It’s been a few years since Universal and Blumhouse announced they were developing an Exorcist reboot with Halloween reboot director David Gordon Green, but now the first trailer for The Exorcist: Believer—which some cool people might have seen attached to Oppenheimer this weekend, and other people saw at CinemaCon earlier this year—has finally been released online.
The trailer definitely feels like The Exorcist, even if you don’t immediately recognize the piano twinkles that keep popping up, but successfully evoking the original film is also something Green was able to do pretty well in his Halloween movies (or at least the first one) and that wore off pretty quickly by the time he was making his sequels. Believer was originally announced as part of a new Exorcist trilogy, but hopefully the reaction to Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends has convinced everyone involved to at least wait and see how this goes before diving straight into the Pazuzu pool.
As for this trailer itself, it opens with Leslie Odom Jr. as the father of one of two girls who mysteriously disappear in the woods one day, returning later with mysterious injuries and no memory of being gone. It eventually turns out that both girls are possessed, apparently by the same demon that possessed Regan in the original Exorcist, which prompts Ann Dowd to call up none other than Ellen Burstyn’s Chris MacNeil—Regan’s mother from the original movie. This is Burstyn’s first time returning to the Exorcist franchise, and her character is probably going to be dealing with a lot of leftover trauma from her last encounter with demonic forces.
Speaking of returning to this franchise, Linda Blair is supposed going to appear in some capacity, but she’s not in this trailer. We’ll have to wait until October 13 to hear more about what Green has in mind for this reboot.