After concluding hisHalloweentrilogy withHalloween Ends, David Gordon Green is tackling a different horror masterpiece’s legacy with a new sequel toThe Exorcist. This untitledExorcistmovie, set to be released on October 13, is being planned as the first installment in a new trilogy. Like hisHalloweenreboot, Green’sExorcistfilm will follow on directly from the original classic and retroactively alter some of the franchise’s controversial canon. Leslie Odom, Jr. stars as Tanner, the father of a possessed child, who seeks the counsel of a parent who’s been in a similar situation: Chris MacNeil, played by a returning Ellen Burstyn. Green’s newExorcisthas a few key rules to follow in order to live up to William Peter Blatty’s original novel and William Friedkin’s beloved 1973 film adaptation.
Green is clearly hoping to have the same success with his revival ofThe Exorcistfranchise that he had with his revival of theHalloweenfranchise. But it’ll be trickier to recreate the horror ofThe Exorcistthan it was to recreate the horror ofHalloween. With aHalloweenfilm, fans are satisfied as long asMichael Myers gruesomely kills some unsuspecting Haddonfieldites. Simplicity is the key to a greatHalloweenmovie; it’s about the simple terror of a masked maniac picking off a random succession of victims. But anExorcistfilm has to make the audience believe in demonic possession.
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When it first hit theaters in 1973,The Exorcistbecame an instant cultural phenomenon. Its massive critical and commercial success – not to mention its timelessness and staying power over the past half a century – helped to legitimize the horror genre. Along withRosemary’s BabyandDon’t Look Now, it was one of the first prestige horror films to come out of Hollywood. DuringThe Exorcist’s blockbuster run, the press was filled with urban legends about movie theaters handing out vomit bags at showings and viewers being so horrified by the film that they had to be institutionalized. Audiences had never seen the Devil depicted in such a startlingly realistic way. The new movie needs to recapture that shock and surprise.
Why Halloween 2018 Worked
What made theHalloweenreboot somuch more successful than the average horror rebootis that Green had a real reverence for theHalloweenfranchise and committed to contemporizing its lore. 2018’sHalloweenbrought Michael into the modern day. Today’s teenagers dismissed the majority of the series’ canon as far-fetched fake news and Michael murdered a pair of true-crime podcasters hoping to exploit his killing sprees for clicks. The newHalloweenexplored the long-term psychological effects that the trauma of Michael’s mass murder had on Laurie Strode after four decades and introduced her daughter and granddaughter, who are equally as badass.
John Carpenter’s originalHalloweensolidified the tropes, conventions, and plot formula of the slasher genre and inspired a wave of slashers in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. Green understood that he wasmaking a slasher above alland filled his 2018 reboot with thrilling kill sequences. Michael hid in a child’s bedroom closet for the babysitter to find him, stomped a psychiatrist’s head into a fine paste, impaled a high schooler’s chin on a fence post, and decapitated a cop and turned his head into a jack-o-lantern. Audiences flock toHalloweenmovies to see Michael kill people, and the 2018 film provided that in spades.
How The Exorcist 2023 Can Achieve The Same Success
To achieve the same success as Green’s last horror reboot, the newExorcistfilm needs to do a deep dive on Chris and her lasting trauma just like theHalloweenrevamp did with Laurie. It can’t just skim the surface likeNetflix’sTexas Chainsawlegacy sequeldid with Sally Hardesty. Part of what madeThe Exorcistso great is that Burstyn’s Oscar-nominated performance played the emotions of a single mother who doesn’t know how to help her ailing child with real authenticity. Green needs to give Burstyn the room to bring as much humanity to the reboot’s older Chris that she brought to the character in the 1973 original. TheExorcistreboot shouldn’t rely on CGI. Computer-generated effects are available to filmmakers now, but CG horror never hits as hard as in-camera trickery. The originalExorcistcreated plenty of visceral scares with old-school practical effects. Friedkin lifted a contortionist with wires, sent thick pea soup through a hidden tube for Regan’s vomit, and used a rubber dummy of Linda Blair for the 360-degree head spin.
Just as 2018’sHalloweenwas a great slasher movie above all, 2023’sExorcistneeds to bea great possession movie. Living up to the legacy of the franchise should be secondary to telling a great possession story. The most crucial thing for the reboot to do is capture the terror of demonic possession and the unpredictability of malevolent forces taking over a human host. The originalExorcistis the ultimate possession movie, just like the originalHalloweenis the ultimate slasher. The new reboot needs to offer another terrific entry in the subgenre that the originalExorcistdefined.
