When horror is horrifyingly bad

A classic horror film’s sequel deeply disappoints priest Yaroslav Walker, missing opportunities to address psychological and spiritual power.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

A man and a women stand looking in the same direction with concerned faces.

Ellen Burstyn and Leslie Odom Jr are concerned about the reviews.

Universal Pictures.

That’s it. I have nothing more to say about the film in this review - The Exorcist: Believer. If you want a proper, knowledgeable, definitive derogatory diatribe against this dreadful waste of celluloid, may I suggest you watch this review by Mark Kermode. The good Doctor loves the original Exorcist more than any other reviewer I’m aware of and is the expert witness you need if you want to understand the absolute abomination this ‘film’ is (and, more importantly, is not!). I don’t have the energy. However, I do have the Church’s authority to speak on matters of faith and doctrine, so instead of my usual theology-smuggle at the end of a review, can we just dive right into it?

SPOILERS AHEAD – trust me, it doesn’t matter…

You can’t comment on an exorcism film without reference to the original – The Exorcist. Believer is David Gordon Green making a something of a sequel to the original; this went well with his first Halloween film, and then turned horrifyingly, stupidly bad with the second and third outings (and such treatment is promised for the Exorcist franchise). The Exorcist is a club sandwich of thematic wonder. William Peter Blatty was both a tremendously talented writer and also a thoughtful, intelligent, and committed Roman Catholic. When he wrote the novel of The Exorcist, he created a popular (slightly bloated) theological masterpiece. Adapting the script for William Friedkin to direct, he took the core themes and trimmed all the fat. The result is gorgeously lean, muscular, agile film that moves at a clip and doesn’t allow you a moment to forget the searing questions of faith, and doubt, and family, and failure, and sin.

Believer raises no such questions. If it has any sort of theme or message it seems to be this. The demonic is there not to sow random chaos, horror, pain and destruction (a good understanding of ‘evil’ as ‘nothing’, very much in keeping with a conception of evil formalised in Western theology by St Augustine almost a few millennia ago, which Blatty presents with perfection). It is there to offer people an ironic monkey’s-paw-esque bargain to reveal their own weakness and hypocrisy…yeh? Believer isn’t just terrible film, and not just a terrible sequel to a remarkable film; it is the lazy desecration of a cinematic theological legacy.

The original gave a gorgeous visual commentary on the human spirit remaining resilient in the face of evil as the absolute negation of ‘what is’.

To name the overarching source of my incandescence, it is this question: What is the demonic doing in this film? What is it achieving? The original Exorcist is clear – Fr Merrin (the eponymous exorcist) explains that the possession of a child is intended as random, purely nihilistic, awful chaos that grinds down the resolve of righteous. It has no point, no substance – it is genuine ‘evil’, nothingness collapsing in on itself. In Believer the demon seems to be wanting to make a social commentary on parenting…maybe? At the start of the film the voodoo-blessed mother is caught in a building collapse after a Haitian earthquake, and as she lies dying in a makeshift hospital the father is presented with a terrible choice: the surgeon can only save one or the other, mother or baby. SPOILER – he may have a daughter, but he didn’t choose her. There’s another girl who is something of a free spirit with parents who are very light touch. One father didn’t want his daughter, the other doesn’t seem to be too bothered about his daughter having structure…you know? Parents, children, the sins of the father…you know?

The great climax has the demon(s) presenting the assembled non-exorcists with a choice. Fathers – choose your daughter and she’ll live, first come, first served. One father recognises the immorality, the pointless and annihilating ‘evil’, of letting a girl die, the other doesn’t. He’s been pretty much a non-entity throughout the film, has no real understanding of what is going on, is about as psychologically traumatised as it is possible to be, and is presented with the opportunity to save his daughter…of course he makes the wrong choice…because this is a ‘clever film’…The demon reveals the girl who was chosen will die. TWIST. Didn’t see that coming – admittedly this film is so stupid I didn’t see anything coming. Why? Why let one girl live? Why is this demon – this figure of total and destructive evil – teaching the people a lesson about self-sacrifice and never being willing to sacrifice an innocent? Is the demon making an important point? WHAT IS GOING ON!? Well, the mistakes of Heretic are being repeated, but this is a point for the cognoscenti…

The original gave a gorgeous visual commentary on the human spirit remaining resilient in the face of evil as the absolute negation of ‘what is’; it ends with a broken man finding his faith and his redemption in a Christ-like act of self-sacrifice (Fr Karras – the junior exorcist – takes the demon into himself and commits suicide). There is, in this final act, a moving and absolute statement on the indomitability of creation (and humanity as the pinnacle of creation) as that which God has willed into being and continues to will ‘to be’. We are here! We are loved! We are to be redeemed! We cannot be seduced by the lie that decay and dissolution and destruction and nothingness is our ultimate destiny. Believer has people stumbling by accident to a conclusion that says nothing about God, or the devil, or heaven, or hell, or faith, or doubt, or family, OR GOOD AND EVIL, or anything serious.

I despise this film. I pray to God the other two films in the proposed trilogy do not get made. They probably will…maybe that’s not the end of the world. Maybe the inevitable sequels will, in the very fact of their being filmed and released, be a better exposition of the reality of banal and destructive evil, which seeks to find the beauty of ‘what is’ and tarnish it, than their actual stories. Maybe…

Star rating? At the sight of this film the stars themselves hid…

Column

Culture

Digital

Film & TV

Justice

10 April 2025

4 min read

Data scientists should stop watching Minority Report and start watching The Shawshank Redemption

A justice ministry’s prejudicial database leaves no room for redemption.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Tom Cruise gestures with his fingers in an e-glove in front of his face

Tom Cruise takes the measure.

20th Century Fox.

The go-to for any news item about using AI to predict crimes before they happen is Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report from 2002, starring Tom Cruise as a futuristic cop, who employs human “precogs” as clairvoyants to get ahead of the villains.

So, I’m far from the first to name-check it as showing the dystopian future that the UK’s Ministry of Justice heralds with its test project to “explore alternative and innovative data science techniques to risk assessment of homicide.”

That use of “homicide”, rather than the more British “murder”, is telling, almost like the Ministry wonks have just watched the movie. The pressure group Statewatch has no doubt where they’re heading, with data being used on people who may never have been convicted of an offence and “will code in bias towards racialised and low-income communities.”

Spielberg was always ahead of the curve. But my fear is less the chilling dystopia that Statewatch sees in its precog. Actually, I’m more worried about the past in this context, or rather in how we treat the past.

If I haven’t to date done anything wrong, then I have committed no offence. I am literally innocent. And that’s an absolute. An interpretation of data that indicates that I’m more likely to commit a crime than others is neither here (in my conscience) nor there (in the judicial system).

Furthermore, there’s a theological point. If it is so, as we’re told, that no one is without sin, then we’re all culpable in the pasts that we have lived so far, but the future contains all we have to play for.

To suggest that some of us are more likely to screw up in that future than others is very dangerously deterministic. It’s redolent of Calvinism’s doctrine of the “elect”, those who have already been marked for salvation and eternal bliss, regardless of what they do or don’t do in this life, while the rest of us, however virtuous our mortal deeds might be, will rot in hell.

Neither Calvin’s determinism nor the Ministry of Justice’s prejudicial database leave any room for redemption. They’re just trying to identify events that will definitely (the former) or are likely to (the latter) happen. Conversely, we live in hope (for some of us a sure and certain hope) of a future in which we can be redeemed, whatever we have done in the past.

And that’s why I find Minority Report an unsatisfactory analogy for the development of real-life precrime technology. It is a film that is only about determinism, which leaves no room for either free-will or redemption. And that’s applying a form of intelligence that is truly, er, artificial.

The vital thing is that hope is fulfilled, the prisoners make it to their paradise after worthless lives spent in jail. Justice is seen to be done.

A more helpful movie, richer in its development of these themes – and not just because it’s got the word that I favour in its title - is 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption, based on a novel by Stephen King. Here we have the idea explored that the past isn’t only irrelevant to our futures, but doesn’t even really exist in time in relation to the future.

It’s bursting with more religious themes even than Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns, which are really only the righteous saviour turning up to defend flawed goodies from evil baddies, again and again. For a start, The Shawshank Redemption is set in a prison, where whole lives are spent atoning for crimes that have or haven’t been committed. See?

Lifers who are released after decades struggle to cope or kill themselves. The central character, a messianic figure, lives in hope with his convict friend of reaching a beach in the Virgin Islands, while the prison warden describes himself as “the light of the world”, but is assisted by his prisoners in money-laundering – washing clean – his ill-gotten gains.

I could go on. But the vital thing is that hope is fulfilled, the prisoners make it to their paradise after worthless lives spent in jail. Justice is seen to be done. But the important thing here is that there is no pre-crime determinism. The future, which often looks hopeless, is rolling out towards the possibility of redemption, which ultimately becomes the only certain reality.

One can dwell on movie plots too long. They are only, if you’ll excuse the pun, projections of life. But it is nonetheless irritating both that a government department with Justice in its title can believe it worthwhile to explore how it might deploy AI to predict who tomorrow’s criminals are likely to be and its critics condemn it by using the wrong dramatic analogies.

Minority Report was a dystopian thriller that suggests that the future can only be changed by human intervention. The Shawshank Redemption showed us that inextinguishable human hope is in a future we can’t control, but can depend on.

Anyone who is interested in justice, especially those who work in a ministry for it, might benefit from downloading it.

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