Pazuzu, is that you?
It sure seems like it in the first trailer released to the public for “The Exorcist: Believer.” This had already played at CinemaCon in April and absolutely terrified the audience. Now, viewers can get a jump on their Halloween season themselves. Watch it below.
Most notable about this entire sequel is the fact that it’s the first time Ellen Burstyn has returned to play Chris MacNeill, the D.C. housewife terrorized when her daughter was possessed by a demon in the original “The Exorcist” in 1973. For all the subsequent sequels (and a prequel), she was absent as the franchise went in other directions. But in director David Gordon Green’s take on this material, produced by Blumhouse, he seems to be doing what he did with his 2018 “Halloween”: take an iconic star of the original film and let us see how those terrifying events shaped her life in the decades after.
Of course, Jamie Lee Curtis had appeared in multiple “Halloween” sequels. So Burstyn’s appearance in an “Exorcist” movie after half a century is even more astonishing. And what’s unique is that it seems she’s being brought in to serve the role Max Von Sydow played in the original: as an exorcist herself. We see in the trailer that she’s spent a lifetime researching the occult, following the events in which her daughter Regan (Linda Blair) was possessed by the demon Pazuzu. Now she needs to help two girls who seem possessed as well, at least one of them by a demon who may be Pazuzu.
“We’ve met before,” Burstyn says, as one of the girls creepily hisses “Mother…” at her.
Mind you, Burstyn is 90. Her casting in this is really a singular gift, and something that instantly generates that much more interest in “Believer.” She had been nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars for her turn in the original film (and won a year later for “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”) and was, along with Von Sydow especially, representative of director William Friedkin’s early take on “elevated horror.” That original film, slow and contemplative long (sometimes pretentious) sections, was a blockbuster by fusing its extraordinary horror with elements of art cinema. Hard to imagine Burstyn, after a 60-year career, would return to her iconic role if there wasn’t something particularly ambitious about this script.
Watch it below. Universal opens “The Exorcist: Believer” on October 13. The new cast includes Leslie Odom Jr., Lidya Jewett, Olivia Marcum, Ann Dowd, Okwui Okpokwasili, Jennifer Nettles, and Raphael Sbarge. A follow-up titled “The Exorcist: Deceiver” is now confirmed to be released Easter weekend, April 18, 2025.
