Director – David Gordon Green, Screenplay – David Gordon Green & Peter Sattler, Screen Story – David Gordon Green, Danny McBride & Scott Teems, Producers – Jason Blum, David Robinson & James G. Robinson, Photography – Michael Simmonds, Music – Amman Abbasi & David Wingo, Visual Effects – Crafty Apes, LLC (Supervisor – Luke Ditommaso), Deep Voodoo & The Mill, Special Effects Supervisor – J.D. Schwalm, Makeup Effects Designer – Christopher Nelson, Production Design – Brandon Tonner-Connolly. Production Company – Blumhouse/Morgan Creek/Rough House Pictures.
Cast
Leslie Odom, Jr. (Victor Fielding), Lidya Jewett (Angela Fielding), Ellen Burstyn (Chris MacNeil), Ann Dowd (Ann), Olivia O’Neill (Katherine West), Raphael Sbarge (Pastor Don Bevans), Norbert Lee Butz (Tony West), Jennifer Nettles (Miranda West), Okwui Okpokwasili (Dr Beehibe), E.J. Bonilla (Father Maddox), Danny McCarthy (Stuart), Tracey Graves (Sorenne Fielding), Celeste Oliva (Detective Konik), Linda Blair (Regan MacNeil)
Plot
Victor Fielding is raising his daughter Angela on his own. Angela and her best friend Katherine West go missing after school one day. They turn up again three days later with no memory of what happened to them. Angela begins to act strangely. Victor’s neighbour Ann, a former Catholic nun, is certain that she is possessed. Though sceptical, Victor allows Ann to introduce him to the aging Chris MacNeil whose daughter Regan was possessed years earlier. Ann organises bringing an interdisciplinary team comprised of a Baptist minister and a voodoo practitioner together to drive out the demonic force inhabiting the girls.
The Exorcist (1973) was one of the major modern blockbusters. It created an absolute sensation when it came out, including being nominated for ten Academy Awards (winning two of them). Its lasting influence has been creating the Possession Film, where the clichés laid down by The Exorcist of the possessed in cracked faces taunting, the Catholic priests as the frontline defenders on the side of good come in to chant the rites of exorcism in Latin and so on have become cliches still being perpetrated fifty years later in supposedly true-life based films such as The Pope’s Exorcist (2023).
The Exorcist led to a series of sequels. Linda Blair returned for the universally derided Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). The book’s author/the film’s screenwriter William Peter Blatty took the director’s chair for The Exorcist III (1990), which I would argue is the best of the series. Next up was Renny Harlin’s clumsily heavy-handed prequel Exorcist: The Beginning (2004), as well as Paul Schrader’s Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist (2005), the original version of the film that ended up being dumped by the studio for not being scary enough. There was then the tv series The Exorcist (2016-7), which followed on from the original and has a not uninteresting first season.
The Exorcist: Believer is a further revival of The Exorcist series. It comes as a collaboration between Morgan Creek, who has held the rights since the 1990s, and Blumhouse, who has become a major horror-producer throughout the 2010s with the assorted Paranormal Activity, Insidious and The Purge films. (See below for Blumhouse’s other films). Blumhouse and director David Gordon Green had previously collaborated on the revival of Halloween (2018), which proved a substantial box-office success, and led to two sequels with Halloween Kills (2021) and Halloween Ends (2022). Here Blumhouse and Green have planned to do the same with a trilogy of Exorcist films.
Chris MacNeil (a 90 year-old Ellen Burstyn) and father of the possessed Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom, Jr)
With The Exorcist: Believer, Blumhouse and David Gordon Green employ exactly the same formula they did with their Halloween sequels. That is to say – they construct a work that directly follows on from the original and ignores the other sequels. That and bring back the principal names from the previous films – a 90 year-old Ellen Burstyn and a less-than-30 second cameo from Linda Blair right at the end. As opposed to the way that Jamie Lee Curtis’s return became central to and one of the best bits about the Halloween sequels, Ellen Burstyn gets very little to do before being sidelined in a hospital bed. Although one of the more amusing and perfectly natural aspects is the idea that Chris McNeil has published a book about what happened and toured the talkshow circuit.
David Gordon Green fancies himself some modern horror genius – it seems evident in the enthusiasm with which he tackles classic horror properties and seems to think he knows better than those who made them. In actuality, Green is a shitty director who lacks anything other than a humdrum commercial efficacy. There is nothing in either his Halloween films or The Exorcist: Believer that even raises a mild jump. Characteristically with their horror films, Blumhouse waters down anything edgy to a very soft R rating. Thus there are no vomitings over priests, no foul-language taunts, and certainly no crucifix masturbations. All that we get are lame fake jumps – the lights going off, Lidya Jewett entering a room with sinister effect, Leslie Odom, Jr. jumping at seeing a snake. David Gordon Green has essentially taken two classic works of horror that terrified audience when they came out and reduced them to dull, anodyne works that wouldn’t outrage or scare even a toddler and have all the outrage value of a supermarket-bought Halloween costume.
And there is the exorcism itself. Blumhouse was been one of the production companies who has readily adopted the new move towards diversity in entertainment more than any others. This means that we now get two girls affected, one from an African-American family and the other from a white family. No issue with any of this (except perhaps to wonder how one demon can possess two people at once). On the other hand, the film has tried to extend the new all-inclusiveness to the exorcism itself and this just becomes bizarre. Indeed, when the exorcism actually occurs, what you end up with is two girls tied to chairs in an average sized dining room and everyone standing around chanting at the same time as the girls throw taunts. It results in the actual exorcism becoming a cacophony, directed in a way that feels like a perfect illustration of the dictum about too many cooks in the broth.
Two possessed girls for the price of one – (l to r) Lidya Jewett and Olivia O’Neill
The Exorcist was grounded in William Peter Blatty’s Jesuit beliefs and all of the other films, with the exception of Exorcist II: The Heretic’s loopy diversion off into African folk religion, have followed suit. On the other hand, The Exorcist: Believer seems to want to embrace diversity of religion and serves up a panoply of other exorcists from Baptist and voodoo traditions alongside Catholicism. Even then, the Catholicism is represented by an unofficially sanctioned former nun (Ann Dowd) after the church backs out for reasons, something that would never happen in real life. You almost get the impression that The Exorcist: Believer was being so dedicated to diversity that it wanted to throw out any notion of Catholicism altogether – Ellen Burstyn even has a line that leaves you bursting into laughter where she states she wasn’t allowed to view the exorcism of Regan “because of the patriarchy”.
What it ends up with is an Exorcist divested of any traditional Catholicism and made up of assorted other religions. I have an issue with this – one of them being that these religious viewpoints have radically different and non-compatible ideas. For example, voodoo has the idea where the participant becomes possessed by a loa and this is seen as a good thing, whereas Baptism and Catholicism regard possession as a total evil and of The Devil. Not to mention, Catholicism and to a lesser extent Baptism tend to the view that they are the One True Church. You can have fun imagining the ridiculous viewpoints that this would entail “I need this powerful certainty in my faith to complete this exorcism except that I have to water down my faith sufficiently to allow that other religions are right also.”
The problem with The Exorcist: Believer and most of the other Exorcist sequels and copycats is that they are films made by non-believers hence have no grounding in the religious ideals and just play mix-and-match. Here you end up with a feelgood secular notion of religion where what you believe isn’t important but that family connections and community support matters the most. It just seems too nebulously huggy and feelgood to deal with any notion of confronting a force that is evil incarnate. It leads to the unintentionally amusing idea of how the original The Exorcist would have played out where instead of a cadre of priests come to drive the demon out of Regan she is greeted by family members and an assortment of religious social support organisations and people with New Age beliefs trying to give Regan a big hug and tell her she is loved. I think if we had, The Exorcist would never have been anything other than forgotten let alone considered a classic – and yet David Gordon Green wants us to believe these are the forces fighting darkness.
