Fifty years after having made spectators from all over the world jump on their seats (and having won two Oscars, the first horror film in history), one of the most iconic titles of horror cinema returns to theaters. «The Exorcist: The Believer» is the first film of a new trilogy conceived as a sequel to William Friedkin’s 1973 masterpiece. One of the Midas kings of the genre, Jason Blum, founder of the Blumhouse production company, in this case allied with the giant Universal, got his hands back on that story, exploited by numerous films and a series. And for this return, Ellen Burstyn, mother of the little girl possessed in the first film, and Linda Blair herself are also part of the character. “It was Jason who called me with the proposal,” director David Gordon Green tells ANSA. «It’s all my fault – Blum takes the floor – after doing the remakes of Halloween with David I said to myself: now we can try with the most important horror film of all time, we can make a trilogy on the Exorcist».
The Exorcist – The Believer was supposed to arrive in theaters on Friday 13 October, but the announcement of the release of Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour for that same day forced Blumhouse and Universal to bring it forward by a week. The story told in the film takes place decades after the original story. After the death of his pregnant wife, Victor Fielding (played by Leslie Odom Jr., Tony winner and Oscar nominee for That Night in Miami and Hamilton) leads a quiet life with his 12-year-old daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett, known for Good Girls), in a small town of tidy houses and lush nature. When Angela and her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum) disappear in the woods, only to return three days later without remembering anything, her parents understand that a superhuman evil has taken possession of the girls. To free them, they turn to the only person who has gone through the same experience: Chris MacNeil, author of a book in which she recounts the exorcism carried out 50 years earlier on her daughter Regan. For the first time since 1973, Burstyn returns to play her.
But Gordon Green and Blum succeeded in the impossible mission of bringing Linda Blair back to the screen, the former child actress who played Regan, whose life was profoundly affected by that role. «The first step was to inform her of the project – says the director – then she came to assist the two girls, I was interested that in addition to their parents and psychologists, they had the support of someone who for 50 years had to deal with that role. In the end we said to her: while you’re on set, why don’t you get back in front of the camera? And she accepted.”