The Scariest Thing in the Exorcist Movies Has Always Been the Body of a Pubescent Girl

With due respect to Pazuzu, the scariest thing in the Exorcist movies is the body of a teenage girl. In William Friedkin’s original and in David Gordon Green’s 50-years-later sequel The Exorcist: Believer, demons find their earthly entry point in a young woman—or, in the case of the new movie, young women—in the throes of puberty, the point where their bodies become strange to them, and more importantly, to their parents. I’ve seen The Exorcist many times, but each time I’m shocked anew by the scene where the possessed Regan (Linda Blair) stabs herself in the crotch with a metal crucifix, then grabs her mother’s head and presses it to the wound, screaming “Lick me!” (You wouldn’t think the image of Ellen Burstyn’s blood-smeared mouth would be an easy one to forget, but perhaps my memory has been trying to protect me.) When Regan yells to a Jesuit priest that his mother “sucks cocks in hell,” we’re meant to be shocked that she knows his mother has recently died, but we also have to wonder, where did a sweet little girl learn such filthy words?

Believer is less obviously freaked out by its central characters’ physical maturation. When Angela (Lidya Jewett) and Katherine (Olivia O’Neill) go missing in the woods, no one suggests they might just have sneaked off to fool around with boys, or with each other. But the fear still lingers. As the girls’ parents canvass homeless shelters, desperately looking for information, one heavy-lidded man leers at Katherine’s father, makes a circle with his fingers, and jabs a hot dog through it, over and over. Later, as Angela lies in a hospital bed, the sheets start filling with blood, a pool spreading outward from between her hips until it practically engulfs her.

In The Exorcist, medical experts offer up a series of explanations for Regan’s violent and vulgar behavior, including a disruption of the temporal lobe, which some scientists believe was also the root of St. Paul’s visions of the divine. “The problem with your daughter is not her bed,” one doctor explains, after we’ve seen it shake so violently that she’s almost thrown to the ground. “It’s her brain.” But the problem is not just in her head. Although the movie begins as a slow burn—apart from a foreboding prologue set among Mesopotamian ruins, the closest we get to a demonic visitation in its first half-hour is the whoosh of a Ouija planchette—once the possession starts in earnest, we’re confronted almost immediately with tangible evidence of the supernatural. In addition to his mother’s death, the exorcist Father Karras is struggling with his belief in God—the demon also taunts him as a “faithless slime”—but for the audience, as for Karras, it’s less a matter of faith than humility, laying aside what we thought we might know to be true, accepting the proof right in front of our eyes.

Yet for Believer’s shellshocked parents, it’s not immediately clear what to do with that knowledge. Burstyn’s Christine simply had to hand the matter off to the professionals: the priests. As she points out during her brief appearance in Believer, she’s not even present for The Exorcist’s climactic moments, as one exorcist and then another give their lives to rid Regan of her demon. In 2023, however, priests aren’t so easily coaxed into performing exorcisms, which one calls a form of “religious interference.” Their track record isn’t even so great, he admits: Half the time, either the victim or the priest ends up dead. So instead, the parents end up assembling an ad hoc coalition drawn from across the spectrum of faith, including those who have lost it. Angela’s father, Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.), became an atheist after his wife died in an earthquake while still pregnant with their daughter. Katherine’s parents are members of a Baptist congregation, albeit one that seems more polite than it is pious. One neighbor is a former Catholic novitiate, another a Pentecostal who speaks in tongues. The Pentecostal next door brings in a Black woman who specializes in rootwork, which she describes as a mixture of African and European traditions practiced by enslaved people. Christine, who followed her ordeal by writing a bestselling book on demonic possession, explains that forms of exorcism exist across numerous cultures and religions, some much older than Christianity. But Believer’s interfaith council doesn’t cast a particularly wide net. (Perhaps we’ll catch a glimpse of a Muslim or Hindu exorcist in one of Believer’s two planned sequels.)

Rather than being compelled by the power of Christ, this band should, Christine explains, draw its power from their “faith in each other”—an intriguing if not entirely successful way of finessing the vital question at the movie’s core. If the devil exists, and so does hell (and Believer is, eventually, quite explicit about the latter), then God must too. But the movie dissembles on the subject to the point of incoherence. While there’s a touch of ambiguity in the original Exorcist—Regan hisses in pain when she’s sprinkled with what she’s told is holy water but turns out to be straight from the tap—Believer is merely vague and muddled, swapping out a sense of the divine for an amorphous endorsement of community and the idea that God is only the force that wants us to “keep going.” (Toward what, exactly?) Green brought back the Halloween franchise with a clear idea of how he wanted to update it, turning the series’ perennial victim into a shotgun-wielding aggressor. But Believer wants to feed on the zeitgeist without taking a side. The movie’s closing act is strewn with references to abortion, but it’s as if the Dobbs ruling came down the day before shooting commenced, and they just threw in a few lines for relevancy’s sake without thinking through how it resonates in a story about young women trying to expel an alien force inside them. (After all, this year also marks the 50^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.) The girls in Believer are still victims, their bodies controlled and scrutinized but never really their own.