New ‘Exorcist’ is a schlocky retread of shocks we’ve seen before, with diminishing returns of disturbia
The Exorcist: Believer
Starring Leslie Odom Jr., Jennifer Nettles & Ann Dowd
Directed by David Gordon Green
Rated R
In theaters Friday, Oct. 6
Fifty years ago, people all over the place were freaking out about director William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. I saw it in a downtown Nashville theater with one of my high school friends and her mom, who was progressive enough to take a couple of 16-year-old kids to a movie swirling with buzz about how deeply disturbing it was, and that anyone who saw it might be opening themselves up to dark, satanic forces.
Well, my friend, her mom and I and survived it, just fine. And The Exorcist went on to claim a rightful place as a horror classic, the gold standard of movies about the ancient belief in demonic possession. It became a brand name, a franchise of five films spread over as many decades.
Now there’s a sixth, and even though it’s an Exorcist movie, it’s no Exorcist. The new fright flick is a schlocky, hyperventilating return to the basics of the first movie, transplanting the original setting of D.C.’s leafy Georgetown neighborhood to the modern-day South (everything, it seems, is filmed in Georgia these days) with all-new characters joined by a couple of old ones, including Ellen Burstyn reprising her role from 1973. There’s someone else, too, but I won’t spoil it.
As Charlie Daniels once sang, the Devil went down to Georgia, and here he does, indeed. Hey, that must mean all the demonic scourge has been purged from Washington, right?
When a couple of young school chums (Lidya Jewett and Olivia Marcum) go missing for several days in their tight-knit, church-going community, their parents (Leslie Odom Jr., Jennifer Nettles) are understandably distraught, then overjoyed when the two little girls are found, disoriented and a bit worse for wear after their three-day trek in the woods. After a battery of medical procedures and psychological testing, their moms and dads—and a devout next-door-neighbor (Ann Dowd)—realize what the audience already knows: Some kind of demon has hitched a ride home inside the two little sweetums.
Both girls get progressively weirder in this devilish two-fer before going head-spinning, feral-batshit crazy. The Exorcist: Believer retreads most of the shock-value stuff of the original film—writhing young bodies, blood-stained nightgowns, spooky levitation, a vicious act with a crucifix and droning incantations of religious mumbo jumbo. One of the girls has slash marks on her back spelling out a message that viewers of the 1973 movie will certainly recognize. “The body and the blood!” screams the other, stomping down the aisle of a church service in a ranting reference to the Christian ritual of communion. A character compares what the girls have been through with the sacred mythos of Christ descending into hell for three days between his crucifixion and resurrection.
Eventually, a Catholic priest is called in, but this exorcism becomes a grassroots all-in affair, with two little girls strapped into chairs, hissing and writing and spewing black bile as parents, friends and neighbors intone Bible verses and splash on “holy” water.
Only here, 50 years later, it’s not very frightening, and it’s certainly not terribly shocking anymore. This retread into familiar territory doesn’t do much of anything new, especially when it comes to deeply disturbing viewers, and it crowns it all with a tidy little bow of suggestion that the powers of demons and darkness can only be countered by being a “believer.”
Director David Gordon Green also steered three Halloween sequels, and he collaborated with Danny McBride on the gonzo pothead movie comedy Pineapple Express and TV’s East Bound and Down, Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones. McBride is also one of this film’s cowriters and producers, and this project was hatched during breaks in production of Gemstones, the profanely hilarious HBO comedy series in which he plays a comedically corrupt televangelist.
McBride doesn’t appear in this Exorcist, though, and that’s too bad. Having Jesse Gemstone do battle with a double-dipping demon—now that, I believe, would make for one fine holy hell of a movie.
The Media Tourist 