Not content with merely reinvigorating the legendary Halloween franchise for a new generation, director David Gordon Green now turns his attention to an even more revered horror classic. Crank up the Mike Oldfield because The Exorcist: Believer is possessing cinemas when it arrives in New Zealand on October 12.
As seems to be the custom these days, The Exorcist: Believer is ignoring all prior sequels and spin-offs (two sequels, two seasons of television, and two entirely discrete prequels…it’s nuts) in favour of offering us a direct follow up to William Friedkin’s magisterial 1973 adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s landmark horror opus.
In this new riff on the old pea soup vomiter, single dad Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) is rather understandably troubled to discover that his daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) and her friend (Olivia Marcum) may be suffering from a bad case of demonic possession. He reaches out to the one person who may be able to offer some insight into his predicament: Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn making a Jamie Lee Curtis-style return to the franchise), whose daughter, Regan, was possessed in the OG film. And things proceed spookily from there.
The Exorcist: Believer is the first of a planned trilogy, which is either good or bad news depending on how you felt about the last couple of Halloween films. The Exorcist has been a bit of a scattershot series so far, so perhaps a wiser course of action would be to get just one movie right first, rather than putting all your ecclesiastical eggs in one trilogy-sized basket.
Having said that, there’s a bit of a trend for religious horror happening right now, with The Pope’s Exorcist recently in theatres, and The Nun 2 just around the corner. So what better time for the World Heavyweight Champion of the subgenre to step back into the ring?
