In the summer of 1977, I saw a movie that would change my life.

No, not that one. I mean, yes, I saw Star Wars multiple times, and my first published byline was a review of it that I wrote for a small-town paper. But I’m referring instead to Exorcist II: The Heretic.

I was 14 that year, spending the summer with my sister’s family in Missouri. My sister was 16 years older than me, so I was left to my own devices most of the time. And once I discovered the two teenage girls who lived right across the street, you can imagine where those devices led me.

But i had already developed a love of film, even though my critical faculties were still a work in progress. I knew that The Exorcist had been a huge deal, one that I hadn’t seen (I was only ten the year it came out, and this was long before any sort of home video). But the commercials made the sequel look amazing (the trailer, on YouTube, is genuinely cool). I begged my brother-in-law to take me, since I’d never been to an R-rated movie before (and did not realize that, as Alan Spencer says, the R rating is designed to “keep out those under 18 without money”). And I worked up the nerve to invite one of those teenage girls, Gina, to go with us. She had no interest in the movie, or me; I think she went just to get out of the house.

The movie was, shall I say…unexpected.

Since I’d never seen The Exorcist, I had nothing to compare this to, but the gore was minimal, the scares were nonexistent, and the overall effect was . . . odd. Several scenes prominently featured teenage Linda Blair’s jiggling breasts, which didn’t seem as creepy to me then as it does now. I genuinely didn’t know what to make of it. Access to reviews wasn’t as easy then (you had to get the magazines or newspapers day and date, or you were out of luck) so I had nothing to guide me. Yet there was something about it that stuck with me.

I read the making-of paperback, and wish I’d held onto it since it’s out of print now and sells for a small fortune. I bought the soundtrack, which became my introduction to Ennio Morricone. I wanted to read the novelization, but there wasn’t one. No one else I knew saw it, save for my brother-in-law, who gave it this backhanded review: “It was a very well-made movie.”

And that was it for the next few years. I didn’t see it again until the home video boom of the 80s, when I watched it on VHS and discovered that my initial WTF was, in fact, the right response. Because by any conventional standards, Exorcist II: The Heretic is a hot mess.

And yet . . .

I can’t claim it’s an undiscovered gem, because it’s been watched and written about pretty much since it opened, and the critical consensus has barely wavered. Yes, visually it’s excellent, the music is great, and the ideas are truly ahead of their time. But against that, you have some of the most wooden acting you’ll ever see; imagine if Keanu Reeves played every role, even the sixteen-year-old Regan, and you’ll get some idea. And the cast were not B-string slackers: Richard Burton, Louise Fletcher, cameos by James Earl Jones and Ned Beatty. If you can’t pull performances out of them, the problem isn’t with the cast, it’s with the director, in this case John Boorman.

Which is not to say Boorman is a hack. He’s made at least two acknowledged classics, Deliverance and Excalibur, along with Point Blank, Hope and Glory, and The Emerald Forest. But he also made Zardoz, a quintessential WTF movie, and that seems to be the Boorman who showed up for Exorcist II. As a result, it has gone down in history as possibly the worst sequel ever.

Still, over the years I kept returning to it. Part of it was nostalgia, but part of it was an aspect of the story that somehow got missed among all the production design. The story of a teenage girl who’d once been possessed having to go through it again was, in fact, a great idea. The idea of a cleric who wanted to help and had to parse out the truth was a tremendous character concept. They were, in fact, wasted in Exorcist II: The Heretic.

So I decided that maybe I should pick them up, shake them off, dip them in batter and deep fry them.

And that is first part of the origin of my new horror novel, Dandelion. Stay tuned for the part that involves big-box stores. And here’s a sidebar post on the kick-ass theme music by Ennio Morricone.