And Then I Saw Her Face: It’s a Doubly Demonic Possession in Blumhouse’s Sequel ‘The Exorcist: Believer’
The devil gets a BOGO deal in Blumhouse/Universal’s upcoming sequel to a film that shocked and awed audiences back in 1973.
Fifty years after moviegoers witnessed the frightening spectacle of young Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) vomiting pea soup, swiveling her head 360° from its starting point, and saying some not very nice things about what someone’s mom was doing in the afterlife, there’s a new sequel to the devil-may-scare horror classic The Exorcist.
The Exorcist: Believer, directed by David Gordon Green (Halloween, Halloween Kills, Halloween Ends) for Blumhouse Pictures and Universal, hits theaters this October. The movie features Ellen Burstyn, who is reprising her role as Chris MacNeil, the mother of the unfortunate Regan in the original.
In Believer, Chris gets pulled into a new tale of possession, this time of two girls. Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom, Jr. (One Night in Miami) is distressed to find that his daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) and her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum) have vanished in the woods. When they reappear three days later with no recollection of where they’ve been, they both are exhibiting some odd and disturbing behaviors, like eating pages of the Bible.
The terrifying events that unfold after their return lead Victor to consult one person who has walked the road to Hell before: Chris MacNeil, who turns up on his doorstep ready to help. But is it too late?
Believer will also star Ann Dowd, Okwui Okpokwasili, Jennifer Nettles, Norbert Leo Butz and Raphael Sbarge. Green is directing from a screenplay he wrote with Petter Sattler (Camp X-Ray), from a story by Scott Teems (Halloween Kills), Danny McBride (Halloween trilogy) and David Gordon Green, based on characters created by William Peter Blatty, whose novel The Exorcist began it all.
The original Exorcist movie inspired two sequels that were part of the same timeline, and a couple prequels that didn’t necessarily stay faithful to that. There was even a recent short-lived television series on Fox based on the film. The movie killed at the box office and earned 10 Academy Award nominations, becoming the first horror film ever nominated for Best Picture.
Just as Blumhouse’s Halloween revival was meant to be a trilogy, so goes the resurrected Exorcist franchise. After the October 13th, 2023 release of Believer, fans can look forward to a sequel, The Exorcist: Deceiver, to hit in theaters on April 18, 2025, as the next entry in a planned Exorcist trilogy.