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    Diving Into ‘The Exorcist: Believer’

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    We knew Ellen Burstyn would be back. But what else? A discussion of some of the spoiler moments in the new sequel to the 1973 horror classic.The spooky season has arrived and among this year’s crop of horror franchise resurrections is “The Exorcist: Believer,” the first in a planned trilogy of sequels to William Friedkin’s 1973 classic “The Exorcist.” If you know anything about this revamped version, you’ll know it’s not just one little girl who’s hacked by Satan, but two. For everything else, keep on reading — meaning spoilers ahead.Like the director David Gordon Green’s previous trilogy of “Halloween” reboots, “The Exorcist: Believer” has been critically panned. Given the two movies set to follow — the second installment “The Exorcist: Deceiver” is scheduled for spring of 2025 — it’s a bad start for Green and company. Though I imagine they’re not banking on good reviews so much as the divine power of nostalgia and brand recognition.David Gordon Green narrates a sequence from his film, featuring Leslie Odom Jr. and Lidya Jewett.Eli Joshua Adé/Universal PicturesFor nearly two hours, the film tracks the possession and eventual exorcism of two 13-year old gal pals: Angela (Lidya Jewett), who is Black, and Katherine (Olivia O’Neill), who is white. “Believer” starts out in Haiti with a portentous prelude that hearkens back to the original, in which a Catholic priest stumbles upon satanic heirlooms in a very sinister-looking part of Iraq. Angela’s parents are on vacation in the island country when an earthquake hits, gravely injuring the mother and forcing the father, Tanner (Leslie Odom Jr.), to choose between saving his pregnant wife or the baby inside of her.In the present, Tanner is an affable single dad suggesting that he chose the babe. This assumption makes up the film’s emotional backbone. After the girls go missing and return three days later with their feet mangled and eyes tweaky, they hit a monstrous form of puberty. It’s teenage rebellion made sacrilegious, razed of all of the truly crass and nasty edges that made Linda Blair’s Regan, the possessed girl in the original movie, so shocking to behold.The film pivots away from the girls to focus on feels, courtesy of the original cast-member Ellen Burstyn’s Chris MacNeil (Regan’s mom), now the author of a book about Regan’s possession. Chris isn’t a final girl, and she’s not uniquely skilled at fending off the baddie. But because she’s a legacy character, “Believer” treats her with an air of reverence that gives her a preternatural connection to the devil — and it makes him, a supposedly omnipotent, unknowable being, a lot less scary. The demonic version of Katherine jabs a crucifix through Chris’s eyes, blinding her for the rest of the movie — a condition that parallels the film’s ideas about belief in the indemonstrable. Chris has long been estranged from Regan, who supposedly cut contact with her mother after the release of her book. Chris holds on to the possibility of Regan’s return, which she does, in a final-act cameo by Blair herself.“The Exorcist,” a master class in grief and dread, is quite unlike the formulaic fun of, say, slasher movies that easily breed follow-ups. Famously, Friedkin (and Burstyn, at least until “Believer”) wanted nothing to do with the extended universe that spawned after its release. You don’t need to watch any of the other “Exorcist” movies to understand “Believer,” which only draws from Friedkin’s version — and offers up this extension.The film’s equal-opportunity possession encourages cooperation between racially diverse families, and the jumbo-exorcism in the end doubles as a kumbaya circle for religious harmony. Both families assemble a supergroup of believers to perform the rites: a Protestant minister, a voodoo mistress, an Evangelical speaker-in-tongues, and an ex-Catholic nun. Because believing isn’t about any one religion, it’s a collective act of faith. Circling back to Tanner’s decision in the beginning, the devil, trickster that he is, demands that the parents choose one girl to survive. Katherine’s dad, the most weak-willed of the three, screams out his daughter’s name and — just like Tanner, who had asked for the doctors to save his wife — the opposite happens. Angela survives. But given the shoddiness of the exorcism itself, and the fact that the devil seemed to be calling the shots through the end, I’d imagine Satan has more in store for her. More

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      Watch a Scene From ‘The Exorcist: Believer’

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      The film’s director and co-writer, David Gordon Green, narrates a sequence featuring Leslie Odom Jr. and Lidya Jewett.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.A light switch clicking on and off is at the center of an unnerving sequence in “The Exorcist: Believer.”Leslie Odom Jr. stars as Victor Fielding, a father whose daughter (Lidya Jewett) had been missing and only just returned, quite different from when she left. Narrating this sequence, the director David Gordon Green said, “I’m starting to establish the unnerving quality of a father that can’t quite explain the behavior of his daughter.”He does this by using a continuous timeline, with the scene playing out as if in real time even though there are numerous shots.“That slow burn,” he said, “that time where there’s no gimmicks that you can process as a viewer, it adds a strange expectation of when something is going to happen.” The scene’s eerie conclusion helps to set up the mayhem that will soon follow.Read the “Exorcist: Believer” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      ‘Halloween Ends’ Review: It Probably Doesn’t

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      David Gordon Green wraps up his reboot trilogy for a horror franchise that never stays dead for long.Can we imagine future Halloweens without a new “Halloween”? We might have to, if David Gordon Green’s “Halloween Ends,” the wrap-up film of the reboot trilogy he began in 2018, plants a full stop on a 44-year-old franchise. Savvy viewers, though, will intuit the title’s missing question mark, understanding that Michael Myers, one of cinema’s fustiest boogeymen, is unlikely to remain interred for long.And for a spell in “Halloween Ends” it seems as if Green might be offering a creative hand to his possible successors, only to withdraw it in favor of business as usual. Four years have passed since the events of “Halloween Kills,” and Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has given up the gunslinging-granny look and doomsday prepping in favor of a cottage-core aesthetic and memoir writing. She and her granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak), have inexplicably remained in Haddonfield, Ill., where the townsfolk still blame Laurie for inciting Myers’s last stabbing spree and, presumably, for their plummeting property values.Also shunned by the locals is Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), a geeky lad whose disastrous babysitting exploits three years earlier resulted in a dead child, a murder trial and an acquittal. Clearly, he’s perfect boyfriend material, and after saving him from the town bullies, Laurie introduces him to Allyson. Things go swimmingly until Corey encounters Myers one night in a dank cave beneath an underpass and learns there might be more to life than enduring insults and suffocating shame.At first, Corey’s involvement with the visibly declining Myers (again played by James Jude Courtney) is strangely ill-defined, a cross between caretaker and understudy. But as proximity to evil causes Corey to change — being an acolyte apparently does wonders for the libido — his too-rapid transformation constitutes a missed opportunity for the franchise. By pumping up Corey’s psychological damage, Green could have made a passing-the-torch movie, giving Corey a clear framework for his capitulation to the allure of slaughter. This also would have meshed perfectly with Laurie’s declaration that evil doesn’t die, it just changes shape.Changing shape, though, is something that exhausted movie properties struggle to do, and Green and his three co-writers soon revert to the comforting beats of the body count. This time, the townspeople — after virtually hijacking the previous installment — have dwindled to a few familiar faces, and there’s a touching reunion between Laurie and a flirty Officer Frank Hawkins (nice to see you, Will Patton, however briefly). He doesn’t know she’s already taken.The twisted bond between hunter and hunted that’s common to many serial-killer narratives (though rarely more overtly and eloquently than in Bryan Fuller’s terrific TV show “Hannibal”) has always been this franchise’s backbone. As if attempting to honor that, Green has made a movie that’s less frantic and more intimate than its predecessor, one that unfolds with a mourning finality. For me, its most evocative image is of a severed tongue circling lazily on a record turntable — maybe Green’s way of letting us know that he, at least, has nothing more to say.Halloween EndsRated R. Don’t pretend you don’t know why. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters and available to watch on Peacock. More

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      ‘Halloween Kills’ Review: There Will Be (Copious Amounts of) Blood

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      The newest installment of the “Halloween” franchise, starring Jamie Lee Curtis, is a murderous mess that substitutes corpses for characters.After a dozen movies — and a 13th on the horizon — the once-monstrous Michael Myers shuffles into theaters this weekend as exhausted as the 43-year-old franchise that indulges his blood lust. “Halloween Kills,” the middle film of a reboot trilogy started in 2018 by the director David Gordon Green, is an indolent, narratively impoverished mess that substitutes corpses for characters and slogans for dialogue.What Green appears to be killing here is time. While his previous installment cannily reimagined Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), the plucky babysitter who bested Myers in John Carpenter’s original film, as a trauma-toughened grandmother, this latest exhumation turns her into a virtual bystander. We find her, mere minutes after the ending of the last chapter, bleeding profusely in the back of a truck, barreling away from her burning home and believing her nemesis vanquished once and for all.“Let it burn!” she screams at the firefighters, perhaps aware that the body count of emergency workers is about to soar. Thereafter, she will mostly languish in a hospital bed in the hapless burgh of Haddonfield, Ill., while her daughter and granddaughter (Judy Greer and Andi Matichak) are left to hold the bag — or, in this case, pitchfork — when Myers, inevitably, returns.Plagued by idiotic pronouncements (“He is an apex predator!”) and moronic behavior (doors are left unlocked, an unloaded gun is brandished), “Halloween Kills” plays at times like an exceptionally gory comedy routine. (I dare you not to laugh out loud when one character bemoans the rising number of slayings by declaring, “This was a safe place and now it’s not anymore!”) And if Haddonfield seems significantly more diverse this time out, it’s to no apparent purpose other than to vary the appearances and sexual orientations of its victims. That’s a shame, because the only characters I missed when the picture was over were the gay partners planning a pleasant evening with Mary Jane and “Minnie and Moskowitz” (1971). I hope they already knew the ending.Clumsy flashbacks to the original plot soothe the uninitiated, and characters we barely remember are reintroduced to take their chances among those being creatively killed off. Leading these is Anthony Michael Hall as a grown-up Tommy Doyle, the child Laurie was babysitting on Halloween, 1978, now running a support group for survivors of that night’s mayhem. In mere minutes, Tommy harangues his group into an angry posse, rounding up nondescript townspeople to hunt Myers down. As the mob congregates — mystifyingly — at the hospital, Laurie is prompted to stumble briefly out of bed, stab herself with a painkiller-filled syringe and yowl like a banshee. Contract fulfilled, Ms. Curtis!As for possibly our most resurrected cinematic psycho (played once again by James Jude Courtney), he seems a little sadder behind his rapidly decomposing mask. The success of any “Halloween” retread depends fundamentally on its ability to telegraph the mad magnetism between Myers and Laurie — a tether that’s trampled by this picture’s amorphous gang of vigilantes, repeatedly yelling “Evil dies tonight!” In light of the coming attractions, I can reliably predict that it does not.Halloween KillsRated R. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters and on Peacock. More

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      Universal Pictures Spends Big for New 'Exorcist' Trilogy

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      The deal, expected to be announced this week, is for more than $400 million and is a direct response to the streaming giants that are upending the film industry’s economics.LOS ANGELES — Heads are spinning in Hollywood: Universal Pictures and its streaming-service cousin have closed a $400 million-plus megadeal to buy a new “Exorcist” trilogy, signaling a sudden willingness to compete head-on with the technology giants that are upending entertainment industry economics.Donna Langley, the film studio’s chairwoman, teamed with Peacock, NBCUniversal’s fledgling streaming service, to make the purchase, which is expected to be announced this week, according to three people briefed on the matter. These people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the still-private deal, said the price was in the vicinity of the $465 million that Netflix paid in March for two sequels to the 2019 whodunit “Knives Out.”Universal had no immediate comment.The “Knives Out” and “Exorcist” deals — both negotiated by Bryan Lourd, the Creative Artists superagent — solidify a new streaming gold rush. The eye-popping talent paydays of 2017 and 2018, when Netflix scooped up big-name television creators, have migrated to the film world.The proliferation of streaming services and their scramble for subscribers has driven up prices for established film properties and filmmakers. At the same time, traditional movie companies are under more pressure than ever to control those same creative assets; moviegoing has been severely disrupted by the pandemic and may never fully recover.Linda Blair as the possessed Regan in the original “Exorcist,” which was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including best picture.Warner Bros. Entertainment, via Associated PressIt is surprising, however, that Universal and Peacock have come to the table in such a major way. NBCUniversal, which is owned by Comcast, has started to devote more resources to the little-watched Peacock. Programming from the Tokyo Olympics is available on the service, for instance. But Hollywood has heretofore viewed the year-old Peacock as unwilling to compete for top-tier movie deals.Universal’s decision to revisit “The Exorcist” is striking in and of itself. The R-rated 1973 film about a baffled mother (Ellen Burstyn) and her demonically possessed daughter (Linda Blair) was a global box office sensation — “the biggest thing to hit the industry since Mary Pickford, popcorn, pornography and ‘The Godfather,’” as Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times in 1974. It has become a cultural touchstone, the type of film that fans and critics guard as sacrosanct.Universal is not remaking “The Exorcist,” which was directed by William Friedkin from a screenplay that William Peter Blatty adapted from his own novel. But the studio will, for the first time, return the Oscar-winning Ms. Burstyn to the franchise. (Two forgettable “Exorcist” sequels and a prequel were made without her between 1977 and 2004.) Joining her will be Leslie Odom Jr., a Tony winner for “Hamilton” on Broadway and a double Oscar nominee for “One Night in Miami.” He will play the father of a possessed child. Desperate for help, he tracks down Ms. Burstyn’s character.Suffice it to say, Satan is not thrilled to see her again.David Gordon Green, known for Universal’s blockbuster 2018 reboot of the “Halloween” horror franchise, will direct the new “Exorcist” films and serve as a screenwriter. The horror impresario Jason Blum (“Get Out,” the “Purge” series) is among the producers, along with David Robinson, whose company, the independent Morgan Creek Entertainment, has held the “Exorcist” movie rights. The Blumhouse film executive Couper Samuelson is among the executive producers. (Blumhouse has a first-look deal with Universal.)The first film in the trilogy is expected to arrive in theaters in late 2023. Under the terms of the deal, the second and third films could debut on Peacock, according to one of the people briefed on the matter.Donna Langley, Universal’s chairwoman, and the horror maestro Jason Blum, who will help produce the new trilogy.Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for CinemaconIn a business sense, the deal reflects the boldness of Ms. Langley, chairwoman of the Universal Filmed Entertainment Group. In the wake of the pandemic, which brought movie production to a halt, she led an effort to develop safety protocols to get the assembly lines moving again. In the case of “Exorcist,” she led a push inside NBCUniversal to pull off the big-money deal.The cost of the package is so high because Ms. Langley and her deals maven, Jimmy Horowitz, did not play by Hollywood’s old economic rules; they took a risk and played by new ones — those used by streaming insurgents like Netflix, Amazon and Apple to outbid traditional film companies, at least until now.The old model, the one that studios have used for decades to make high-profile film deals, involves paying fees upfront and then sharing a portion of the revenue from ticket sales, DVD purchases and television rerun licensing around the world. The bigger the hit, the bigger the “back end” paydays for certain talent partners.The streaming giants have done it differently. They pay more upfront — usually much, much more — in lieu of any back-end payments, which gives them complete control over future revenue. It means that talent partners get paid as if their projects are hits before they are released (or even made). The risk for talent: If their projects become monster hits, they do not get a piece of the windfall. More