It’s been a little over 50 years since arguably the most terrifying horror film in history landed on screens, shocking audiences around the world and becoming the first horror nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture. Now a new sequel, The Exorcist: Believer, is streaming on Showmax, just in time for Halloween.
Since the death of his pregnant wife in a Haitian earthquake 12 years ago, Victor Fielding has raised their daughter, Angela, on his own. Just as they start to move on, Angela and her friend Katherine disappear in the woods, only to return three days later with no memory of what happened to them.
In his terror and desperation, Victor will seek out the only person alive who has witnessed anything like it before: exorcism survivor Chris MacNeil.
Oscar nominee Leslie Odom Jr (Hamilton) stars as Victor, while Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn sets a new record for the longest live-action actor-character pairing in film history as Chris MacNeil, the woman who moved heaven and Earth to save her daughter from an unthinkable evil in the 1973 film.
DNA of the movie
“Having Ellen Burstyn in this film ties the DNA of this movie to the original,” says legendary horror producer Jason Blum of Blumhouse fame, who’s been nominated for three Best Picture Oscars, for Whiplash, Get Out and BlacKkKlansman. “For all fans – especially me – that is very satisfying.”
Blum says The Exorcist: Believer is “trying to convey the horror that a parent can feel when their world, their only child, is threatened, and trying to come to terms with how your beliefs might have to evolve when you are guiding someone through this unusual world.”
“The film explores themes about unity and how people overcome hardships with community,” says writer-director David Gordon Green, a Sundance, SXSW and Venice winner who also directed Halloween, one of the highest-grossing horror movies of all time, and more recently Showmax favourite The Righteous Gemstones.
“Demonic possession is a way that people can explore ideas of more relatable types of possession: internal struggles that we all have.
“It’s a subgenre of horror that I’m drawn to because it explores those questions of, ‘Who am I? Who’s within me? Are there things within me that my community might see as questionable? And, if so, can they pull something out of me through relationships, love, intervention?’ All of these ideas I find really intriguing.”
“It’s a terrifying thought that you can be taken over by a force that’s inside,” agrees Burstyn. “It’s one thing to be taken over by somebody coming into your room, kidnapping you. But the idea of a force being able to get possession of you and you can’t control it? I don’t think there’s anything more terrifying.”
The filmmakers took extensive pains to make sure that the young actors could handle the film’s often disturbing material, as well as the rigours of being central characters in a major film production.
“When I watched the original film, I thought, ‘This is insane,’” says Lidya Jewett (Good Girls, Hidden Figures), who plays Angela. “That was the first time that I’d seen anything like that.”
“You want to make sure that they are okay with having an emotionally complex journey because these characters go to very tough places,” Green says. “We wanted to make sure there was a healthy environment for them both on-set and off. That starts with great families and great parental support, and then we also brought in psychologists and educators.
“All of that was critically important because not only do these young women have to memorise lines and act like they’re possessed by a demon, but they also have to sit in a make-up chair for two and a half hours each day, and go to school, and deal with a bunch of crazy people on a film crew trying to make a movie. So, it’s a tremendous psychological challenge for any young actor.”
The young actors also had to progress through multiple levels of possession, as the demon takes greater control of them over time. They worked closely with Green to keep their performances in-sync with each other and the film’s narrative.
Heart of darkness
To take audiences into the heart of darkness, David Gordon Green and Oscar-winning SFX make-up designer Christopher Nelson mapped out the film so that the demon girls would go through three make-up stages of possession. Originally there were four stages. “We called Stage 1 ‘naughty,’ followed by ‘nasty’ and ‘gnarly,’” Green says. “Stage 4 became ‘never again,’ because we wouldn’t even film it. We got the girls in the make-up, and we were like, ‘Nope, never gonna do that.’”
The Exorcist: Believer was a #1 box office hit in the US and the 40th biggest blockbuster of last year globally, becoming the highest grossing film in the franchise since the original. The horror was also nominated for 13 Golden Scythe Awards, including Best Picture.
