The trailer for the direct sequel to 1973’s The Exorcist was released online by Warner Bros. on July 25. The sequel, titled The Exorcist: Believer, will not address the second and third films, but the director, David Gordon Green, says Believer will not attempt to erase the sequels as his 2018 Halloween retcon did. Believer is about two teen girls who go missing for three days, and after they are found, they cannot remember the time they were missing and begin acting abnormally. The girls become possessed by two demons, and their parents struggle to find help. Chris MacNeil, the mother of Regan, the possessed girl in the 1973 film, returns to advise the parents in seeking an exorcism.
The whole arc of the film is shown in the trailer. We see the girls before they are possessed, their parents searching for them when they go missing, the hospital scenes when they are found, the early stages of bodily invasion, the full-blown demon voices, the parents seeking answers from doctors, and the arrival at the conclusion that the girls are possessed.
The trailer contains numerous references and plot parallels to the first film and its marketing. These references echo the events, lines, sound design, makeup, music, and imagery of the 1973 movie.
The Black and White Flashes
At the end of Believer’s trailer, the faces of the teens flash to over-exposed, starkly black and white cuts. This is a direct homage to the marketing of the 1973 film. The original trailer for The Exorcist was rejected for allegedly causing test audience members to vomit or have seizures. The rejected trailer begins with Father Lankester Merrin arriving outside the MacNeil house in a taxi. Voice-over narration tells the viewer, “Something beyond comprehension is happening to a little girl on this street, in this house. A man has been sent for as a last resort to try and save her.”
At 30 seconds in, the trailer cuts to black, the score spirals into the now iconic strings, and for the next 60 seconds, the screen strobes with black-and-white flashes of the faces of Regan and the demon before the title fades in with red lettering on a black background.
Paper Fortune-teller
In The Exorcist, Regan contacts the demon Pazuzu with an Ouija board. In the new trailer, Victor Fielding, the father of one of the possessed girls, Angela, discovers a folded paper fortune-teller – the kind divided into four diamond folds that you place your fingers in. He unfolds the fortune-teller to discover the word, Hell. This is, like the Ouija board, a seemingly mundane, children’s toy that the demons have exploited to make contact.
Thrashing
In the first movie, the first supernatural event that Chris witnesses comes when Regan’s bed begins shaking and jumping while she is lying in it. This moment is referenced twice in the trailer. In the first scene, Angela is found by her father convulsing on the hallway floor. The second reference comes when Katherine, being visited by Chris, imitates Regan’s thrashing and speaks in Regan’s voice, repeating the lines Regan screamed when her bed began shaking.
Public Outburst
The first sign that something serious is happening to Regan psychologically comes at a dinner party hosted at the MacNeil home. Her mother, being an actress, has a social circle of celebrities. Among the partygoers is an astronaut. Regan comes downstairs during the party, looks at the astronaut, and says, “You’re going to die up there.” She then urinates on the floor where she is standing.
In the Believer trailer, Katherine enters her family’s church and interrupts the sermon, screaming repeatedly, “The body and the blood.” We can expect this scene may come to a climax with some bodily fluids.
Makeup Design
The makeup designs for the two possessed teens are accurate to the design of Regan. The girls have contact lenses with pale green and yellow contact irises. Their skin is clammy, faces swollen, and their lips are cracked. Like Regan, both of the teens have scratches on their faces. Katherine has an inverted cross cut into her forehead.
Doctors Point the Way
Just as it is the doctors who suggest exorcism in the 1973 movie, it is the doctor in Believer who points the way to the MacNeil story. Victor asks the doctor, “Have you ever seen anything like this?” The response from the doctor is, “No, but there are people out there who have.” This line is spoken over a scene of the doctor looking at an image on her computer screen of Chris MacNeil’s book, A Mother’s Explanation.
Examinations
After the convulsions and the urination, Chris takes her to her doctor for tests. In Believer, this looks to be the same route the parents of Angela and Katherine follow at first. At some point after the girls’ initial returns home after going missing, they are taken to a hospital or mental facility for observation. At a minute and six seconds into the trailer, Angela is rolled into a hospital, strapped to a stretcher, violently trying to get free, and screaming. When Chris first visits Angela, she is in an observation room behind plexiglass.
Regan
Regan MacNeil is referenced multiple times throughout the trailer. First, there are a couple of shots of Regan’s name scratched into a piece of furniture by one of the teens. In the next cut, after Regan’s name is shown, we are shown her image in a picture frame at Chris’ home. Later, as already discussed above, when Chris visits Katherine for the first time, Katherine conjures Regan’s voice.
Desecration
In Believer, we see Katherine ripping pages from the Bible and eating them. In the first movie, Regan performs acts of desecration as part of the psychological warfare. Before any signs of possession, she is already being fully taken control of by the demon. In a scene that happens off-screen, Regan sneaks out in the night, goes to the nearby church, paints the statue of the Virgin Mary with red and black paint, and molds cone-shaped breasts and a phallus on the statue with clay. Later in the movie, the demon self-pleasures violently with a crucifix and screams to Regan in the third person to let Jesus fornicate with her.
Dog Fight
There is a quick cut of two dogs fighting in the trailer to Believer. This is repeating a scene at the beginning of The Exorcist when Father Merrin visits an archeological site in Iraq. At the site, there is a statue of Pazuzu. Merrin climbs up the rocks and faces the Babylonian demon. During this scene, dogs are fighting in the background. The snarling growls preview the bestial sounds of Regan in the final act.
Tubular Bells
You cannot make an official sequel to The Exorcist without the film’s signature musical themes. The trailer mixes pieces of the String Quartet by Krzysztof Penderecki and three notes from Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield three times in the trailer. At one minute and 47 seconds into the trailer, when Regan’s picture is shown and Chris is introduced, the haunting Tubular Bells is unleashed and plays for 23 seconds until Chris enters Katherine’s room and speaks with the demon.
Gown and Wrist Restraints
When Chris enters the room to speak to the demon inside Katherine, the teen is dressed in a teal hospital gown like Regan wore. Katherine moves to the bed to imitate Regan during the scene. As she convulses on the bed, we see the leather wrist restraints she has removed lying on the bed. Regan was restrained with a white cloth, wrapped around her wrists.
The Gray Horse
In the Believer trailer, there is a single shot of a dead gray horse lying in the grass. Like almost every other image in the trailer, there is meaning behind the horse. In the first act of The Exorcist, after Chris returns home from a day on a movie set, Regan describes to Chris her day with Chris’ assistant, Sharon Spencer. Regan says that a man on a gray horse came riding up while they were picnicking by the river, and he let her ride the horse. Regan then asks Chris if they can get a horse.