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Should we be excited for The Exorcist: Believer?

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The Exorcist: Believer

William Friedkin’s The Exorcist is considered by many as the scariest and most accomplished horror film in history. It essentially perfected the possession story while setting the blueprint for future forays into the subgenre.

Building a franchise around such a landmark film, though, proved remarkably difficult. Expectations shot up astronomically given the towering presence of the original. Other than the uneven but compelling Exorcist III (released in 1990 and directed by William Peter Blatty, the writer of the 1971 The Exorcist novel the first movie adapted), and the amazing but short-lived The Exorcist 2016 TV series developed by Jeremy Slater, every other attempt at expanding upon the signature horror of Friedkin’s classic has failed spectacularly.

The question now is, will David Gordon Greens’ new Exorcist movie, subtitled Believer, become a possession that’ll reignite audience fears of demonic activity, or will it be another botched exorcism that’ll fade into obscurity along with Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and the the prequel movie Exorcist: The Beginning (2004). Another version of the prequel exists called Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist which was released in 2005 after The Beginning failed to ignite the box office or win over critics. Yes, Warner Brothers released two versions of the same movie, complete with two mostly different casts and two different directors (Renny Harlin worked on Beginning and Paul Schrader on Dominion).

Believer is the first of a planned trilogy that seems to be taking more than a page from Gordon Green’s treatment of the Halloween franchise. The first trailer for the movie established a considerable alteration to the formula concocted before it by showcasing two possessed girls instead of one. This doubling down on the source of horror is an idea that also made its way into the latest Halloween trilogy, to an extent. In the third installment, Halloween Ends, a new character opens the door to the possibility other people can “become” Michael Meyers, thus changing the fabric of the original concept.

The first Believer trailer goes on to show the parents of the possessed girls in a desperate race to try and figure out what’s wrong with their kids. This lands them on the path of someone who’s been through this experience before and who’ll end up helping the parents navigate the possession: Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), the original survivor parent.

The Chris MacNeil character seems to be cut from the same cloth Laurie Strode was in Gordon Green’s Halloween, Strode being that franchise’s original final girl. She’s a survivor that looks like she’s either been waiting for or has been preemptively preparing for another bout with the same demon that possessed her daughter Regan. Trauma cloaks this character to justify a continuation of the story that ties in to the very first film. From there, we’ll have to see how much is sticks to the Halloween reboot formula and how much it deviates from it.

A few things worry me about this new chapter in the Exorcist franchise, apart from potentially being too similar to the latest Halloween trilogy in structure. First, we’ve gotten a lot of exorcism and demonic possession movies since the first Exorcist. Clichés, genre trappings, and expectations have had ample time to settle in and make themselves known. The first trailer, for instance, shows the possessed girls talking in that overdone multi-voice distortion effect that sounds more like an anonymous caller asking for ransom money than it does a demon.

One of the things that made the first movie’s possession so gut wrenchingly terrifying and memorable was the fact the demon had its own voice, which was masterfully crafted and performed by actress Mercedes McCambridge speaking over Linda Blair’s lines. It created a horror icon and it made things intimate and infinitely more disturbing.

Thus far, the two possessed girls from the Believer trailers come off as more generic, the standard demon kids that spout the usual unholy jargon in the exact voices you’ve come to expect. Fans have gotten a good helping of this already this year alone with The Pope’s Exorcist, though that movie did largely stick to one voice actor for the main demon. In this case it was Ralph Ineson (The VVytch) who took on demon duties. Before The Pope’s Exorcist, though, we had an exorcism episode in FX’s American Horror Story: Asylum, a found footage take on it in The Last Exorcism, an Anthony Hopkins-led movie called The Rite, and the Scott Derickson film The Exorcism of Emily Rose (the better of the bunch).

When Friedkin’s Exorcist came out, no one had seen anything like it. That’s not the case anymore.

My second worry concerns the decision to turn the story into a trilogy. In a sense, The Exorcist already tried this, though not intentionally nor with an eye to create a larger narrative that extended to several movies to get the complete story. Regardless, the result was just not good.

John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic is considered one of the worst horror sequels in existence, to the point that Friedkin himself once said to have felt disgusted after watching it (a sentiment shared by Blatty, who called it a humiliating experience). It’s a direct sequel, catching up with Regan a few years after her exorcism to find the demon might not have been cast out entirely (diminishing Father Karras’ sacrifice at the end of the first movie).

The Exorcist III, while boasting some great scares and an underlying sense of unease that carries throughout, didn’t exactly stick the landing. It could’ve bene great, but its ending (of which there are different versions of) felt like it belonged to another movie. Its successes, though, are owed to the new mysteries it creates regarding good and evil and spirituality. It’s not a retread of the first movie. Rather, it’s an expansion that explores similar themes through different avenues and perspectives using the more fleshed out characters from Blatty’s novels.

Having this new set of movies already conceptualized as a trilogy might alleviate these problems, but Gordon Green’s previoustrilogy work with Halloween saw a good idea stretched to its limits in all the wrong ways. Michael Meyers became a blunt metaphor for Trump era divisions, characters were killed for shock value rather than carefully plotted story arcs, and the violence authored by The Shape became gratuitous to the point of losing touch with the narrative.

Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends betrayed the storytelling highs of the first one, killing the momentum early into part 2 and never really catching up again. Believer’s chances of hitting the targets it has in its sights become stronger if each movie justifies its existence without coming across as a cash grab that’s only just tangentially connected to push out another horror trilogy. To score a win, it needs avoid the things that ultimately held Halloween back.

So, should we be excited for Exorcist: Believer? Based on the trailers alone, no. There’s always a chance the odds get flipped and we get a great new take on the material. But whatever expectations we might have now should be taken with caution. Don’t get me wrong, I want to see a good trilogy come of this, especially since the triple-feature approach hasn’t gotten the chance it deserves in horror. Unfortunately, the journey to Believer carries a lot of baggage that can weigh it down considerably. More excitement could’ve been afforded to it had it not been an Exorcist movie but a whole new venture into possession horror, one that stands on its own demonic legs. Then again, anything has the capacity to surprise. Breaking the cycle and giving audiences something worth screaming at, or potentially fainting from, will be welcomed with open arms. The road to that, I fear, is looking quite bumpy.

The Exorcist: Believer opens October 6th, 2023 nationwide.

Shudder’s CURSED FILMS is a surprisingly noble look at notorious horror cinema

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Cursed Films
Shudder

The idea of a cursed film evokes images of satanic creatures standing behind the camera, corrupting what’s captured on celluloid. It’s a kind of subgenre in its own right, a kind of supernatural conspiracy theory hub for fans that do not believe in coincidence when it comes to set fires, mysterious crew deaths, and filming disasters. Shudder’s new Cursed Films docuseries traverses this particular horror terrain, and it does it well, but thankfully not in ways I was expecting.

Cursed Films is a five-part documentary series focusing on five films widely considered to be cursed by horror fans, collectors, and even casual moviegoers, especially those that love to dig into the mythos behind productions marked by tragedy and controversy.

The cursed movies explored in the docuseries are The Exorcist, Poltergeist, The Omen, Twilight Zone: The Movie, and The Crow. As of the time of this writing, only the first three films have been explored in the series.

Those expecting a gratuitous indulgence in the dark stories surrounding these films, and validation of popular beliefs, will not leave entirely satisfied. I say this as a good thing. Cursed Films is, surprisingly (to me, at least), a very serious deconstruction of horror myths, where fact and fiction are separated and then dissected to get at the root of why people like to think cursed movies exist.

The first episode dives straight into perhaps the most controversial movie of the bunch, The Exorcist. My personal favorite horror movie (traditionalist that I am, I guess), William Friedkin’s movie about a girl possessed by a demon has been mired in darkness since day one. People worried that the actual making of the film resulted in the legitimate summoning of Lucifer and his army of possession-hungry demons. Injuries sustained by actors during production and even unexplained set burnings seems to confirm all of this to eager followers of the happenings of The Exorcist’s initial release.

People lined up in droves to see The Exorcist.

To tell you the truth, just writing the name of this movie down gives me chills, irrational though that may be. It’s the only movie that gets scarier with each viewing for me, and yet Cursed Films took me down a different path with it. It dedicated most of its runtime to explaining why people so aggressively associate the devil with the movie and why horror inspires audiences to pursue such dark trains of thought.

The show features psychologists, religious scholars, key production and cast members, and writers all mostly aligned within the idea that the only thing that can curse a movie is its audience. Psychological terms are conjured up to explain why fans gravitate towards curses to explain the mysteries of their favorite movies, all of which have perfectly plausible explanations (for the most part).

The Exorcist episode, for instance, debunks a lot of its myths by looking at the PR campaigns of a desperate movie studio hellbent on turning a profit while also looking at how some of the accidents in the workspace actually happened. It even includes talks on the impact of the work culture the movie’s director created during filming, which is well documented.

Perhaps the most potent and surgically precise look at a cursed film can be seen in the Poltergeist episode. Two deaths and rumors about the macabre nature of certain props have been circulated enough for some people to confirm the tragedies that accompany the franchise are the results of a curse, possibly originating from beyond the grave.

Scene from the movie Poltergeist.

What Cursed Films does with this movie is nothing short of masterful, going from legend to legend in an attempt to dispel the “curse,” which for the series means proving no such thing exists. It looks at the psychological and supernatural value people put into objects and locations seen in popular films and how it translates into a whole tradition of people visiting fictional haunted places as if they’re actually haunted.

I’ve participated in this, although not under the impression the place I visited was really haunted. I once had the chance to drive close to where the Amityville house from the infamous 1979 Amityville Horror movie was located. The fact the movie was loosely based on “true events”—that have since then been disproved—made the opportunity all the more enticing, so I took it. I saw the house. People live there. I saw no ghosts walking around, not a single swarm of flies hovering over its windows, and no blood dripping from its walls. In fact, I saw other houses that looked almost the same neighboring it. So much for a place housing one of the gates of Hell.

I thought about this short trip to Amityville a lot while watching Cursed Films. The show’s deconstruction of what could be termed as magical-horror thinking made me rethink the entire experience. It’s interesting because even though I knew the house wasn’t haunted, I did feel unsettled. The power of the movie, and the story it’s based on, had definitely charged the place with a supernatural sensation that was hard to shake off. In the end though, it was just a house. For the few minutes I was there, the only thing haunting it was a curious horror fan holding up traffic to take in one of horror cinema’s most iconic locations. Watching Cursed Films, one can feel a lot like this, especially if you’re prone to give into urban legends.

Cursed Films aims at reminding people horror fiction is just that, fiction. And it needs that emphasis on fiction. In fact, the docuseries suggests these myths and legends do a disservice to the people behind the scares, the ones who work for a living to get a scream out of people in the movie theaters. It’s a meditation on the power of belief when it comes to the representation of evil in film. It wants us to consider that movies themselves don’t have to be haunted to become superior works of horror fiction. They can achieve that pretty well on their own, without the necessity of being cursed.