Few movies invite as much derision as Exorcist II: The Heretic. So lambasted is John Boorman’s 1977 follow-up to William Friedkin’s 1973 horror smash The Exorcist that it has ceased to bear any personality of its own. Instead, The Heretic only rears its head when placed in comparison to its predecessor, and not at all favourably: Boorman’s approach in steering away from scares in favour of spiritual philosophy saw critics and audiences turn away in their droves. Nor has time been kind: The Heretic regularly tops lists of worst sequels and worst movies ever made.

That said, such a scorned movie leaves behind a fascinating legacy. Enter director David Kittredge, whose terrific, long-gestating documentary Boorman and the Devil takes the moral high ground, reclaiming dignity from disaster to fascinating, inspiring, and surprisingly moving effect. This is a film that excavates much goodwill from the cinematic rubble, not least in the candid interviews with Boorman himself, shot over one day, in which the veteran director palpably reconciles with the movie that nearly killed him, both physically and professionally.

Exhaustively researched and propulsively told, Boorman and the Devil follows a traditional doc route, but it’s the incidental pleasures that yield surprises and big laughs along the way. The natural jumping-off point is The Exorcist itself, one of the biggest blockbusters of its day, a cause celebre and the first horror movie to ever be Oscar-nominated for Best Picture. It was inevitable that studio Warner Bros would warrant a sequel, and Kittredge’s film makes one thing absolutely clear: no one, least of all the eventually appointed helmer Boorman, went into The Heretic (later retroactively dubbed Exorcist II) with bad intentions.

The sense of poignancy and humour escalates as it becomes clear how Boorman’s vision was subject to extenuating circumstances, notably an ever-changing script that bamboozled returning star Linda Blair and most other members of the production, Boorman rejecting the terror of The Exorcist in favour of tribal mysticism and people riding locusts. Kittredge sensibly allows the director to answer for himself on this front, and the answers are fascinatingly complex, sitting at that juncture of artistic pedigree (the filmmaker was hot stuff after 1972’s Deliverance) and a wholesale failure to read the room on a commercial level.

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The joyous nuggets keep on coming, from veteran thespian Richard Burton’s canny way of avoiding tedious table reads to the delightful Louise Fletcher’s recollections on pretty much everything. Inadvertently or not, Kittredge’s film opens a fascinating window into a lost way of making movies, where it’s compelling lead star Blair to take a physical walk off a multi-storey skyscraper to the recreation of the African savannah on a Hollywood backlot. Spirited reminiscences from the A-list directorial likes of Joe Dante only reinforce the sentiment.

In one of the production’s most significant crises, the sand used for the Africa location got into Boorman’s lungs and gave him a devastating fever that almost ended his life and the movie in one fell swoop. The movie’s notorious initial preview screening in Pasadena, gleefully recounted by Friedkin himself on more than one occasion, also gets another welcome and highly amusing airing, this time bolstered by recollections from those who were inside the theatre at the time.

It could all feel like a wallow in pretentious masochism, but Kittredge’s editorial stance never sneers. It instead observes with a sense of bemused awe the elusive stage when ambition curdles into folly, something that happens to the best of us in a variety of different contexts. The key difference here is the presence of several million dollars on the line, not to mention the overarching legacy of a horror classic that all but doomed this sequel out of the gate.

The Heretic’s reputation may be cursed, but when we come full circle back to Boorman, visibly emotionally battered but with his wry head held high, one perceives the value of sticking to one’s principles, ridiculous oversized locusts and all.