By 1990, The Exorcist had already cemented itself as prestige horror: terrifying, meticulously crafted, and culturally unavoidable. Then came Exorcist II: The Heretic, a garish, mystical mess that almost killed the franchise. And yet, despite that disaster, audiences and studios still wanted a third installment – something that could restore the series’ dignity.
The author of the original book, William Peter Blatty, didn’t initially want to write a sequel. However, he did have an idea for a story starring Lieutenant Kinderman (a major character in the book who barely got a cameo in the first film). What followed was a classic example of production hell, one of the less glamorous circles of hell, reserved for directors arguing over final cuts while studio executives poke them with pitchforks made of contract clauses.
Both William Friedkin and John Carpenter circled the project over the years before ultimately bowing out. Blatty turned his story into the bestselling 1983 novel Legion before eventually helming the adaption himself. And what we eventually got was 1990’s The Exorcist III, a film far closer in spirit to that original great film: measured, atmospheric, and mercifully free of hippy-dippy crap.
Yep, this time we got some good fucking food.
Fifteen years after the Regan MacNeil incident, Georgetown is unsettled by a string of murders that bear the unmistakable hallmarks of the long-dead Gemini Killer (Brad Dourif) – a sadistic psychopath executed fifteen years earlier. The crimes are grotesque and ritualistic, complete with decapitations and taunting messages left behind for the police.
Lieutenant William Kinderman (George C Scott), now older and spiritually worn thin, takes the case personally. As he digs deeper, the evidence becomes increasingly impossible: the methods are identical to the Gemini’s, down to details never released to the public. Either a copycat has impossible knowledge, or something far stranger is at work.
Kinderman’s investigation leads him to a psychiatric hospital, where he encounters a mysterious inmate known only as Patient X – a man who bears an uncanny resemblance to Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller) from the first film, and claims to be the Gemini Killer. The only problem with that is that both men are supposed to be long dead. You may remember that when we last saw Karras he was, like those Bananas in Pyjamas, coming down those stairs. By which I mean he fell down them and bashed his brains in.
But regardless of the truth of the matter, the body count continues to rise, with Patient X seemingly at the centre of it all despite being kept under lock and key. Kinderman is forced to confront the possibility that a great evil has not only returned, but embedded itself within broken institutions meant to heal and protect.
As it turns out, Karras did survive that fall. Somehow. But unfortunately, old Pazuzu (the demon possessing Regan) was pretty pissed at being thwarted. So he transferred the soul of the Gemini Killer, who died at that very moment, into Karras’ body. It’s like Quantum Leap. Which I suppose is more preferable to the usual means in which a serial killer would wear your skin.
The Quantum Leap comparison works well for the Karras–Gemini dynamic. At times we see Karras, the flesh-and-blood man, and at other times Gemini, the spirit inhabiting him. The shifts are disorienting but intentional, emphasising the tension between the corporeal and the supernatural.
The film culminates in a desperate exorcism inside the hospital to defeat Gemini and save Karras’ soul. It’s less a triumphant confrontation than a final, exhausted attempt to sever the connection between the possessed body and the malignant force animating it. The resolution offers no grand victory, only temporary relief, as if the darkness has merely been delayed rather than destroyed.
If the original film was about faith under assault, and Heretic drifted into cosmic abstraction, The Exorcist III is about something colder and more pervasive: rot. Slow, human rot. Blatty shifts the locus of horror away from the private bedroom and into public institutions. The Church is tired. The police force is worn down. The hospital – where most of the action takes place – feels sterile, impersonal, and spiritually hollow.
The Gemini Killer embodies this decay. His philosophy is rooted in his mockery of faith, of meaning, of human dignity. His murders are theatrical acts of desecration, designed not just to kill but to destabilise. He wants chaos to feel inevitable. That’s where the horror lives: not merely in possession, but in the suggestion that suffering is random, cruel, and unearned.
This is not a bombastic, “scare a minute” horror. There are no hypnosis machines, no locust theology, no psychedelic dream logic. Well apart from that one weird sequence in which Kinderman dreams of heaven and it plays out like some farce, more similar in tone and execution to Blatty’s previous film The Ninth Configuration. A dream in which Fabio of all people shows up as an angel. Apparently Kinderman has the same dreams as my mum.
The horror in The Exorcist III is built on atmosphere, dialogue, and psychological dread. A slow burn that trusts patience over cheap shocks, the film makes corridors and shadowed rooms feel haunted, overlaid with subtle, unsettling sounds.
Its most famous moment, the now-legendary hospital corridor scene, is widely considered one of the greatest jump scares ever committed to film precisely because it’s earned, not imposed. Blatty takes the time to build up the scene, continually playing with our expectations until blam we’re treated to the horror of someone running with scissors.
Then there’s Brad Dourif, whose performance as the Gemini Killer elevates the entire film. He’s volatile, intimate, and disturbingly articulate. Some of the film’s best moments is just him delivering rambling and unhinged monologues. It’s quite Shakespearean, but you know – actually fun. Dourif plays evil as something that thinks, reasons, and enjoys explaining itself.
The writing is dense and unapologetically talkative. Characters sit in rooms discussing faith, death, and the soul. The terror often lies not in what’s shown, but in what might happen next. It’s a stylistic cousin to the original’s grounded realism, filtered through introspection rather than procedure. Some viewers find the tone uneven, with its vaudeville dream sequences and a studio-mandated climatic exorcism – both of which feel louder and less refined than the rest of the film.
Even so, The Exorcist III accomplishes what Heretic never could. It respects the original without attempting to replicate it. Blatty understands what he is going for here and isn’t interested in sheer spectacle alone. He uses restraint where it’s needed and goes all out when it’s appropriate. And at its core, this is a film about tired men. Kinderman mourns lost friendship and eroding belief. Father Dyer clings to ritual as comfort rather than certainty. There’s a palpable spiritual exhaustion running through every frame.
One idea that I come back to when I watch this film is that institutions are doomed to erosion because they can never truly “win.” The police will never end crime, hospitals will never end death, and the Church will never eliminate sin – their function is maintenance, not victory. That endless cycle invites fatigue, bureaucracy, and spiritual thinning, creating cracks where chaos can seep in.
The Gemini Killer exploits this fragility, turning his murders into proof that order is temporary and entropy inevitable. By the end, evil isn’t defeated so much as postponed – pushed back just far enough to keep going. And on an entirely unrelated note, there are three more films in this series after this one (I won’t be reviewing them).
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