THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER is the new Blumhouse-produced EXORCIST sequel directed by David Gordon Green (YOUR HIGHNESS), who also co-wrote it with Peter Sattler (CAMP X-RAY). It tells the story of two 13-year old girls in Percy, Georgia who mysteriously disappear and return in a state we watchers of these movies will recognize as “demonically-possessed.” I’ve seen people making fun of that premise – “Oh wow, there’s not one, but TWO of them!?” – but I think they’re missing the point. It’s not about one-upping, it’s about creating a scenario where two families with different beliefs and backgrounds have to deal with this at the same time.
It immediately feels more like a true EXORCIST followup than the trailer had me worrying it would, because it does open in an exotic locale. Photographer Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr., RED TAILS, ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI…) and his pregnant wife (I thought girlfriend but I read wife) Sorenne (Tracey Graves, THE WEDDING RINGER) are vacationing in Port-au-Prince, Haiti (filmed in the Dominican Republic), and it’s shot very naturalistically, full of vivid color, texture and people. They talk to nice locals, some give Sorrene a traditional Haitian blessing to protect her baby, they visit the inside of a beautiful church. The differences between Victor and Sorrene are illustrated by Sorrene’s exclamations about “Jesus is in this place!” while Victor is more excited to get a photo of the city from the bell tower.
Then there’s a tragedy, and 13 years later Victor is a widower, raising their daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett, “Young Katherine Coleman,” HIDDEN FIGURES, “Young Nakia,” BLACK PANTHER) alone. This is a strong contrast to Chris MacNeil in the original. He has an unglamorous job shooting family portraits, and their house is big, but not movie-star big. Obviously he doesn’t have servants and assistants. He’s even a boxer, something I noted as a signifier of Father Karras’ working class background in the first film. Unlike Chris he’s a very hands on parent, making Angela’s breakfast, driving her to school, only reluctantly letting her go over to her friend’s to do homework because he likes spending his time with her.
Angela and Katherine (Olivia O’Neill) actually aren’t doing homework, they’re going into the woods to do some kind of seance thing, because Angela wants to talk to the mother she only knows from her dad’s beautiful photos. Then something happens and they don’t come home until they’re found 30 miles away three days later, thinking they’ve been gone for a few hours.
Katherine comes from a church-going Baptist family. In my opinion the movie is pretty sympathetic toward her mom Miranda (Jennifer Nettles, The Righteous Gemstones) and dad Tony (Norbert Leo Butz, who was so good as an asshole cop in Justified: City Primeval), though they make a few questionable comments about their daughters’ friendship and Tony makes a scene at the police station, blaming the disappearance on a homeless encampment. Watching this over Victor’s shoulder I interpreted him as thinking wow, this guy is an asshole… but I’m not gonna intervene because what if he’s right? (To my dismay, Victor’s later visit to a soup kitchen supports the stereotype of homeless people as perverted creeps.)
As in the original, they first approach the possession as a medical problem. That’s always been my favorite part of THE EXORCIST, but Regan is treated by elite specialists in a time before I was born. This hit me very differently by capturing a feeling I recognize: waiting in a hospital, stressed out, tired, confused, waiting for answers from endless tests. In some scenes I thought they might be using real medical professionals, because they seemed so authentic.
They rule out a bunch of things and then kinda say, “I don’t know, they seem fine!” It takes one day before Angela flips out at home, attacks her dad and goes into convulsions. A little later, Katherine causes the scene of all scenes in church. I like the moment when the parents run into each other at the hospital and nobody has to say out loud, “Oh shit – you’re back too?” Odom is particularly great in this movie and really nails the part where they theorize that the girls’ feet are burnt because they were in Hell for three days, like Jesus, and he tells them to get some sleep.
As you know if you’ve seen any trailers, this is the first EXORCIST sequel to get Ellen Burstyn to return as part I protagonist Chris MacNeil. Victor seeks her out because after the events of part I (and, I choose to believe, part II) she quit acting and wrote a very successful book about her experiences (estranging her from Regan). Green says he was inspired by Burstyn’s own memoir, but I think it’s interesting that William Peter Blatty based the character on his neighbor Shirley MacLaine, who during my youth was better known as that new age lady than as a movie star. (Nobody here seems to know Chris for her acting.)
Rather than turning super-Catholic, Chris is now very non-denominational, having studied the overlap of beliefs about exorcism in many cultures. She also seems to have maintained the attitude of the doctor who suggested exorcism to her 50 years ago – that maybe it’s a psychosomatic solution. She mentions placebos, implying that religion can be a bunch of bullshit but having something you believe in could be good for you. I think we’ve had many examples of believing stuff not being good for the world as a whole, but it’s a nice notion in this context.
One thing I’ve noticed in reviewing the EXORCIST series is that most people don’t want THE EXORCIST to be a series. The very idea makes them angry, each followup has been hissed upon arrival, and obviously people weren’t gonna take kindly to this being announced as the first in a trilogy. I figure the dismissive coverage, terrible reviews and so-so box office were guaranteed no matter the quality of the movie, so my fear was that Green would plan for the same arc as his HALLOWEEN trilogy – normal stuff you expected in part 1, wilder more ambitious ideas in the sequels – and then wouldn’t get to complete it.
At first it plays that way, though with Chris in a more limited role than Laurie Strode. So MAJOR SPOILER COMING UP HERE I got a good chuckle when the pleasing-but-expected development of Chris stepping up as the titular The Exorcist was immediately derailed by Katherine stabbing her in the eyeballs with a crucifix. It’s so upsetting, but it’s a horror movie, it’s within its rights. I respect it.
I like that this one addresses the first film’s deference to male authority. Chris notes that she didn’t actually witness the exorcism because “in my opinion I didn’t fit into their patriarchy.” Certain doofuses will no doubt interpret this as a modern wokening of the story, but for its entire fifty years of existence there has been discussion of THE EXORCIST’s themes of scary female puberty and how its single mother protagonist sits out the climax as the male religious officials take over.
This time it’s different. Chris convinces Victor that the importance of the church is not the specific beliefs but that it brings people from a community together. He extends that to uniting the two families and their friends to solve this problem together.
An interesting supporting character I haven’t mentioned is Victor and Angela’s neighbor Ann (Ann Dowd, THE DROP, HEREDITARY), who also sees her in her capacity as a nurse. She and Victor don’t get along well but she makes an impression on him by telling him how possessed Angela taunted her about a deeply personal secret from long ago when she almost became a nun. She brings in Father Maddox (E.J. Bonilla, GEMINI MAN) to be The Exorcist, but when it’s go-time Father Maddox explains that he can’t do it because the all-male panel at the diocese rejected his request… so he hands his Roman Ritual book to Ann, wishes her luck, and stays in his car. She steps up to what she now believes is her destiny, leading the exorcism with the support of Katherine’s pastor Don (Raphael Sbarge, RISKY BUSINESS, THE HIDDEN II) and even a Hoodoo practitioner named Dr. Beehibe (Okwui Okpokwasili, I AM LEGEND), recommended by Victor’s sparring partner Stuart (Danny McCarthy, FRED CLAUS).
The makeup, the possession acting of the young actresses, and creepy demonic voices are all really well done, but the filmmakers are still up against the fact that if you’ve seen one exorcism climax you’ve kind of seen them all. So I appreciate the turn of events with Ann, because it adds a new underdog element, and since she’s a nurse and was already there to run a heart monitor, she breaks the usual science vs. religion dichotomy of the series. The other exorcism highlight for me is when Dr. Beehibe does her rootwork, freaking out Katherine’s parents until they can be persuaded of its basis in a Bible verse they like.
Within the movie it’s never stated who the demon is. Sometimes it seems like it’s ol’ Pazuzu, because it seems to know Chris. I also wondered if it was one demon possessing both girls at the same time, or a two demon buddy team. I think it’s one, and he’s a real jerk because he has this big idea of forcing them to choose one of the two girls to survive – teasing Victor about the greatest trauma in his life, prying apart the unity he’s created between the families, and even sort of echoing the worst day of Father Merrin’s life in DOMINION: PREQUEL TO THE EXORCIST. There’s no one weird trick to get out of this one. Some people won’t like that, but I think it works.
Time for the standard conflict-of-interest-disclosure-brag: David Gordon Green wrote the introduction to my book Seagalogy. But I doubt he remembers that much, and it’s out-of-print now, so maybe I’m in the clear. At the time I admired his unorthodox arc from indie dramas like GEORGE WASHINGTON, ALL THE REAL GIRLS and UNDERTOW to the action comedy PINEAPPLE EXPRESS, and my respect has only grown stronger after his decade of comedy with Danny McBride and then the two of them cashing in that clout to live out their horror franchise dreams. (Like the HALLOWEEN movies this has a story credit for Green, McBride and Scott Teems).
I know Green’s little pocket of the HALLOWEEN universe is hated by many. I kinda love those movies, but even if I didn’t, to argue that they’re less valid than any of the other post-Carpenter ones is just nonsensical. I’m sure that opinion will fade with time; can you imagine how goofy it would be to still by worked up about parts 4 or 5? Or even 6? Or even RESURRECTION, the one that’s so bad that even I’ve vowed not to watch it again?
The most logical argument against them is the purist one that no one should make sequels to HALLOWEEN. That’s not gonna happen, of course, but also I reject that attitude. Yes, Randy deserved to die in SCREAM 2, and I hope he burns in hay-ell. Sequels – great ones, crazy ones, baffling ones, okay ones – are part of the joy of horror, part of what made me fall in love with the genre, part of what still makes it fun. Every sequel or remake of HALLOWEEN or TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE – and there have been some that I’ve hated with an unhealthily fiery passion – has only increased my love, fascination and appreciation for the originals. And that’s how I feel about THE EXORCIST movies too, after this last couple weeks of immersion.
The many people out there loudly proclaiming THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER the worst shit ever are being, pardon my French, a bunch of silly billies. This is a well made, well acted, serious-minded sequel that’s much more interested in themes and ideas than gross-outs or scares (though it gives us some of those too). To act like it’s a stain on a perfect legacy when the last one was Renny Harlin’s EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING is ludicrous. And most people hate EXORCIST II anyway, so they’ve had 46 years to get over their sacred waters being polluted. Everybody needs to calm down.
I have faith that BELIEVER is an interesting movie. I’m more agnostic on whether it’s worthy of the series. It’s probly more consistent, less goofy than THE HERETIC, but it’s certainly not as crazy, and I miss that. In an interview in the new Fangoria, Green talks about respecting the sequels for taking “big swings” and says he was trying to do that too. I suppose that could apply to its religious ideas and the fate of its returning hero, but this doesn’t have the feverish, can-you-believe-they-did-that? thrill of II, or the drastically different template and tone of III, so it feels a little underwhelming. It also seems pretty restrained in the amount of Green-isms. Intentionally avoiding his usual humor means we don’t get many of the quirky little tangents that make the minor characters in his HALLOWEEN movies memorable.
I miss the urban environment of EXORCISTs I-III. Sequels can change up the setting, that can be a good thing, but I think way more horror movies take place in small towns than in cities, so that makes this feel a little more like a standard issue horror movie, less like the ambitious/pretentious/elevated approach Friedkin established.
And I think that’s related to the other thing: this doesn’t feel big like previous EXORCIST movies. The same year THE EXORCIST was made for $12 million we got horror movies like THE CRAZIES ($250,000), AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS ($500,000), and MESSIAH OF EVIL ($1 million). The sci-fi movie WESTWORLD was made for $1.2 million. Hell, THE EXORCIST cost almost twice as much as that year’s James Bond movie LIVE AND LET DIE ($7 million).
The economics aren’t there for BELIEVER to have that kind of extravagance. If we can trust reported budgets it’s somewhere in the middle of modern studio horror, more expensive than INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR, EVIL DEAD RISE or THE POPE’S EXORCIST, but cheaper than THE NUN II, THE BOOGEYMAN, SCREAM VI, THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER, way less than RENFIELD, and possibly less than the faux b-movie COCAINE BEAR ($30-$35 million, according to Wikipedia). Some of those may be bullshit, but BELIEVER certainly doesn’t give you a feeling of “wow, it’s an event to see a horror movie done on this level,” which I think should be a goal for anything calling itself THE EXORCIST. Since that’s something that’s just not in the Blumhouse business model, maybe they were the wrong people to give the rights to.
I would rather be saying this is one of the best EXORCIST movies, or one of the best David Gordon Green movies, than that it’s just interesting. But these are the facts on the ground. I hope I’ll have something more exciting to report next time if they really do continue the trilogy, but I’m not sure Blumhouse has it in them to go bigger and bolder – to go Magic & Ecstasy on that ass – after this reception. But hey, maybe a miracle will come along and restore my faith.
P.S. There is actually an IMDb trivia entry for this I found interesting. It says that although the demon is never named, the credits call it Lamashtu, which it says is a character from Mesopotamian mythology that preys on pregnant women during childbirth, making it an opponent of Pazuzu, who protects pregnant women. Yeah man, I hope we get some demon on demon action in part 2.
October 11th, 2023 at 4:48 pm
Seems weirdly culturally appropriative to say that all cultures can do exorcisms in a series that’s been avowedly Catholic up until now. I mean, it’d be odd if someone made a movie about how Christians can totally make Golems if they want to, right?