While David Gordon Green’s rebooted Halloween trilogy may have ended with an awkward thud, there is no doubt that the director and Blumhouse brought back a dormant franchise in a fantastic way with the first film. Now, they are trying to do it again, this time with The Exorcist: Believer, a requel to the original film that just dropped its first trailer today.
Much like with Halloween, The Exorcist: Believer appears to be scrapping everything that happened in the sequel films and using the original movie as a launching point. Unlike with Halloween, that’s not going to be quite as controversial as The Exorcist‘s sequels (and reboot in 2005) were never all that much beloved in the first place. In Believer, we appear to pick up decades after the first, Academy Award-winning film. Single father Victor Fielding (Tony winner and Oscar nominee Leslie Odom Jr.) discovers that his daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett), and her best friend (Olivia Marcum) have gone missing, but when they return three days later with no memory of anything, something is clearly up. Or… would it be down since it’s about hell? Either way, both his daughter and her friend start turning into the classic possessed child that The Exorcist created and has since turned into a trope.
Of course, since we’re using the Halloween reboot playbook here, Victor must turn to Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), the mother of the original film’s possessed child, for help. This is the first time Burstyn is returning to the franchise, and it definitely lends the reboot a lot more credibility. That’s not to mention how really creepy this The Exorcist: Believer trailer is. The Exorcist popularized and exploded the entire genre of exorcism horror, and by now many of its original ideas are tropes — so it’s good to see that this film seems to be doing a few things differently, like having two concurrent possessions.
The film also stars Emmy winner Ann Dowd (The Handmaid’s Tale, Hereditary) as Victor and Angela’s neighbor and Grammy winner Jennifer Nettles (Harriet, The Righteous Gemstones) and two-time Tony winner Norbert Leo Butz (Fosse/Verdon, Bloodline) as the parents of Katherine, Angela’s friend.
The Exorcist: Believer will release 50 years after the original film did on October 13.
