I recently watched last year's attempted legacy sequel/semi-reboot of the Exorcist franchise, The Exorcist: Believer.
I don't think I heard a single positive thing about this movie when it was released. The hate for it was truly inescapable within the horror community. I didn't watch it expecting a cinematic masterpiece. It was more of a "It's free, may as well see what everyone's bitching about" type of watch. I wasn't expecting to like it. In fact, I was expecting to, most likely, laugh at it. (That said, I never choose to see or not see a movie based on reviews, anyway.)
However, while it certainly is far from the most amazing and brilliant thing I've ever watched, I have to say, I failed to see exactly what was so wrong with it.
To give a quick synopsis, The Exorcist: Believer is the story of a young girl named Angela, raised by a single father after an earthquake in Haiti killed her pregnant mother. There's a whole opening sequence that depicts her mother receiving a blessing, as well as her father being told he is going to have to make a choice as to whether his wife or baby will live. We then fast-forward thirteen years to Angela, who, having obviously never met her mother, wishes to hold a seance of sorts to try to reach her. She enlists the help of a friend named Katherine, and the two go off into the woods with some candles and a pendulum. We don't see what happens once they reach their destination, we only learn that they've been missing for three days and are eventually found in a barn, thirty miles from where they started out, and they seem to believe they were only gone for a few hours.
After that, the typical possession-movie fare ensues, and it turns out the girls are possessed and in need of an exorcism. They do the normal types of things you see these types of characters do in these types of movies, Chris MacNeil makes an appearance, only to end up blinded by the possessed Katherine, an exorcism is arranged, performed interestingly with a few types of people from different backgrounds being involved (which I definitely thought was the coolest and most original part of the movie, despite some people calling it "woke") and ultimately Angela lives while Katherine dies after the demon plays a cruel trick on their parents, and Linda Blair makes a brief appearance, reprising her role as Regan MacNeil and finally forgiving her mother for basically exploiting her possession for all these years.
It's not perfect. It's not the most exciting. But it's a perfectly fine movie for what it is. I really didn't think it was bad.
I have a few issues with it, of course. I feel as though the backstory of Angela's parents was built up too much for her mother to not come into play as a ghost/angel. Katherine, on the other hand, got no real backstory at all, so it was difficult to care what happened to her, and her being the one to die had very little impact for that reason. It was sad, sure, but it didn't hit as hard as it would have if Angela had died instead. Also, Chris MacNeil's involvement almost seemed unnecessary. I understand that the new Halloween trilogy started a trend, but shoe-horning past characters into new stories doesn't always work, especially when they get removed from the storyline as quickly as they came. While Chris fared slightly better than Sally Hardesty in the attempt at a legacy sequel to Texas Chainsaw, her direct involvement in the storyline is over almost as quickly as it begins, and it makes me wonder if this movie would have been more well-received if it had just been its own thing.
And then I started thinking about possession/exorcism storylines in general.
No, I wasn't alive when The Exorcist initially came out, but damn-near everyone who has any interest in horror knows the story. That movie broke ground. It terrified a generation of people. It caused religious protests. It came into the horror genre, dared to go where no movie had gone before, and shattered expectations. Many movies about demonic possession exist, but The Exorcist did it first and did it best. You really can't recreate something like that.
The thing about possession/exorcism movies is that they, with few exceptions, really are all the same. There are only so many ways to tell that type of story. A person encounters a demonic entity, they exhibit strange behavior, are skeptic at first, then finally agree to exorcism, and a battle between good and evil ensues. There are different ways it can play out, but ultimately it's always going to essentially be the same movie, just with different characters and settings, and slightly different stakes depending on the circumstances. But that doesn't mean they can't be good for what they are.
I feel like a lot of comments I saw regarding Believer were that it was either too different from the original film, or that it was too much of a rehash. And these both sound like ridiculous arguments to me because of course it's going to be different from a groundbreaking movie made over fifty years ago, but also, you can't expect it to not have similarities, because possession storylines, for the most part, are pretty linear. There's always going to be the person who does something they shouldn't, the strange turn of events that come after, the skepticism, and the exorcism itself. The pieces are always more or less going to be the same. It's just a matter of how they're arranged.
Perhaps the classics should be left alone at this point. Perhaps it's all a bit much, trying to cash in on stories that ended decades ago. But at the same time, perhaps the horror community needs to be a little more open-minded, and accept things for what they are. Know that greatness can't necessarily be recreated, but things can still be decent. Sometimes it just feels like people watch movies looking to complain.
I'm sorry if this was a strange thing to talk about...I just didn't think Believer was awful enough to deserve the tremendous amount of hate it got. It wasn't perfect, but I certainly didn't think it was a bad movie. For what it was, which was basically a film that could only do so many things for the type of film it was, while trying to pay homage to something truly iconic, it did a fair enough job. I feel like it's just a matter of people being hard to satisfy, and possession plots being overdone and held to a standard they can never reach.
That said, I do have another post coming soon about a movie in the same vein that far exceeded my expectations, so, stay tuned.
And, in the meantime, stay spooky, my friends.
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