The Exorcist: Believer is about to hit our screens at a time when the 1973 original celebrates its 50th anniversary. The late William Friedkin’s classic is often described as the greatest scary movie of all time – a terrifying tale of demonic possession in which actress Chris MacNeil fights to free her daughter Regan from the evil spirit Pazuzu. Filmmaker David Gordon Green, speaking to NME from Los Angeles, calls it “the holy grail of horror movies” and follows up by saying, “I absolutely adore every frame of Friedkin’s film.” No pressure directing a sequel, then.
The legacy reboot follows the revisionist genre laws set by Green’s own recent Halloween trilogy (2018-2022). It’s a direct follow-up and completely ignores any other entry in the series: Exorcist II: The Heretic, (1977) Exorcist III (1990), Exorcist: The Beginning (2004) and its alternative version Dominion: Prequel To The Exorcist (2005). Those might as well exist in another universe (or burn in Hell).
The Exorcist was both a phenomenon and a box office juggernaut. As famous as Halloween is in the horror community, The Exorcist exists on an entirely different realm of cultural impact and cinema history. “It could be said it’s daunting to follow in those footsteps, but I also think it’s 50 years later, and there’s a new audience, new conversations, and an evolved culture,” is how Green explains his decision to take the gig. “We don’t live in a world [anymore] where the word ‘exorcist’ has the same foreign feeling as it did back then. Everybody knows what one is, everybody has seen an exorcist movie.”
And what creative benefit is there in pretending the other films in the franchise never existed? Well, in regard to The Exorcist: Believer, the answer perhaps lies in John Boorman’s maligned 1977 sequel. Continuing the story of Regan, now in her late teens and living in New York, Boorman made a frankly batshit movie – too batshit. “I rewatched Exorcist II and it’s totally bonkers,” says Green. “So if I had to deal with a narrative that congested, but also in some ways bombastically brilliant, I just didn’t know what to do with it. It’s an art film and it’s bizarre. I’m trying to keep my take on the franchise grounded, relatable, and practical in its effects and understandable in its narrative. If it [Exorcist II] was just called Boorman Goes Bonkers, I would love it.”
“Ellen Burstyn was the first one to start busting everybody’s balls”
Green’s new instalment tells the story of widower Victor Fielding (played by Leslie Odom Jr.) and daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett). One day, she goes missing after school, along with pal Katherine (Olivia O’Neill). When they return, the dazed pair soon turn into a gruesome twosome. At a total loss, Victor turns to MacNeil who, since we last saw her, has spent decades becoming an expert on demonic activity. It was known well in advance that Ellen Burstyn would return, via press release and then the trailers.
Everybody told Green it was impossible to get Burstyn aboard. But perseverance and allowing the 90-year-old star input into her character paid off. “I met with her and talked to her and she was exactly as everybody said: very sceptical, said ‘thanks but no thanks’. But I wouldn’t stop bugging her,” he jokingly puts it. Green also remembers the first day on set, everybody going quiet when Burstyn appeared. “We treated it as this sacred moment, and she was the first one to start busting everybody’s balls, having fun, and she really took the pressure off.”
The next star attraction in The Exorcist: Believer is the demon. Pazuzu (aka Captain Howdy) is taking time out from corrupting the flesh of the innocent. Although it is never named and seen only fleetingly, Green was keen to expand the mythology and, after doing much research, he selected a Mesopotamian demigoddess known as Lamashtu. On choosing this female demon-god, the director explains with tongue firmly in cheek: “I started researching Pazuzu and I didn’t necessarily feel bound to this demon from the previous movie. I did get excited about the demonology surrounding that demon, and found, I guess, a demon friend of Pazuzu’s.”
Ashley Levy served as Head Of Makeup on the new film, helping transform actresses Olivia O’Neill and Lidya Jewett into hellions. While The Exorcist: Believer makes plenty of visual references to the 1973 blockbuster, it sets about doing its own thing. A horror movie enthusiast, Levy specialises in what she calls “beauty and the beatdown”. “I can make you look beautiful but also massacre you.” In talking to her director about the early stage of possession makeup effects, she says: “What was so cool about David, every little thing is a piece of texture and [adds to the] storytelling. Everything was so important to him as a storyteller.”
“I’ve seen a lot of exorcism movies, but I ain’t ever seen this before”
Did late effects and makeup maestro Dick Smith’s pioneering work on The Exorcist present a challenge to the team? “Absolutely,” Levy agrees. Their approach was to evoke the memory of Smith’s groundbreaking makeup effects without directly copying. Chris Nelson, The Exorcist: Believer’s special effects and makeup wizard, was also praised by Levy. “Chris did an amazing job applying that principal of ‘I’m not trying to be Dick Smith’. It was more, ‘I’m going to create something that’s going to make you feel a certain kind of way [and draw up memories of the first movie].’ It’s going to upset and disturb you, but the respect and the homage is going to come in little elements and make you realise that, if you don’t replicate something exactly, it’s not disrespectful.”
Green inserted his own innovation into the exorcism genre, bringing to it the concept of synchronised possession. We get two victims for the price of one movie ticket. Shared possession is a gnarly idea, and there have been documented cases, according to Green. “I had the idea of multiple families [as victims of possession] and I’d never heard of synchronised possession before but you read these cases – I’ve read about two-to-five people being possessed by one entity and these synchronised phenomenon [occurring]. I got excited. I’ve seen a lot of exorcism movies, but I ain’t ever seen that before.”
Another radical departure for the series is the introduction of multi-faith beliefs, rather than it being an exclusively Catholic affair. Green says this was very much part of updating the franchise but equally reflecting the society we live in today. “I think the world I know and live in is vast in its spiritual perspectives, and emotional perspectives. We have the man in the white collar and the ‘power of Christ compels you!’ but bring in some other perspectives, from Baptist to Pentecostal to Hoodoo culture and atheism, as well as the medical and psychological communities which have a voice in these considerations.”
As much as The Exorcist: Believer pays loving homage to its forebear, they are beasts of different eras. “[The original] is such a slow burn film. One of my favourite scenes is Lt. Kinderman interviewing MacNeil in her house, and it’s just a very long slow zoom, no coverage. It’s brilliant but anybody at a test screening [today] would say, ‘We don’t need that scene, cut it’. I worry about those types of scenes surviving a modern day ticket-buying audience. People are wanting more instant gratification, more plot twists and explanations, less ambiguity, so I’m trying to acknowledge that, but have my cake and eat it too.”
Green’s film sits in fascinating contrast, thematically too. Friedkin’s is a lonely, sad, heavy film, populated by a divorced and distracted movie star, a daughter with an absent father who spends a lot of time on her own playing with a Ouija board in the basement, or with her mother’s personal assistant. There’s the guilt-ridden Jesuit priest, a Jewish detective struggling to understand what’s happening, and an elderly exorcist in retirement. In comparison, The Exorcist: Believer is about community and hope. Even its finale is filled with people coming together to ward off evil. Was this a conscious decision, to create a kind of dialogue between two movies, between battling viewpoints? “Wow. I never really thought about that. But you’re totally right. Our film is about community and that juxtaposes with everything in the original film. I’ll have to process that a little bit. There’s something to that, for sure.”
Like the original, the film ends with a grand set piece. A blood-vomit-spit-and-rancid-vapours exorcism. It is a harrowing and eerie scene. It must have been fun to devise and execute. When we ask him if it was, Green is mystified by our use of the word fun. “Did you say ‘fun’? Fun is the wrong word.” He declares it the most difficult thing he’s ever filmed.
“It was really fucking hard. That sequence was three weeks of work and the young actresses had two and a half hours of makeup – and 30 minutes to get the makeup off at the end of the day, and limited [employment] hours because they’re kids. You could have given me three years to make that scene, and it would be tough. The content was hard, we had to do all these effects practically. That was our ambition to get it done right, and light it correctly and to make it emotional and scary. It was extremely well planned but every day there would be a hundred curveballs. I was relieved when it was done, satisfied. [Shooting that sequence] was way more daunting than following in the footsteps of Friedkin’s masterpiece.”
‘The Exorcist: Believer’ is released in cinemas on October 6