The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D-
Last October, director David Gordon Green gave us one of the worst horror sequels ever made with Halloween Ends. This October, Green returns with another one of the worst horror sequels ever made with The Exorcist: Believer. If anything positive can come of this ridiculously misguided film, it’s my hope that it will be the final (or close to final) nail in the coffin of the legacy horror sequel, which is a trend that can’t die soon enough. The Exorcist: Believer is a brazenly cynical, lazy product that is almost astonishing in its disrespect toward its source material.
Depending on how you want to look at it, this is the fifth, sixth or seventh film in the Exorcist franchise (it depends on if you count both versions of the prequel as separate movies and if you count the excellent The Ninth Configuration). However, this being a legacy sequel, don’t worry if you have only seen the original film because, just like with Green’s Halloween trilogy, Believer is a direct sequel to the original The Exorcist. Actually, you don’t even need to have seen the original movie because this doesn’t really continue the story in any meaningful way; it is just a safe retread of the first movie combined with some groan-inducing 2020s politics and utterly pointless cameos from legacy characters.
Going into this movie, it seemed to me that this is an interesting time to revisit The Exorcist as a franchise. Released it 1973, it is hard to overstate the cultural impact of The Exorcist. In terms of actual ticket sales, The Exorcist is the ninth biggest movie of all time and sold 110 million tickets at the U.S. box office. As a point of reference, Avengers: Endgame sold 95 million tickets. However, American society has become a lot more secular in the last fifty years. How would a story like The Exorcist work in a world where the popularity of organized religion has plummeted and the stature and influence of the Catholic Church is so diminished? How could the idea of dogmatic evil be reconciled in that scenario? Or, what would happen if the demon possessed someone of a different faith, like a Jew or a Muslim? It lends itself to a discussion of whether good and evil are universal constructs and if their battle can be separated from a particular faith if the intentions are proper. There is still interesting material to be mined from this franchise.
Believer does none of that and, where the original asked serious questions and treated the audience like adults, Believer treats its audience like children. And dumb children, at that. Here is how the pitch meeting went for this movie:
Executive #1: “Guys, how could we even attempt to top The Exorcist?”
Executive #2: “Well, you know how that movie had a possessed girl?”
Executive #1: “Of course.”
Executive #2, leaning in with a wry smile: “How about two possessed girls?”
Executive #1: “You crazy son of a bitch, I’m in.”
Our two possessed girls are Angela and Katherine, who disappear in the woods one day when trying to perform a séance to contact Angela’s deceased mother. They reappear after three days with no sense of the time that has passed or what has happened. It is this first act when I was actually on board with the movie. It is a creepy and well-acted procedural about missing children that could have gone in any number of interesting directions.
But then it becomes a sequel to The Exorcist and that’s when everything falls to shit. The legendary Ellen Burstyn returns to reprise her role from the original classic and there isn’t a single reason for her to be in this movie other than to plaster her name over the advertisements. Her role here is so embarrassing and pointless that it almost feels like a parody of legacy sequels and she deserves better than that (although, to her credit, she only agreed to be in this piece of shit when the producers agreed to her large salary demands and then agreed to fund scholarships for acting students at her alma mater, Pace University). She is saddled with some of the most godawful, cringe-inducing dialogue in years (“I wasn’t in the room for my daughter’s exorcism. I think it’s because I’m not part of the patriarchy”) and then is swiftly removed from the story in such an undignified way that one wonders if the screenwriters had a personal vendetta against her. I truly hope that one of those acting students is the next Meryl Streep or this just wasn’t worth it.
The possession, despite the brilliant numerical advantage over the original, is strictly by-the-numbers and devoid of any shock value. It’s amazing how tame things have become in the last fifty years. While the original had a young girl masturbating with a crucifix and spouting obscenities that would make a death metal singer blush, this iteration ups the ante by, um, mainly having them tied to chairs and growling. I’m not sure if it’s a lack of ambition or just a reflection of the times or both, but The Exorcist: Believer is a safe, dull movie that is completely devoid of scares and doesn’t even attempt to approach the sacrilegious terror of its predecessor. If you were always too scared to watch The Exorcist, then don’t worry, you should be fine watching the 2023 iteration. We wouldn’t want our horror movies to be scary or offensive or anything. That’s for savages from the pre-2010s.
The exorcism itself is trite and literally overcrowded, as there are a dozen characters in the room, most of whom have barely been established, as they use the power of community to save the girls. Yes, the power of community. The Catholic Church is treated as ineffective in these modern times, so we must have a UN meeting of different faiths come together to face evil. I mentioned earlier that this kind of thing could be an effective exploration of evil in a diverse and increasingly non-secular society, but I meant if it was written by an intellectually-functional adult. The film’s disdain for Catholicism is as subtle as a hammer bludgeoning (and I’m not even Catholic) and the film fails to ask any meaningful questions about the nature of evil in the context of various faiths. Instead, we have a character look at the camera in the midst of an epiphany and say “I understand. It takes all of us.” That’s a fucking line in this movie. I know the “patriarchy” line has gotten most of the attention, but the audible groan that this line sent rippling through the audience in my theater was possibly the most memorable part of this viewing experience.
The Exorcist II: The Heretic is justifiably considered one of the worst, if not the worst, sequels ever made. While it is a terrible sequence of baffling artistic choices, at least it had artistic choices. It was trying to do something, it was just something stupid. I now long for the days of such failed ambition. The Exorcist: Believer is childish, lazy, patronizing trash. The first act and some strong performances are the only reasons why this isn’t getting an F (I intended to discuss individual performances, but I’m over 1,100 words and this movie just isn’t worth the time). And, of course, this is the first part of a trilogy because heaven forbid we ever just try to make one good movie anymore.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exorcist%3A_Believer#/media/File:ExorcistBelieverPoster.jpg
