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“The Exorcist: Believer” Trailer Reaction
“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.” […]
“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.”
Director: David Gordon Green
Writers: Peter Sattler, David Gordon Green, Scott Teems
Staring: Ellen Burstyn, Jennifer Nettles, Leslie Odom Jr., Ann Dowd, Lidya Jewett, Olivia Marcum
Release Date: October 13, 2023
IMDB
It is spooky season! Who says it needs to be crisp outside to watch a scary movie?
I saw The Exorcist: Believer (2023) trailer before Oppenheimer (2023) and I was shaking my fiancée’s arm when I began to understand what was being previewed. The trailer was not on any public forum. I had no idea it was coming. What a fantastic surprise. What a glorious, devilish, amazing surprise.
You want to know what is worse than one demon child?
TWO DEMON CHILDREN!
The Exorcist: Believer (2023) does not have an official log line on IMDB, but the trailer offers a pretty clean & cut look at what’s going to happen.
Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) is a single father and the story turns eerie off the jump when his daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) and her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum) go missing. The girls are eventually found, but only after many days. To the scared curiosity of many, Angela and Katherine thought they were only gone for a few hours.
As the trailer progresses, the oddities multiply. Both women begin acting strangely in the hospital and at home. The best part of the trailer is when Katherine walks into a church caked in blood chanting unholy things with everyone’s terrified eyes on her.
The first half of this trailer establishes the terror, and the second portion triggers the nostalgia nostrils. We are getting the return of Ellen Burstyn playing Chris MacNeil, the mother of Regan from The Exorcist (1973). Victor is desperate for help, so he turns to Chris hoping that her experience can ease the pain his daughter and her friend are suffering.
Chris preaches to Victor that exorcisms are rituals, and in order to free both Angela and Katherine, all different styles of exorcisms from all cultures are going to be necessary. Chris is not messing around. It is safe to say that this proposal of a solution comes after the realization that the demon impregnating the two young girls is the same that possessed her daughter.
Evil does not stay hidden.
The ending to the trailer is smash cuts of the girls getting in sync, literally. They are tied back-to-back and have identical heartbeats. Their unity appears to be a sign of strength for this malevolent demon, so time is running out if Angela and Katherine are going to survive. The very end of the preview has black & white images fading in and out of one another. It is a direct homage to the original trailer of William Friedkin’s masterpiece.
We do not see Regan in this first trailer, but that is a shocking surprise that the screenplay writers wou;d want to keep from us. We do get some references to her with pictures and creepy bed frame carvings, but there is no confirmed visual. The trailer doesn’t show us everything. Thank you.
David Gordon Green is directing this direct sequel to The Exorcist, and he is no stranger to inheriting an iconic horror franchise and retconning/ignoring its numerous sequel attempts. He did the same with Michael Myers and 2018’s Halloween.The new sequel was good, not great. Green’s subsequent sequels to his sequel are highly divisive. For the record, I prefer Halloween Ends (2022) to Halloween Kills (2021), but I may be in the minority.
It is encouraging that Gordon Green has experience with this exact process before, even if the results are not easily definable. The Exorcist: Believer is a more dangerous project than Halloween because The Exorcist was an even more cultural touchstone than Halloween (1978). People weren’t having seizures of vomiting when watching Myers stab people with a kitchen knife.
We need to agree as a society that nothing is going to be able to match the original Exorcist. Nothing will really come close. If The Exorcist: Believer hits the same marks as 2021’s Candyman. It kept the same ethos as the original and added to the 1992 original. The more modern version is not nearly as scary, but it still leaves an impact after watching it. Here is to hoping that David Gordon Green and company don’t try and outdo the original. Pay proper respect to it by creating a quality movie on its own.
The Exorcist: Believer comes out in theaters on October 13, 2023.
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