently has a whole exorcism sequence tacked on with a priest who appears out of nowhere, but I didn’t see any of that.
This isn’t The Exorcist. How could it be? It’s slower, talkier, more interested in character and dread than shock. It’s a procedural with supernatural elements and philosophical undertones. But it’s good! It’s strange and genuinely unsettling, and the friendship between Kinderman and Dyer makes the horror more appalling and tragic when it comes. Even though I’ve said a lot already, I feel like I still haven’t said too much, so I am going to stop right there in case you haven’t seen it. And if you haven’t, you should.
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