Panic in year Zero!

Jaume Balagueró (discussed in previous [REC]-[REC]² -Quarantine post) recently contributed a piece to the hypothetical-trailer Teaserland project: El Exorcista 5.

Of course, there was no Exorcist 4, or else there were two. Paul Schrader shot the film now known as Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, which was then scrapped; Renny Harlin took over and reshot essentially the entire film, now Exorcist: The Beginning. Until I get to see Schrader's X, I here refer interested parties to my bible on the topic, Scott Foundas' Hell Hath No Fury, which ran for the LA Weekly in 2004, the containing issue subsequently spending at least three years sitting in a stack of reference materials for my occasional consultation.

As the unseen Schrader version grew in reputation, there was some early speculation that it'd see a side-by-side DVD release along with the Harlin film. Some time after Exorcist: The Beginning hit theaters (August 2004) and subsequently DVD (March 2005), the Schrader film saw the light of day as a very limited theatrical run and eventual DVD release (October 2005), which I hereby argue qualifies it as canonical. Both are alternate tellings of the prequel, so each one could be considered The Exorcist Zero, though this numerology has not yet – yet – widely caught on in the film world.

The zeroth installment seems to have premiered in the comic book world. While the true ground zero was underground mainstay Zap Comix, which released an issue #0 in 1967, that was more a middle finger to The Man, or at least a gag on the comic numbering Establishment. The #0 as denotation of prequel would be decades off.

Other than Zap, the first published example I can find came in December 1991 with The Mask #0, a prequel to the Dark Horse miniseries that would become a sizable hit for Jim Carrey a few years later. The Mask character (technically, not a character so much as a mask) featured in a few more miniseries for Dark Horse both before and after the movie, which launched a cartoon series and a sequel. The Mask series had its fans, but #0 was far from a major comics event, unlike something called Unity a year later.


Valiant Comics, launched in 1990, revived a choice few of Gold Key Comics' 1960s roster of characters: Dr. Solar, Man of the Atom; Magnus, Robot Fighter; Turok, Son of Stone. Sadly, The Occult Files of Doctor Spektor did not see revivification. Valiant proved a juggernaut in the early 90s, giving Marvel and DC serious competition for market share. Though Valiant increased rapidly in popularity, it found itself heavily in debt to its parent company, and consequently started work on what would be the defining event of its history, a company-wide (all eight titles!) crossover called Unity, kicking off with Unity #0 in August 1992. Unity 0 was a free sample, a giveaway to get fans into comic shops and hopefully pre-ordering their copies of the upcoming issues. The project was an enormous hit, sending Valiant comics to claim a number of spots on the monthly top-ten sales lists for many months to come. Unity 0 and Unity 1 bookended the 16-issue crossover, lending a certain sort of epic, spacey feel to the thing, but in practical terms, they could as easily have been numbered Unity 1 and Unity 2, or Unity A and Unity B, or Unity Yellow and Unity Blue. Two months after Unity concluded, Rai #0 was released (in November 1992), becoming a massive hit and helping Valiant relaunch the Rai book, while providing a jumping-off point for several new spinoff and related titles. While Rai #0 was a major release, Valiant had already been working with the idea of numbering an issue zero to denote antecedence to established chronology, and did so in a surprising number of ways.

By that time, you might have already walked into your comic shop and bought a copy of Archer & Armstrong #0, available over the counter. Other Valiant takes on the Zero were more ambitious. If you wanted a Harbinger #0 – which in 1992 you definitely did – you had to cut out and mail in coupons from your Harbinger issues #1-6, though you'd be understandably reluctant to take scissors to a comic which fan frenzy had escalated above the $100 mark. If you wanted Solar, Man of the Atom #0, you didn't need to cut anything up, but you did need either dough or prescience; it was serialized throughout the first ten issues. This means that while you could have a Magnus or Harbinger #0 in 1992, you'd have to wait for March 1994 to finish reading Solar #0 – but it also means Solar's seeds were sown first in September of 1991, beating even The Mask #0 to the punch.

After Valiant's sales were at least temporarily saved by zero, other companies pursued the zero effect. Over at Image Comics, Rob Liefeld, not known for his originality (zero for conduct, Rob), rushed Youngblood #0 to press (shocking, considering his inability to get any book out remotely on time) and had it in stores by December '02. A preponderance of imitators soon ground zero into the dirt, and alternate numbering became an occasional, reliably noticeable gimmick. DC, Marvel, and Wizard Magazine had their own takes on the idea (there are comic books numbered ½, 1,000,000, and even less than zero, as when Marvel did a month of -1 issues), but I think we're far enough afield for now.

Video games have taken to the zero numerology – Resident Evil, Silent Hill (renamed SH: Origins), Perfect Dark, Mega Man, Street Fighter – but film has been slower to get carried away. The initial effort seems to be 2000's Ringu 0, the third in the Ringu (The Ring) series, followed in 2004 with Cube Zero, the third in that series as well. Alex Proyas has Dracula Year Zero in development, and the new Star Trek flick was under the working title Star Trek Zero for a brief time; I suspect zero will come to be a more common movie-title suffix in the near future.

So, finally, back to the warring Exorcist prequels. Are they both Zero, or is one Zero and a Half or Zero #2? As they offer alternate takes on the same story, the films don't seem to exist in the same continuity, which makes them alternate zeroes. If we are already drawing from comic logic, we can always further apply it to find we have Exorcist Zero (Harlin) and Exorcist Earth-2 Zero (Schrader). This would make Paul Schrader the evil anti-Renny Harlin, which by God if I hadn't just written extensively on Valiant Comics, you'd be reading a couple pages on right now. Granted, it's more fashionable and less absurd to consider Schrader the good guy and Harlin on the dark side of filmdom, but objectively, Harlin's film somehow seems to have primacy, though the reasons are tenuous. Studio preference, first/wider/theatrical release, even the primacy of EXORCIST in the title over DOMINION.

I'd welcome a more movie-based reading of which film is the main one, as well, and would offer one myself if it weren't some time since I've seen them, and both too closely together to remember details very distinctly. Certainly Schrader's is the better film, though hobbled by some pulled funding, incomplete effects, and limited post-production, it's also not as great as we all had hoped in the collaborative creation of the legend of Paul Schrader's Unreleased Exorcist Movie, wherein we elitist types repeated that we'd heard the studio found it too psychological, too deeply scary, and not gory enough. As it is, it's sort of like Breaker Morant, if it were also Wishmaster.

In any case, there are five Exorcist films, numbered up to Legion, I'm sorry, numbered up to Exorcist III, which means Balagueró's dream project (or momentary amusement) would be either IV or, even following Balagueró's own logic, VI. Comic books dictate that a number zero installment doesn't fill a place sequentially, so if this were a comic, it'd be El Exorcista 4. It's questions like this that keep this blog up nights.