Flasz On Film

William Friedkin’s The Exorcist is a masterpiece of filmmaking which continually stands as a singularity in the landscape of the genre of horror. There’s nothing like it, presumably at least in part thanks to Friedkin and William Peter Blatty’s approach to the story they were telling. Broadly speaking, they weren’t trying to make a horror film. They didn’t necessarily care about upholding or upending the genre template. They worked as though they didn’t even know it existed.  

Now, this nonchalant maverick modus operandi employed while putting the 1973 The Exorcist together surely contributed to the difficulty in following up this movie and turning it into a series. In fact, there’s probably an article (or even a series of articles) I could pen about these mostly unfortunate attempts at the various sequels and prequels to the Friedkin movie; however, I am not sure if I have the mental stamina to sit through Exorcist II: The Heretic ever again without seriously risking my own well-being.  

In any case, the question remains: how one makes a sequel to an all-time classic like The Exorcist without infringing on its legacy or alienating what essentially is a broad-church audience of cinephiles, especially in a world that has already seen four shots on goal in this space. What are you exactly supposed to do? What is it that makes The Exorcist what it is? Previous sequels would suggest it may be the Pazuzu mythos, or the characters. Or is it the film’s unique tone and atmosphere? Could it be the Friedkin-esque stroke of cinema verité? 

It is honestly impossible to predict, therefore it only follows that whoever decides to make a movie related to The Exorcist is likely to work in complete darkness if they want to add to what’s already out there and build upon the existing mythology and iconography, such as it is. However, in the current climate of legacy sequels, it might be safer to bank on nostalgia connected to the movie you’d like to sequelize, and it might just be safer to give the original a do-over. Which is what David Gordon Green and his collaborators clearly set out to do when they decided to take a punt at resurrecting The Exorcist. After all, Green managed to successfully bring another iconic series from the dead with his take on Halloween that bypassed the entirety of the franchise baggage accumulated over the many years… before squandering this freshly accrued genre caché with Halloween Kills and then driving a wooden stake through the heart of the series with the utterly unwatchable Halloween Ends.  

Hence, I’m afraid that the very idea of David Gordon Green signing on to rejig another genre classic generated some mixed feelings among the fans. I suppose I can count myself among those fence-sitters who secretly wished for The Exorcist: Believer to successfully capture the spirit of Friedkin’s original in the way the 2018 Halloween relayed the mood of John Carpenter’s classic, while equally preparing for the worst.  

When the movie opened with its golden hour hues and long zoom close-ups of fighting dogs somewhere in Haiti, the shaky immediacy of the camera work indicated that the filmmakers may have done their homework. They introduced us to Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.) and Sorenne (Tracey Graves), a pair of tourists exploring Port-au-Prince, inhaling its culture and basking in its dense spiritualism oozing out of every corner and food stall. We were let in on what we were told was an ancient ritual of blessing Sorenne’s unborn child… while we were somehow made to feel uneasy, as though this idyll was undercut by a sinister presence, a sense of impending doom. For a second there, I felt that maybe David Gordon Green could be the one filmmaker capable of understanding the genius of Friedkin’s masterpiece and bringing it to the forefront of his new and refreshed take on this icon of cinema.  

No such luck, though.  

What looked like a promise of directorial confidence and deep understanding of the subject matter was a mere display of braindead pantomime because The Exorcist: Believer soon revealed its true intentions. After this brief prelude in Haiti permeated with what looked like genuine Friedkin-esque verité immediacy, the movie unfortunately defaulted to convention and found solace in executing on the legacy sequel playbook without necessarily paying too much attention to those characteristics that made Friedkin’s movie unforgettable and unsettling in equal measures. Green essentially attempts to remake the original – which is what the legacy sequel playbook dictates – and transports us from Haiti, where Sorenne perishes in the aftermath of a massive earthquake, into the future where Victor is raising his daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett), solo, doing his level best despite constantly mourning his late partner. 

This relationship is already reminiscent to that of Chris MacNeil and her daughter Regan, whom we met in 1973, and whose ordeal became the stuff of legends. Green’s camera attempts to approximate the atmosphere of tactile realism as it establishes the father-daughter chemistry. But, in contrast to Friedkin and Blatty, in 2023 nobody has the patience to envelop the viewer in the progressively tightening atmosphere of incoming horror, partly perhaps because we already know where things are going… especially because the filmmakers don’t even attempt to hide their intentions.  

What follows is predictable: Angela disappears together with her school friend Katherine (Olivia O’Neill). And when they both re-emerge, they don’t remember a thing. What they also don’t realize is that they do not come back to their families alone, as they end up possessed by demonic entities. Again, as the legacy sequel logic dictates, not only does this revelation set in motion a sequence of familiar events culminating in an exorcism sequence, but it also invites a few familiar faces to come back to the fore, if only to tickle the viewers’ nostalgia glands.  

And you know what? It would have been fine if the filmmakers had done exactly that – staged a legacy sequel complete with cameos from Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair. Hell, I’d probably still be holding an olive branch if they had chosen to do a Peter Cushing in Rogue One and resurrected Max Von Sydow or Jason Miller in some kind of time-travelling stupidity. But there’s a massive “but” attached to this. I’d have been on board with everything if they showed me they knew how to tip their hats to Friedkin and let him know they knew what they were doing.  

I’m pretty sure John Carpenter wasn’t disappointed with David Gordon Green’s Halloween. Though, he may have been simply happy with the paycheck and the fact he got to do the score for the movie. One can never be sure. And if I were David Gordon Green, I’d have done everything in my power to make sure that if I did have the opportunity to show this movie to Friedkin, he would approve.  

Unfortunately, William Friedkin is no longer with us and we’ll never truly know what he would have said if David Gordon Green got the chance to take him to the premiere of The Exorcist: Believer. However, I can perhaps infer that what would have likely occurred would have been eerily like the time when Morgan Creek head honchos took him to see a sneak preview of Exorcist 2: The Heretic. During that fateful screening, someone stood up in the middle of the movie, angry and vengeful, and shouted at the top of his lungs to the rest of the audience that “the people who made this piece of shit are in this room!!!” I’m pretty sure William Friedkin would have done the same had he lived long enough to see this movie.  

Without a shred of exaggeration, The Exorcist: Believer proves perfectly that nobody – nobody!!! – has ever come close to understanding what made the original special. And even if they did, they had no idea how to reduce this knowledge to practice. It is such a profound travesty because there are moments in this movie where you could just about convince yourself that Green, Danny McBride (who co-wrote it together with Peter Sattler) and everyone else involved in this project may have had a good idea about what to do. There are flashes of Friedkin-esque immediacy peppered throughout the movie that give the movie brief moments of hope… before immediately undermining themselves by reverting to the safe embrace of a post-Wan genre template.  

Hence, literally nothing works in this movie. It’s just a run-of-the-mill possession horror subservient to canonical jump scares, brief elements of body horror and utterly uninspired elements of design. And to add insult to injury, in stark contravention of what Friedkin would have found acceptable, the movie almost always, without fail, chooses to go for a belt-and-braces approach in generating suspense and dread, as though the filmmakers didn’t trust I’d be scared when I’m supposed to be scared. Therefore, even though the movie occasionally implies it is interested in remaining tethered to some kind of reality, Hollywood creeps in every time things get heated with its overt reliance on abundant special effects, non-diegetic music and on-the-nose production design.  

And this is exactly why The Exorcist: Believer is a pervasively terrible movie that fails to live up to the standard set in 1973 by Friedkin and Blatty and proves that The Exorcist should have been left alone. 

Sacrilege.  

In fact, I think it is one of those movies whose title even indicates where this movie belongs. But for that you’d have to actively pronounce the title with all its punctuation as The Exorcist Colon Believer.