admin David Gordon Green has done it again—by which I mean he’s cowritten and directed a legacy sequel to a beloved 1970s horror masterpiece, causing critics and horror fans alike to recoil in disgust. The Exorcist: Believer opens this weekend, to a chorus of online boos even louder than those that greeted his recent Halloween sequels. But as with Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends, Green’s latest movie is more than a cynical cash grab.
The critics are right about one aspect of Believer: It’s not especially scary. The truth about exorcism movies (almost all of which owe a debt to the 50-year-old film Green is sequelizing) is that very few of them are. Even William Friedkin’s original is difficult to see in optimal circumstances, which would involve being reborn as a Catholic in 1958, then waiting 15 years for all your worst fears to come true on a giant silver screen. That film nonetheless continues to enrapture audiences. While it doesn’t offer much material for a sequel, legacy or otherwise, talents including director John Boorman, original author William Peter Blatty, and filmmaker Paul Schrader have all made interesting failures out of Exorcist sequels. The consensus on Green’s take is that it isn’t even that– that it’s just a muddle of callbacks and bad horror-picture signifiers.
But the signifiers in Believer that are actually most compelling are Green’s own. Though it’s far from a white-knuckle frightfest, the movie very much develops on his terms, and serves as a companion piece to his Halloween trilogy. The film opens with the Haiti earthquake of 2010, where Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) loses his very pregnant wife. Jumping ahead 13 years, we learn that doctors were able to save his daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett), now a teenager who Victor dotes on as a single parent. As with his version of Halloween’s Haddonfield, Green teases out little glints of both sweetness and hostility from everyday suburban life: the playfulness with which Victor tries to soften his overprotectiveness of Angela; the way their neighbor (Ann Dowd) hectors them about hauling in their trash cans from the curb; the spark of new and giggly friendship between Angela and her popular classmate Katherine (Olivia Marcum), in turn reflected with quiet dismay in the eyes of another girl, left out but for her reluctant role as an alibi.
Angela and Katherine don’t have especially nefarious plans; they just want to sneak off into the woods—a Green specialty—and do a little sleepover-style ritual (Angela hopes to contact her departed mother). We don’t see exactly what happens, only disturbing flashes, but soon the girls are missing, and when they return, after what they think is only a few hours of wandering, it’s three days later and they’re 30 miles away, having lost any sense of time. It’s under these unsettling circumstances that Victor meets Katherine’s parents (Jennifer Nettles and Norbert Leo Butz), religious types quick to anger over their daughter’s bond with a girl they don’t know. Soon enough, the strange behavior the audience is waiting for commences, and we’re on our way to a double exorcism.
That’s how the movie has been described: as an unimpressive gimmick, with two possessed girls for the price of one, plus a soullessly lured-back original star Ellen Burstyn (who’s said she took the gig in order to parlay the studio’s desperation into funding for an acting scholarship). It’s true that the movie’s “legacy” elements could be lifted out almost completely with little difference to the narrative (beyond possibly improving it, and giving more screen time to characters who actually need it). It’s outright baffling that Burstyn was considered such a key element, both in terms of what she does in the movie (very little) and what anyone remembers about The Exorcist (due respect to the amazing Burstyn, but Regan MacNeil’s mom is not exactly a horror icon). The bedeviled besties, however, are right in Green’s wheelhouse–exactly the architecture he needs to explore the community dynamics that seem to fascinate him.
