In the year of our Lord 2023, a half-century after William Friedkin changed the horror genre with The Exorcist, just how the hell do you make a worthy sequel – or, as the filmmakers prefer to put it, a ‘new chapter’? Think about it. Back then, no one had ever seen a movie like Friedkin's – now we've seen dozens of rip-offs. And 50 years ago, faith, and the spectre of the Devil, were part and parcel of many people's lives. Now our churches’ Sunday bells attract fewer and fewer worshippers. So can a modern-day horror movie truly possess the power to compel? To not just scare viewers but shake them to their very soul?
When Total Film sits down with director David Gordon Green and producer Jason Blum to discuss The Exorcist: Believer, it's not the first time they've faced this question. It is, in fact, exactly what they were asking themselves when they decided to follow their Halloween trilogy by adopting a Holy Grail horror IP that exceeds the cultural significance of even John Carpenter's seminal slasher.
‘There have been – a lot of misfires – so the bar was lower,’ says Blum, whose horror house Blumhouse Productions has always practised a business model of reaching large audiences with low-budget enterprises: , and the Paranormal Activity, Insidious and Purge franchises. But and its two planned sequels are something different, with Universal Pictures and its streaming service, Peacock, paying $400m for the rights. ‘The tricky thing with is that even though 90% of the audience who see will have not seen the first , they will have heard about it from their parents, as the scariest movie of all time,’ says Blum.
