The Exorcist is one of the pillars of the horror genre. It turned fifty years old this year. A lot of people would consider it the greatest horror film ever. So when the news came out that David Gordon Green, who directed the new Halloween trilogy, was going to direct a new Exorcist film it took people by surprise. Nobody expected it. Fast Forward to today and it’s a few days before it’s about to be released. And a few weeks before Halloween. Audiences are about to be scared out of their minds.

Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) is a single father raising his teenage girl Angela (Lidya Jewett) She likes to hang out with her friend Kathrine (Olivia O’Neill) After school one day they go into the adjacent woods across the street from their school and decide to summon the spirit of Angela’s dead mother. When something goes wrong. They disappear for three days causing their parents to wonder what happened to them while they were gone.

With this being an Exorcist film there are a lot of makeup effects that transform said characters being possessed. The makeup looks pretty gaunt, the lips are chapped, and the eyes turn colors and various cuts and scars form on the heads and bodies of those affected by the demon possession in this film. The makeup effects instantly bring viewers into this world that Gordon Green is trying to create.

With any horror films must come the scares. This film has a good amount of jump scares. The Exorcism per say had a few scary moments and some dramatic element to it. There were some creepy moments earlon on though once the girls come home from being missing. Gordon Green tried very hard to incorporate the jump scares and I wasn’t that scared overall from what the filmmakers were trying to do. I wanted more scary moments and it was sad we didn’t get that.

With the makeup effects also come the practical effects that create a pretty dark and frightening atmosphere. There is wind and rain and cracks forming in the house that the said Exorcism takes place in. Various other things happened within the context of the film. The spooky nature of everything Gordon Green is trying to do with this story is ever present with everything that is going on. He captures all of what I was expecting in this story regarding the practical effects.

As in the original Exorcist, there are these two girls who get possessed by a demonic presence, and with that comes their performances. They have to bring all they can to these roles. They just seem so similar in tone to Linda Blair as Regan for me. They hit all the notes you have to hit in these roles but they just seem like cookie-cutter performances. All of the same things they do she did in the original film. I know it’s not easy to do this kind of performance so I don’t want to take anything away from these girls but I just felt it was pretty much a copy of what we’ve seen before.

Peter Sattler, Danny McBride, Gordon Green, and Scott Teems created a story with some background to it. There was a cold opening that I felt had some weight going forward in the movie. The problem with it was despite a necklace connected to the deceased mother of one of the girls they completely forget about this part of the story until the very end of the film. I wanted to see more of a connection to this part of the movie within the rest of the film. 

As seen in the trailer there is a return of a character from the original film. Ellen Burstyn reprised her role of Chris MacNeil from The Exorcist and she doesn’t play a big part in the movie. When she appeared for the first time I thought okay this is going to be big going forward and it wasn’t. She was wasted in a sense and never used in a significant way after her initial appearance where she visited the hospital and home of the girls. This to me was a waste of a talented actress where with a better script this could have been paid off better.

Another of the positives for me was the score by Amman Abbasi and David Wingo. They incorporated a lot of the original Exorcist score by Lalo Schiffrin. When those iconic notes popped up sporadically throughout the movie I got goosebumps. These two newer composers brought other sounds and dark tones to the film as well. They mixed newer music with the older music to create a dark and haunting score that was a nice companion to the dark and haunting film.

The Exorcist: Believer is the epitome of the old college try saying. Gordon Green had the ingredients to make a solid sequel to The Exorcist but failed in a lot of ways. The script is lacking in depth and character development,  the acting from the two main girls seemed like cookie-cutter performances from Linda Blair fifty years ago. The practical effects and makeup effects were spot on though. I just wish there was more of a connection to the cold opening and Burstyn wasn’t wasted as she was. This could have been a great sequel but turned out to be another bad horror sequel instead.

2 ½ stars

Dan Skip Allen