![]() The Exorcist - in contrast to Believer, unfortunately - is indeed genuinely shocking, even if the scene in which Regan’s head literally spins is a little less viscerally terrifying to audiences brought up on slicker effects. You may never have seen The Exorcist, but you probably know the gist of it. Beyond its religious implications, the film furnished a cultural touchpoint, especially since its sold-out showings and reports of fainting and possession-like behavior from inside the theater helped bolster it at the box office. ![]() Requests for exorcisms (from Catholics and otherwise) rose sharply, a trend that’s ebbed and flowed in the years since. Billy Graham - emphatically not Catholic, and extremely influential at the time - decried the film as having the devil in every frame. Out here in the world you and I inhabit, The Exorcist’s original release sparked immense controversy among clergy and critics, with Catholics divided on whether the movie was vile, blasphemous, or a great recruiting tool for the church. Ann leads Victor - who lost whatever faith he’d had after his wife died - toward someone who might know something about erratic behavior among young teen girls: Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn, who starred in the 1973 film), mother of Regan. As their behavior grows more erratic, neighbors like Ann, a nurse who lives next door (Ann Dowd), Victor’s sparring partner from the boxing gym (Danny McCarthy), and Katherine’s parents (Jennifer Nettles and Norbert Leo Butz) get drawn into desperately finding a solution. (The names are more than lightly allegorical.) Angela’s mother died in an earthquake in Haiti, just after Angela was blessed, in utero, by a Haitian woman.Īngela disappears into the woods with her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum) and the pair turn up three days later, 30 miles away, shoeless and seemingly disturbed. Set (and released) 50 years after the events of The Exorcist, Believer centers on single dad Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.) and his young teen daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) living in Georgia. That The Exorcist: Believer’s title still employs the singular case furnishes even more of a misnomer than it did in the original these days there seem to be an awful lot of exorcists trotting around. Hollywood isn’t the same, and neither is American religious culture. It highlights in myriad ways how much the world has changed since the original’s release. Yet Believer is a fascinating artifact of 2023. (Green helmed those too, along with writers Danny McBride and Scott Teems, who return for this film.)Īs a film, it’s at best serviceable, stronger in its world-building than in its climactic exorcism and nowhere near as unnerving as the original. Should it be successful, Believer is planned as the start of a trilogy sequel-reboot of the series, much like the Halloween films that were released between 20. Director David Gordon Green claims the rest of the films “fall into the acceptable mythology” of his new film (though their events aren’t mentioned in the movie). The Exorcist: Believer, the newest film in the franchise, is meant to operate as a loose sequel to the 1973 original. There have been a bunch of Exorcist installments in the intervening 50 years, some more successful than others. You don’t really know what’s going to happen, or who’s going to survive this encounter with the pits of hell. ![]() So there are at least two exorcists (plus a third priest, a friend of Karras’s), and thus the movie’s tension and allure come from its plot ambiguity. The movie’s true protagonist is Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller), a priest experiencing a serious crisis of faith, but there’s also a more seasoned exorcist in the mix, Father Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow). In the 1973 original - which overcame studio skepticism to become one of the most successful and significant horror films of all time - there are a few exorcists, all priests trying to cast a demon out of a 12-year-old girl named Regan (Linda Blair). ![]() The identity of the titular, singular “exorcist” of The Exorcist has always been a little murky.
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