The Exorcist: Believer (2023) – Demonic

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 5th October
Seen: 12th October

It’s pretty much impossible to deny the impact of The Exorcist. The classic 1973 shocker is a touchstone of the horror genre, the stories of people fainting and running out of the cinema are the stuff of legends and it is an absolute constant on any ‘Scariest Movies of All Time’ list, to the point that not having it on your list makes the list invalid. With its incredible visuals, revolutionary scares, and Oscar-nominated performances, The Exorcist is one of those all-time classics that everyone can agree earns a special place not only in the Horror genre but in the history of cinema itself. It also should probably have never been turned into a franchise.

Over the past 50 years, there have been about a half dozen attempts to continue the story of The Exorcist and none have come close to the power of the original (some might argue that part 3 might be the closest in terms of quality, but I doubt anyone would say it was equal to the original) and yet for some reason they keep trying to make this into a franchise. The scariest movie of all time has slowly morphed into a series chronicling the continuing adventures of a single demon who can’t get the hint that he’s not wanted and that some priest is always screaming at. That’s what all exorcism movies are but this franchise just happens to borrow the name and occasionally reference an all-time great and sure enough it never works.

It brings no joy to report that The Exorcist: Believer is another bad entry into this franchise that needs to stop (but won’t because the directors made some kind of deal with Satan!), it’s just kind of an expected fact at this point. How could this sequel be anything other than mediocre at best? It’s not like it’s got a fascinating new take on the core concept or has anything particularly new to say, at best it can only be a faint echo of things that’ve been done before not only in other films in The Exorcist franchise but in any horror film that features an exorcism and let’s be real, the only thing that tethers The Exorcist: Believer to the 1973 classic is a pair of elongated cameos that could be excised without anything of substance being lost.

For The Exorcist: Believer’s central couple of characters we are placed in the home with Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr) and his daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) who are just trying to get by while still reveling in the memories of Victor’s wife who was in a horrible accident while pregnant with Angela and died from her injuries, leaving Angela without a mother and Victor without his faith in God. When Angela is 13, she wants to try and come to terms with what happened to her mother so, along with her friend Katherine (Olivia O’Neill), goes into the woods to do a little seance.

Naturally, this goes horribly wrong somehow and the two girls go missing for several days only to return bearing the obvious signs of demonic possession that anyone who has even heard of these films will see coming a mile away. What follows is basically what you’d expect, the two girls do a series of supposedly disturbing things, there’s a quick little cameo from Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), and a lot of screaming assorted bible verses in the general direction of two prepubescent girls tied to a pair of chairs… How groundbreaking.

An almost undeniable problem that The Exorcist: Believer has is that everyone is pretty well versed in what happens in a movie about an exorcism, we know the exact beats of this story, and for some reason, there’s not going to be any new revelatory twist in the classic plot. At points the film practically does a speed run through all the important points just to make sure it gets to all of them, you could practically count down to the moment someone pees in a place they shouldn’t pee or does something loud and shocking in a church. There is no surprise here, it’s so predictable that the only thing that’s left is hoping you like the main pair of girls enough to feel bad for them when the possession begins… but you can’t because you don’t know them.

One of the truly magical things that the 1973 Exorcist film did was that it took its sweet time making sure you knew Regan pretty damn well. You not only knew her, you goddamn adored that sweet little girl like she was your own before they start messing with her. Once that happens, the progression from the sweet girl we love to the demonic head spinner takes time, a lot of it because every little thing that happens to her should be truly terrifying. 

That doesn’t happen in The Exorcist: Believer, you barely get any time at all with Angela before she turns and you get effectively nothing with Katherine, you do not know anything about them other than they’re a pair of 13-year-old girls who know each other… and even then the fact they know each other is apparently a shock to both of their parents who seem to only learn about this friendship when the girls go missing for 3 days. This lack of time to know/like both these girls means that when they both come back looking like they’re about 95% of the way towards spider walking down some stairs, there’s nothing truly lost here. You can’t just ask us to care about these kids just because they’re kids, they have to be actual interesting characters first and foremost and they just aren’t.

Hell, there aren’t really any interesting characters in The Exorcist: Believer at all. Victor is the closest we get to one since it’s a man who lost faith in God and needs to return to religion in order to get his daughter back, but it’s an idea so poorly played out that you could easily miss it. Katherine’s parents are such non-entities that this is the only section of the review I feel obliged to mention them and yet will not bother to give their names because it doesn’t matter, they aren’t the main characters and Katherine is at best just there to give them two possessed girls so they can do a double possession… I guess because a double possession is cooler than a single one, that’s the only reason and the most Katherine does before the possession happens is say ‘hi’. 

Perhaps the person who gets the worst shake out of all this is Chris MacNeil (The character that was so compelling in the original film that it got Ellen Burstyn her second Oscar nomination… for a horror film! We all know how impossible that is, right?) who is revealed to have written a book about Reagan’s possession which somehow created a rift between her and her daughter. Chris is there for maybe two scenes before being shoved out of The Exorcist: Believer in a way that’s frankly disrespectful to the character. This is a woman who we rooted for 50 years ago because she would do anything to save her child, here she’s practically just there because this film needs some way to connect to the original and I guess Linda Blair only agreed to a brief walk on section at the end while Ellen agreed to do actual dialogue. It’s a pointless cameo that at best provides one moment of visceral shock but not an actual scare.

Speaking of scares, God damn none of the ones that are in The Exorcist: Believer are that good or even memorable. Again, to compare this to the original (a thing the film is basically begging you to do) you barely need to think to come up with iconic moments that terrified audiences. The spiderwalk, floating above the bed, “LET JESUS FUCK YOU!”. The original is chock full of classic terrifying and disturbing imagery that sent people into a frenzy at the time and even to this day… nothing in The Exorcist: Believer comes close to that. When something isn’t a carbon copy of something from the original, it’s just silly. I know the film wants me to be disturbed by Katherine screaming “The body and the blood” in the middle of a church but it’s not scary, it’s annoying. 

This is meant to be a sequel to The Exorcist, one of the best movies ever made that terrified people in ways we didn’t even know were possible… and your big plan for a 50th-anniversary sequel is to do the same things again only with less impressive visuals and a worse script? Seems like a bad plan if you want to make a trilogy worth a damn. 

Oh yeah, this is meant to be the first part of a trilogy because for some reason David Gordon Green is becoming a guy who takes beloved horror IP and does brand new trilogies about them… except when he did this with Halloween, we at least got the 2018 Halloween out of that mess, The Exorcist: Believer makes me suspect we’re not going to get anything actually decent out of this new trilogy. Hell, it’s starting to feel like what looked like a horror dream team with David Gordon Green and Danny McBride were just lucky when they made the 2018 Halloween and have been coasting ever since because if this is the start of what they want to do with The Exorcist then this will be rough.

The Exorcist: Believer doesn’t need to exist, it kind of feels like a reminder that this franchise never should’ve existed but this film specifically definitely wasn’t needed. It’s just a much less intense retread of the original which might get a few jolts out of people who somehow go in without having seen the original Exorcist but anyone who knows/likes the 1973 movie is going to get nothing of substance out of watching this. At best The Exorcist: Believer is a serviceable exorcism movie that loosely ties itself to the film that really started the entire subgenre, at worst it’s a cynical cash grab banking on a 50-year anniversary and nostalgia for a classic without delivering anything new that could justify it outside of that. Just rewatch the original, that movie is still goddamn terrifying so why bother with this inferior knockoff?