You don’t understand how being forced to helplessly watch your child’s mental and physical health completely fail while their very identity is replaced by something hideously evil is supposed to be scary?
I mean, I can understand not being scared by it (I wasn’t either), but I’m not sure how the concept would elude someone, even absent a religious bent.
What are your favorites? Shaun of the Dead and Cabin in the Woods are probably the top two for me, personally.
understand that for me personally, I know horror when I see it so even a movie like Army of Darkness counts (even though it might be mostly comedy). A lot of horror movies aren’t necessarily scary (or lose scariness with age, e.g. Gremlins, which I mostly found more thrilling as a kid anyway. But I still look at it as horror). Other people will disagree about what might count as horror but I don’t give two fucks.
I will miss a bunch I’m sure.
I love both Shaun and Cabin. Masterpieces (and Cabin, especially, is such a layered and wonderful thing; horror, comedy, deconstruction, and more). I really like World’s End too. But I don’t like it on the level of Shaun. But then I’ve seen Shaun a thousand times.
Ghostbusters
Gremlins 1 & 2 (man, 2 is a weird movie)
Night of the Creeps
Evil Dead 2
Army of Darkness
The Babysitter
Arachnaphobia (I will never watch it again though)
Mom and Dad
Mayhem
Slither
Ready or Not
Zombieland
The Wolf of Snow Hollow (impossible to overstate my love for this movie)
Trick r’ Treat (anthology with a neat approach to being an anthology, clever stories, and good use of humor throughout)
Club Dread
Maybe we should do a discussion thread about horror comedy. It’s such a great subject.
Considering I saw it when I was 10, I guess perhaps that angle might make more sense to me if I recontextualized the movie by watching it again as an adult, I suppose.
I just remember not buying into the premise. And if a movie can’t convince you to buy into the premise, none of it works. That’s true of science fiction, fantasy premises as well as supernatural ones.
We have our new Regan.
Ha, I totally forgot there was another Exorcist movie on the way. I think I’ll just wait for the inevitable Red Letter Media review.
I’m dismayed to hear the super lame stock demon-possessed voice effect being used instead of something more low-key menacing like Mercedes McCambridge’s work in the original.
Looks like a generic modern possession movie with the IP name stapled to it.
Probably preceded by a Kermode rant.
It looks so, so generic.
Unless the reviews are just glowing, I think I’m going to be able to resist my curiosity on this one. Especially after Gordon-Green’s abortion of a Halloween reboot.
I’m sort of leaning further into the camp of “yes, DGG can screw up another reboot” right now. But hope springs eternal!
… I liked the Halloween reboot. The 3rd one sucked but it could have been good if they’d reversed the order of the movies.
Taylor Swift more powerful than the demon Pazuzu confirmed.
The presence of the creepy cultist lady from Hereditary means that I will at least watch this on streaming.
Reviews are popping up. Yup. This sounds bad.
An execrable film that’s redeemed by almost nothing besides Leslie Odom Jr.’s well-modulated lead performance and the ambient sense of unease that Green casts over the story’s first half, “Believer” is so creatively spineless and bereft of its own ideas that its entire concept of sacrilege is limited to imperiling its franchise’s legacy.
There’s no gravitational center to the film. It’s not Angela and Katherine’s grotesque transformation. It’s not the effort to save them, led in part by a former novitiate played with empathic worry by Ann Dowd . It’s not Victor’s grief and guilt about a past tragedy, another potentially fruitful dimension of the film’s topography that Green only limply explores. Believer is a series of scenes loosely connected, more storyboards than story. Matters of politics—particularly pertaining to abortion—are raised and then forgotten. The Exorcist ’s core allegory—it’s a puberty drama, really—is present in Believer only in the fact that it’s once again young girls afflicted by Satan. What any of that means is not Green’s concern. He guides the film with a distracted hand, as if he’s looking over his shoulder instead of paying attention to what’s thrashing before him.
That watered-down version of an inspired horror theme is symptomatic of a movie that starts out full of promise but fumbles the material as the stakes get higher. It’s no surprise that Believer is less terrifying than its venerable progenitor. That it’s considerably less daring than a movie made half a century ago compounds the disappointment.
Seems like an odd statement. Half a century ago, literally every movie was a lot more daring.
I think that’s his point. You can’t scare a 2023 audience with normal movie exorcism tropes. In 1973, The Exorcist was crazy shocking because nothing like it had been seen by most people. Now? Exorcism movies are a dime-a-dozen. You always have the throw-up, the cursing, levitation, murders, etc. It’s old hat. Just doubling it up and making it two kids instead of one doesn’t move the needle.
Arguably, the most shocking thing in the Exorcist now is the “Let Jesus fuck you!” scene which is still blasphemously effective to modern viewers especially in a PG-13 horror dominant era.
I just had to post this wacky Polygon review.
Believer gets a thumbs-down not surprisingly, but what is super odd to me is that the reviewer writes about The Exorcist series as some standard that Believer doesn’t live up to. I’m sorry, but did this person actually watch Exorcist 2? Legion? Beginning?
While movies about possession were around long before William Peter Blatty and William Friedkin’s 1973 horror classic, few felt so grand or captured the public imagination in the same way as The Exorcist and its direct followers.
Whut?
What makes the series great and unique is what surrounds these exorcisms — challenging, thoughtful movies.
Whut??
Up until this most recent movie, the title The Exorcist carried some weight. While its role as a representation of quality was up for debate, its mark as a sign of ambition was not. Since the original Exorcist , the series has provided some of American cinema’s best and most interesting artists with space to ruminate on faith and evil.
WHUT???
