The Exorcist: Believer (

2023

)

Christian-themed horror movies have always operated at a significant disadvantage for me, which has become even more pronounced after I became a Christian myself. The issue is that if we are to accept that God and the Devil are real, then, quite frankly, the Devil doesn't have a chance. In a straight fight, Satan and his lackeys are powerless and doomed to fail. A simple invocation of the cross, or a splash of holy water, or a few solemn prayers and the unclean spirits simply melt away. While Damien may temporarily hold dominion over Earth in The Omen (1976), we know that he can never win. Likewise, while the apocalypse in The Seventh Sign (1988) may promise a near-term future that is quite turbulent, we also know that the end of all things will bring about our eventual salvation. In the Christian worldview, the battle between good and evil is so uneven that it becomes impossible to derive much tension from it. We know from the start that God will win, because how could it be otherwise?

Thus with the original Exorcist (1973), I never found myself all too concerned with the fate of Regan MacNeil. God would never abandon an innocent child to the forces of hell. So, the only possibilities for the film's plot is that either Regan will be saved, or that God does not exist and consequently, Regan is not possessed and merely suffering from a sort of psychological disturbance. Like all Christian-themed horror movies, there can be no real tension in the central conflict. That said, The Exorcist (1973) manages to keep audiences invested because its story is anchored on two extremely well-written and well-acted characters. It doesn't matter that I know God will win in the end, because in the moment I am lost in Chris MacNeil's fear for her daughter's life and Father Karras' crisis of faith.

The Exorcist: Believer seems to be aware of this issue as well, and likewise is also aware that it has no characters or actors (despite actually having the actress who played Chris MacNeil in the cast, she is clearly there just for a paycheck) who can measure up. However, it does create some tension by playing with the idea that the world the film inhabits is one where the traditional Christian God does not exist. On the surface this is a bit galling, after all, if you want to make an openly heretical horror film there are already plenty of ways to do it. There's no need to hijack one of the most successful Christian movies in history to do so. However, it does give us at least something to think about while the movie is playing, and when you're dealing with a cash-in horror legacy sequel, especially one as boring as this, that is the best you can hope for.

Indeed, watching the trailer I was initially concerned that The Exorcist: Believer would be the sort of movie that acknowledged no divine truth save for the gospel DEI. I was certainly skeptical when I heard Chris MacNeil say she wasn't allowed to watch her daughter's exorcism because she wasn't “a member of their damn patriarchy.” Indeed this line made me mad as it shows a galling lack of respect for the two priests who sacrificed their lives to save her daughter, and is categorically not something that the Chris MacNeil from The Exorcist (1973) would say. The ritual, as depicted in the original movie was dangerous and Chris was excluded for her own safety, not because she was a woman.

Even more worrisome than that clunker of a line though is how Chris claims to have studied a variety of exorcism rituals and said that the practice is common across all different faiths and regions. At this point I thought I saw where the film was going, the demon would eventually be defeated by a group of exorcists from every major religion and a few minor ones. Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to watching a film where a Taoist mystic, a Catholic Priest, an African Shaman, and a drugged-out hippie cosplaying as a Druid bicker back and forth about how to deal with a possessed girl. The problem is that this could only work as a comedy, as the rituals, dogmas, and fundamental worldviews of these groups are so disparate that their practitioners would struggle to agree on anything. I don't think the Jewish exorcist, for instance, will be very happy invoking the name of Christ to drive out demons alongside his Catholic counterpart.

However, all of Chris' arguments are weapon's grade bullshit in the context of the film, because as soon as she confronts one possessed child and attempts to drive the demon out in the name of all higher beings everywhere, she is attacked and blinded by the possessed girl wielding a crucifix. It's almost as if trying to rebuke Satan in the name of Baal and Baphomet wouldn't work. Maybe that is why Father Karras and Father Mirrin didn't want you in the room sweetie. Moreover, the nature of her injury has some spiritual significance as well. Chris, having been the direct beneficiary of a Catholic exorcism, has been given more reason than most to accept the divinity of Jesus Christ, but despite that, she still argues that all religions are equally true, even the ones that contradict one another; There is none so blind as he who will not see.

Creating this spiritual doubt does inject a bit of tension into the early proceedings of the film. The only problem is they had to mangle Chris MacNeil's character to do so. I regard this as less a proper sequel to The Exorcist (1973) and more a disgustingly well-funded fan-fiction project, so the character assassination doesn't bother me all that much. However, it is remarkable in how thorough it is. In the original film, Chris says she is glad that Regan doesn't remember anything about her ordeal, as it makes it more likely that she will have a normal childhood and adolescence. Here, Chris wrote a tell-all book that paraded Regan's trauma before the entire world. She then went on to alienate her daughter to such an extent that now she doesn't know if Regan is alive or dead. Whereas in the original film, Chris was a non-religious person who was driven into the arms of Catholicism by an unenviable circumstance here she is a mystic who has a juvenile view that “like all religions are true in their own way... man.” Perhaps most annoying though, Chris has gone from eternally grateful for the sacrifices of Father Mirrin and Father Karras to petulantly whining about being made to wait downstairs while they died to save her daughter. This is not the same woman as before.

Finally, fans of The Exorcist (1973) know what all those poor sods who like Star Wars have been going through for the last decade.

The Exorcist series has had some pretty wild premises throughout its disparate entries. The Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) transformed Father Mirrin into a heretic and created a whole backstory where the demon, Pazuzu, was targeting children with latent psychic superpowers. While The Exorcist III (1990) shifts the focus to a minor character from the first film as he investigates a disturbing series of Satanic murders. What these movies have in common though is rather than retreading the ground of the original movie they use events and characters from the original to go off in their own direction. They had their own ideas and did something interesting with the world left behind by The Exorcist (1973). They were not just retreads about little girls being possessed by demons. When asked to perform a similar feat and come up with its own unique premise though, the Exorcist: Believer just shrugs its shoulders and says “I dunno... What if we had two little girls being possessed by demons instead of one?” I cannot believe that this is the pitch that convinced Universal to shell out $400,000,000 for the distribution rights.

The two little girls are not given equal treatment by the film, with the film focusing much more attention and sympathy on Angela and her struggling single father Victor. Victor is a lapsed believer because after dragging his heavily pregnant wife to Haiti so he could shoot pictures of church bells and frolicking children, she died from injuries she sustained during an earthquake. He blames God for his misfortune, whereas I am more inclined to blame him for making his wife go with him to a failed state that was already suffering from natural disasters and political unrest before the 2010 earthquake hit. What need does a woman in her third trimester have for clean water or proper medical facilities? He also feels guilty because he told the doctor to save his wife if possible and sacrifice the baby if necessary. A harrowing choice to be sure, but it's the decision that almost any man would make under the circumstances, so honestly I don't believe that he is so tormented by the guilt of this perfectly reasonable decision even if he does love his daughter deeply.

The film will spend a great deal of time attempting to flesh out the relationship between Angela and Victor, but the problem is that there isn't any substance to that relationship. Victor is a single dad who loves his daughter, while Angela is a girl who has only a few friends at school (probably because she's so boring). Both are sad that Victor's wife and Angela's mom is dead, though why Angela is so stuck on it is more than a little odd. Her mom died when she was still in utero, so it's not like she has any fond memories of her. It certainly seems odd that she would steal her mom's scarf then sneak out to the forest and conduct a séance to talk to her. Well... At least it would be odd if the movie didn't need that to happen so she and her friend Katherine could wind up possessed after playing with the occult.

While Angela might not have much going on, Katherine is a complete nonentity. We barely see her when she is not possessed by a demon. Moreover, her family who also hang around for most of the film, have very limited characterization. We know that we're not supposed to like them because they are White and Baptists, and because her dad spends most of the film saying sensible things in an annoying and confrontational manner. There is nothing wrong with focusing on one half of the possessed duo over the other, but here it becomes a serious issue when we get to the film's climatic exoticism and the demon says that the parents of the two girls will have to choose which one will live and which one will die. If Katherine and her family had been developed and interesting characters, or if they were at least as developed and as interesting as Angela and Victor, then this dilemma may have been compelling. As it stands we know from the start that Angela will live and Katherine will die because they are not going to kill off the marginally interesting character in favor of the featureless plank of wood.

Even then, it's not like Angela is a character that we care very much about. The only reason she matters in the slightest is that we know her Dad loves her and that since he's already down one wife, so he won't be able to make any more children. Yet I found it hard to care even when Katherine's father jumped in to say that he chose to save his daughter at the expense of Angela. Part of the problem is I hadn't seen any glimpse into his relationship with his daughter that would prompt him to sacrifice another innocent to save her, partially because I didn't really care whether Angela lived or died, and partially because I didn't think a demon would keep to a fair bargain (you know, Prince of Lies and all that). So it's not exactly a revelation when it turns out that by choosing his daughter, Katherine's dad has consigned her to death and damnation.

The imagery of Katherine's soul being dragged to hell is incidentally the most visually striking and impressive sequence in the film. It is unnerving and bizarre and resembles something like you might glimpse in your worst nightmare. Unfortunately from there, the ending descends into a tonal mess, where soft, hopeful music plays and we see all the other characters go back to their lives. This is an absurd reaction, as in the context of the movie the forces of hell are triumphant. An innocent child was condemned to eternal torment, fulfilling the plan of the demonic creature that possessed her. This should be a tragic ending, why is everyone so chill?! I know that nobody in the audience gives a shit about Katherine, but surely some of the characters in the film should be upset about it.

I also find it funny that the exorcism ends with a dead little girl, a Catholic priest with his head twisted 180 degrees around, and the cops arriving at the scene. How is it possible that nobody involved in the exoticism was locked up after this? Do cops in this universe know that demons are real and periodically twist people's heads around? All I can imagine is that clip from Ticker and Dale vs Evil (2010), where the hapless protagonists explain away the numerous corpses on their property by telling the cops that they have had a “dozy of a day.”

The biggest problem with The Exorcist: Believer, even more so than its poor treatment of legacy characters, its derivative story, its periodic breaks with reality, and its extremely questionable moral core, is that it's just plain boring. The movie is nearly two hours long, and while some horror movies can justify such an ample run-time (The Exorcist (1973) itself was 122 minutes), The Exorcist: Believer is not one of them. There are vast stretches where nothing happens to advance the plot, and the best we can hope for is a lame jump scare every ten minutes and the character assassination of somebody from the original film.

Probably the funniest thing about all this is how confident the producers and filmmakers were in their underwhelming product. I mentioned above how Universal paid $400,000,000 for the distribution rights, but the mere fact that this middle-budget horror movie was released as the first part in a planned trilogy is hilarious on the face of it. Imagine if rather than just releasing the embarrassingly bad The Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), the studio also had an Exorcist III: Pazuzu's Revenge and Exorcist IV: The Return of the Vatican already queued up for release. Adding to the mirth is the fact they have Linda Blair turn up for a five-second teaser at the end of the film like she's Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015). there is nothing I love so much as filmmakers and studios with this level of unwarranted self-confidence.