The Exorcist: Believer might have flopped, but the Fox show from 2016 remains tragically underrated (and very easy to stream!).
The Exorcist: Believer arrived in theaters one week earlier than its planned debut — the marketing braintrust at Universal had Friday the 13th circled in blood red on their calendars for months — leading to a disappointing opening weekend box office take of $26.4 million. Universal blinked when Taylor Swift announced that her Eras Tour movie would also be opening theatrically on October 13, 2023, ultimately deciding that the burgeoning ExorSwift movement wasn’t going to be the second coming of Barbenheimer.
Universal spent $400MM to secure the rights to the franchise, but Exorcist fans will recall that this reboot isn’t the first attempt to inject new life into the iconic brand. For a short while in the late 2010s, we had our first and only Exorcist TV series, courtesy of future Moon Knight creator Jeremy Slater. From a distance, it sounds like a strange idea, particularly when you consider that the show wound up on the FOX network, without any of the gruesome freedoms afforded by premium cable or streaming services. But what might sound like an odd choice, even a cynical cash grab, quickly proved itself one of the most intriguing horror releases of 2016, a tense, ferocious new story that, years before Believer, gave us the gripping legacy sequel to The Exorcist that we didn’t know we needed.
By the time Slater’s show came along, of course, The Exorcist had already gone through several evolutions. After the original film we got the misguided direct sequel (Exorcist II: The Heretic), the more respected, relatively standalone sequel (The Exorcist III), and not one but two prequel films (Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist and Exorcist: The Beginning) competing to tell different versions of the same story. In short, it felt like every avenue in the original continuity was thoroughly exhausted.
So, The Exorcist TV series set out to, seemingly, ignore all of that continuity and just tell a new story about a family falling prey to demonic possession as a dark force gripped their teenage daughter Casey (Hannah Kasulka). For added gravitas, the show cast no less an acting titan than Geena Davis as Casey’s mother Angela, and pre-Succession Alan Ruck as Casey’s father Henry, giving the household a sense of drama even before anyone said a word.
