Ellen Burstyn returns for David Gordon Green’s The Exorcist: Believer
The Exorcist gets Halloween-ified in a trilogy of films that looks exactly like you expect it to
Aux News The Exorcist
When Jason Blum told CinemaCon that David Gordon Green was doing to The Exorcist what he did for Halloween—to “extend and update it”—he wasn’t kidding. The first film of a new Exorcist trilogy, The Exorcist: Believer, looks like a similarly loud and intense legacy sequel, complete with returning cast members and not one, but two possessed little girls.
While Blumhouse hasn’t released a trailer publicly, the studio played it at CinemaCon, revealing the plot and tone of the film, which we’re more than happy to relay to The A.V. Club faithful. The trailer follows two families whose daughters go missing. Found in the woods three days later, the girls have no memory of what happened. But, get this: They’re both possessed.
Like Halloween, the trailer relies on some familiar features from the original, like a possessed girl approaching a group of people, this time a church, and doing some wacky Pazuzu stuff in front of God and the world. In this case, she’s covered in blood and chanting, “The body and the blood!” Now that’s what I call an Exorcist thing.
Ellen Burstyn is standing in for Jamie Lee Curtis, returning as Chris MacNeil, a survivor fighting their [Jamie Lee Curtis voice] trauma. And to connect with other families suffering from possessed daughter syndrome, MacNeil wrote a book and does YouTube videos about having a child that vomits pea soup in your face. Sorry, no Linda Blair in this one, but maybe there will be some shots of newspapers explaining what happened to her.
Fans of his Halloween trilogy will recognize Green’s approach to horror reboots, while any detractors will likely experience Regan-like symptoms of their own. The only question left is, who will play Corey in film three?
The power of Christ compels you to go see The Exorcist: Believer this October.
18 Comments
Man, that is a terrible title.
So who wants to tell them we already got this, and it was pretty awesome?
We already got satisfying sequel in both novel and film form with William Peter Blatty’s “Legion”.The novel is excellent while the film is conpromised by studio meddling it’s still entertaining and a director’s cut is available…although I prefer the theatrical release.
If Green puts his stamp on it, it will gorier, dumber, and completely miss the point of the original.
I’m cautiously optimistic, I think. The book, and its sequel (Legion, which was filmed as Exorcist III [no one wants to admit that II exists – it had Richard Burton and some wasps or bees or something and not much more]) are good, with a lot more to them than was in either movie.Lt. Kinderman (played by Lee J. Cobb in The Exorcist and by George C. Scott in Exorcist III) is a compelling and interesting character, in print and on screen. A highly educated, religiously curious homicide detective – you could do worse than to have him be at least a focus for a film trilogy.Which maybe Green isn’t doing, but… you know, he should.
“Which maybe Green isn’t doing, but… you know, he should.”Yes, I agree. They should make a trilogy following Kinderman, who was in his 60s the last time we saw him over thirty years ago.
HUH. Never realized it before now, but that’s twice that George C. Scott has taken on a role originally played by Lee J Cobb. They were both Juror #3 in “12 Angry Men”.
(Also weird for me personally because I recently bought both from Amazon on a whim and a local theater is playing the Lumet version this weekend. Synchronicity is funny.)
I liked his first Halloween film but the sequels were so bad I can’t believe they gave him another classic 70s horror property to run into the dirt. And didn’t the Exorcist TV series already do some of this premise?
Believer? I barely even know her!
i loved the recent Halloween trilogy. Can’t wait to see this. I wish he would do a Scream trilogy. His and McBride’s humour would be awesome in Woodsboro.
I’d rather see The Exorcist: Belieber, in which a Justin Bieber fan is cured of their unnatural, and presumably Satanic, ability to tolerate his music.
Another case of “why, when you could have created something fresh?” Also, I hope Green, a solid filmmaker, doesn’t continue down the reboot trail for the better half of his career. That seems a shame considering what he’s accomplished.
Having followed David Gordon Green for a long time, I still can’t get over how he started with the films George Washington and All the Real Girls, where he kinda seemed like the next Terrence Malick, and now he’s “legacy horror franchise reboot guy”. I saw his Halloween films and he just does not seem very adept at directing horror at all.
David Gordon Green’s “approach to horror reboots” is to take a brilliant, beautifully directed film which has already had a varied but broadly unsatisfying set of sequels, and then create a new set of shitty sequels.This is not a slight on the Blumhouse, uh, house style per se, but the idea of feeding The Exorcist if all things into their sausage machine boggles the mind. They should do “The Shining 3” next.
That title kind of says it all. Belief was one of the central themes of the original movie. But then again, he made a Halloween movie called Halloween Kills, so I guess redundancy is his thing.
I just really think of The Exorcist as a novel and a film that far transcends genre. I’m not even an unconditional defender of it either, I think it has certain aspects which don’t work so well, but it’s fundamentally a rich, human drama. Yes it’s scary, but it’s the keenly-observed characterisations, and the existential problems that give it this vibrance and immediacy.I haven’t seen a trailer for this DGG thing but it just sounds like a generic melodramatic thriller where plot and character are all contrived in service of the lore and genre setpieces. The opposite of the Exorcist, basically. A more apt comparison will likely end up being something like L’Anticristo rather than the Blatty/Friedkin singularity.
It’s an unusual movie since the drama really derives from the horror. Within the fiction, we can’t deny the existence of the devil*, so we end up horrified by the cruelty and randomness of the possession (like Ellen Burstyn) and worrying that evil exists without any kind of good (like the young priest). The German movie Requiem told a “possession” story as a straightforward drama without buying into the characters’ religious beliefs, and it’s a different beast. *I realize that in the book and the subsequent movies it isn’t the devil, but nothing in the 1975 movie actually contradicts the demon. And the devil is inherently scarier than a demon named Pazuzu.
DGG’s first Halloween re-up was dandy: proper sense of atmosphere, couple of gnarly kills, and a great JLC performance. I admired both sequels for taking big conceptual swings, but both of them are riddled with boneheaded lapses of logic and believability, and both make the critical error of sidelining Curtis in favor of far less compelling characters. Not optimistic about this; Exorcist simply doesn’t need any extension. It’s perfect as a one and done.