Disasterpieces: A New Hope

So, continuing on from my previous post, I'd like to talk about the kind of intellectual avenues that disasters like Alien 3 and Exorcist II: The Heretic lead you down.


The first thing I wonder after films like this is, could you actually make a decent sequel to The Exorcist, or to Aliens? Is there a point in which the dramatic potential within a particular story has been thoroughly exhausted? The curve within which new ground can be covered and new aspects added to characters plummets exponentially downward? Our greatest cultural triumphs are not open-ended: in fact, the only continuously moving forwards works of literature and of the moving image in our society today are newspapers and soap operas. Everything else has to end at some point. Are some story's natural limits much closer than others? Or is it simply a case that with enough wit and determination, any story can be continued, but at a far greater creative cost to the individuals involved making it than if they were applying this effort to an original story?

I would argue the latter statement is probably truer than the former. Someone clever enough can always work out a way to extend a story - it's simply that the limits already set by what's already happened in the story world restrict the ability to cover new ground the way that clever person could if they were allowed to dedicate their energies to an original story with no such restrictions.

My second question to come from disasterpieces is normally, "Well, if it's possible to make a good version of this film - how would you do it?" As both Alien 3 and Exorcist II: The Heretic are sequels, I would say that the secret to a successful treatment would be to reconstruct the fundamental elements of the previous films and add a new concept that pivots the story into a new place and allows opportunities to break new ground as a storyteller. In simple terms, giving the audience something they will enjoy but did not expect - which was exactly the experience they want to repeat. By dissecting Alien 3 and Exorcist II and the expectations the audience had of these movies like an algebra problem, you can create some interesting suggestions.


First up, The Exorcist. The first film was as much a drama as it was a horror film - something the sequel film-makers ignored. It's impossible to create a convincing sequel to a drama using any of the same characters going through similar motions. You can't imagine a truly successful or interesting Requiem for a Dream 2 or a Raging Bull 2, and likewise, no-one wanted an Exorcist II with the same characters doing the same things.

The Exorcist, the original film, was set in the present day, in a world in which not even the Catholic Church believes demonic possession is real. That's examined perfectly in the first movie. And where can you go in the present world that will offer a different emotional landscape for a sequel? You can try to find somewhere primitive - like The Heretic did, but Africa adds nothing to the story, because it's still got the same two groups of people: a few with faith who believe demons exist, and a large majority who don't.



So the obvious place to situate The Exorcist II to create a rich and different dramatic landscape is in the past. If  the sequel was set in a time and place in which nearly everyone believes in demonic possession, where sceptics are lone voices, and instead of moving straight towards demonic possession, we begin the film with the terrifying idea that people in this world believe that normal people around them are routinely possessed by witches and devils, we've turned the first movie on its head. In The Exorcist, we saw one demonic possession that was real. In this new idea of The Exorcist II, we could see a bunch of people who are not possessed (mentally challenged, criminals, the wrongly accused) but who are treated as such. A successful location for such a story could be Puritan New England between the 1640s and 1680s.


Now, the binary opposition between protagonist and antagonist in the first film is entirely clear: entirely decent priests with God in their hearts, versus a terrifying demon who wants to destroy the soul of the child it's in. When both priests sacrifice themselves at the end of the first film, that's the furthest logical extension you can make to the Christ-like priest characters and their arcs.


The only effective way to create a new and surprising opposition between our protagonist and antagonist in a second film is to create an exorcist who is almost as bad as the demon who he is trying to cast out. Let's describe this character as a Witchfinder - a man who routinely claims to find demons in people, who burns innocent women as witches, a man who some believe in private must be possessed by a demon himself to carry out such wicked punishments fellow Christians. What if he comes across a child possessed of a demon, a demon that tells him that it has come in human form to punish him, and will jump from one body to another until it ends up possessing the Witchfinder and his whole family?

What if the Witchfinder swears to exorcise the spirit, cast it out of human form, then burn the child afterwards to ensure that in no way can anyone else - especially his own children -  be contaminated?


Now we've set up an interesting, new third act that builds on the structure of the third film - because we're not just wondering who we're rooting before between the demon and this vile zealot, or whether or not the child can be exorcised - but we're also fearful of what will happen when he is. Throw in a spiritually beleaguered assistant, and the dark suggestion that this Witchfinder might be possessed by a spirit of his own, or might well already be possessed or at least mentally ill - and we suddenly have a lot of interesting possibilities. Especially if the Witchfinder believes by the end of the film that his own children have become possessed by the devil and he must kill him - a complete reversal of the child/parent relationship in the first film - and you've got a much stronger- albeit sketchy - concept for the structural integrity of an Exorcist sequel than any of the ones that followed the original. Because once again, we start with the idea that it's a drama based around the concept of faith, rather than a bunch of kids with weird potty-mouth voices and funny contact lenses climbing up the walls.



The only question now is how to connect these two movies. How is this Exorcist movie linked to the previous one? I would argue that you'd do it very simply at the start of the film and leave it at that: a single title that might read something like this:

"Exorcisms were not always a curiosity.

Records show that in 1694, in Blue Plains, a small township in Maryland near present-day Georgetown, 36 young men and women were exorcised and 15 'unsaved' burnt at the stake.

There are no records to illustrate whether these demonic posessions were real, or the result of mass hysteria.

Only the name of the Exorcist remains: John Tyler."

So this is one way (and only one way) that the failure of Exorcist II: The Heretic actually suggests what I think sounds like a much better film.


2) Now let's take Alien 3. I'd say Alien 3 is more complicated example, because it has a first-rate sequel in the bag. I believe James Cameron is the undisputed master of sequels. In both Alien and Terminator, he manages to flip the concept of the first film on its head and create a satisfying conclusion to the idea begun in the first. Apart from realising he could turn the lone, silent, preditory alien in the first film into an army of seething insects in the second, changing the genre from pyschological horror to war thriller, Cameron isolated a small element of the first film and built it beautifully into a two-film character arc for our main character. Cameron teases out the alienation of Ripley in the first film (who ends up completely on her own) and isolates her through the first act of Aliens, then gives her real human interaction, friends and a surrogate daughter at the end of the second film. They may still float into the unknown, but they do so together.


So, how do you create a sequel out of that? I think the answer lies in what Ridley Scott himself said about an Alien sequel: you've got to go and explore where the aliens come from. This is the thing that Alien 3 and the much worse Alien Resurrection seem to forget - the films are not called Ripley. They're called Alien, and in the first move, you actually see a bunch of different aliens - they just happen to be dead and fossilized on an alien ship that you never see again through any of the following films.

So a third film has a wealth of opportunity to go back and tell us something new about the Alien universe, to transform the fear of the unknown - which is what drives the first film - into the excitement of discovery. If the first film was a horror, and the second twists the genre into an action movie, the third could pull the genre again, into an adventure/horror. A group of people are sent to find out where the aliens come from - after the first two movies, wouldn't you think there would be some interest?


We'd have to remove 'The Company' from the equation. By being revealed as the bad guys for two successive movies, any future dealings with this particular corrupt entity are boring as shit. And isn't it obvious that the aliens have some kind of 'company' of their own - that's what created the alien? What if they have dark plans for creatures like us, too - plans that involve searching societies like ours - societies where we are the 'aiien' to them, and transform and subsume us into their world?


I'm not going to say there isn't a massive risk approaching the Alien story this way - and that is that it risks stripping all the 'alien-ness' out of it if you pull away the veil too much. I would suggest that the less-is-more approach of the group discovering just one distant alien colony, far from the centre of this alien universe, where our group of protagoninsts quickly go from the excitement of discovery to the panic of escaping with their lives, having experienced just the tip of the iceberg - would be the most effective way to bring the story forward.

And the underlying concept - changing the world of the first two movies so that instead of their being an alien in our world, we are an alien in theirs - is a stronger starting position than either Alien 3 or Alien Resurrection.

Anyway - that's my two cents born of how much these two movies make me think. Do you agree with the ideas I've extrapolated for sequels to these movies, or do you think I'm full of shit?

Let me know in the comments.