Confession of a cinematic sinner

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. My new movie, Exorcist: The Beginning, is nearly unwatchable—and I know it.

I substitute gore and disgusting scenes involving maggots and blood for the thrilling, pulsating fear that distinguished William Friedkin’s original. My movie more closely resembles the puerile and bewildering Bones, minus only Snoop Dogg in a pimp suit.

I am embarassingly heavy-handed in my character expositions. In one of the first scenes, I have someone tell the archaeologist protagonist (Stellan Skarsgard) that he is a hardscrabbled ex-priest who has become bitter after witnessing unspeakable atrocities—as if he didn’t know. “You’re a man who has lost faith in everything but himself,” says the character between squinty grimaces. All that’s missing is a PowerPoint presentation.

I fail to establish a context for the gory goings-on, leaving the audience querulous and uninterested. To sell 1949 Kenya to a contemporary American crowd, a good director would have made sure to explain what was at stake and why we should care about the fate of some buried church and the fate of a remote village. I didn’t bother.

I forget the value of genuine emotion, even in the horror genre. M. Night Shyamalan packs more emotional wallop in the first two minutes of The Village than I do in my entire movie, and as a result my characters remain strangers to the audience all the way to the end. And the romance that awkwardly springs up between the archaeologist and the pretty doctor (Izabella Scorupco)? That was just a joke—I thought the editors were going to take it out, but I guess they forgot.

I settle for the cheap stuff when it comes to special effects, producing a cartoonish Cairo and weak attempts at computer-generated hyenas.

I dabble in Nazi and British colonial themes but do not flesh out my ideas and ultimately say nothing. And I don’t know where I get off comparing colonialism to the Holocaust. One of Geena’s stray arrows must have struck me in the head.

I’m not totally at fault. The performances are almost all atrocious. The dialogue is poorly written. The production of the movie had several false starts, with multiple directors jumping ship, and it lost much of its momentum when Liam Neeson dropped out as the lead.