In 2020, at the height of the global pandemic, the braintrust over at Morgan Creek Entertainment, announced — with very minimal fanfare, that they’d be taking a crack at one of the most vaunted franchises of all time — The Exorcist.
Uncertain who’ll be connected to the project. Would Linda Blair be back? Would Pazuzu be up for it? Would 87-year old William Friedkin be assigned to punching and threatening the reboot actors? As you’d imagine a project of this size is positively ripe with a bounty of questions, but unfortunately little to no answers.
What do we now know? Well, we now know we have a trailer and we have three pretty decent, if not a little odd, posters. The other thing we know is that Pazuzu is back to inhabit the bodies of not one, but two little girls. Take that Regan MacNeil!
Even the plot of Exorcist: Believer is pretty darn vague. According to the scant information out on the internet, the plot is a “Sequel to the 1973 film about a 12-year-old girl who is possessed by a mysterious demonic entity, forcing her mother to seek the help of two priests to save her.”
So, while we wait to learn why Pazuzu has held off with demonic possessions for 50 years, we’ll just have to take in the new trailer and ponder….
Scariest Things Podcast “Hot Take” on the Exorcist: Believer trailer.
What did you think of the trailer and will you catch this in the theater in October?
Mike: Will definitely have my butt parked in the theater come October. No question about that. NEED to see what happens to Regan, Ms. MacNeil, and Pazuzu after all these years. That said, for one of the best-known franchises in all of horror, the trailer is rather tepid and uninventive. The only thing that’s interesting about the trailer is the tail end which cribs heavily from the 1973 trailer. Otherwise, this could have easily been any trailer from the “Haunting of ______” from the past 20 years. I’ll see it, but this trailer doesn’t make me a believer.
Liz: Just like Mike, I will be in the theater opening weekend and waiting to be proved wrong because this trailer looks pretty awful. The Exorcist franchise is a favorite of mine as discussed in Podcast episode 78 where we ranked our favorite franchise horror so let’s see where this falls…could it really be worse than Exorcist 2: The Heretic? We’ll find out in just a few months.
ERIC: It is so risky to take on a mission to reboot a movie widely considered to be one of the best-made, scariest movies ever made. Psycho. The Shining. Poltergeist. A Nightmare on Elm Street. They all got a second coming, and all of them came up woefully short. The difficulty with those efforts was that they largely held to the original source material and, with Psycho in particular, tried to match shot for shot. That is not what David Gordon Green is attempting here. This is certainly not a remake, but a follow-up much like Green’s Halloween reboot, which despite two subsequently inferior sequels, was a really solid extension of that franchise. That said, though the opening moments of this trailer were compelling for me, the build-up was not convincingly scary in the least. The original movie banked its premise on the empathetic portrayal by Linda Blair, and I’m not yet seeing this here. I remain doubtful that this was a good idea to reboot this particular classic, but I hope to be proven wrong, and that the movie is better than this trailer.