Back in 2012 and 2013, horror fans everywhere entered a surprisingly abiding state of nausea when not just one but two attempts were made to bring The Exorcist to TV. In the interim, there were more exorcism movies made, along with a recent ”live exorcism,” but nothing big came of those two projects. Until now. Fox has ordered up a pilot for The Exorcist, from a cowriter of the much derided Fantastic Four remake.
Because that last part obviously needs to be repeated: Jeremy Slater – who co-penned the mega-bomb Fantastic Four with Simon Kinberg and director Josh Trank – is apparently still behind this TV series remake of one of the scariest and most well-regarded horror movies of all time. Slater’s other produced screenplay was for The Lazarus Effect, another undercooked effort. I am not flat-out rejecting Slater’s take on The Exorcist by any means, and nor am I promoting that as a response from anyone else. But…
No, I’m just going to take the high floating bed road on this one. Fox’s extended psychological thriller take on The Exorcist will not be directly tied to William Peter Blatty’s original tale, but will be narratively similar. According to Deadline, it’ll follow two polar opposite men coming together to save a family from a terrorizing demonic possession. I automatically flock to anything like this, even though possession-related horrors are among my least favorite. The abundance of films in the sub-genre are nearly identical to a fault in terms of structure and story beats, but it could certainly breach new ground in the form of a serialized TV show rather than a feature.
Mogran Creek picked up the rights to The Exorcist and put together this version of the show in 2013, but it apparently took some dealing to put it together with Fox and 20th Century Fox TV. The other would-be remake would have been a miniseries put together by Martha Marcy May Marlene writer/director Sean Durkin. I’m curious to know what that would have looked like, and I’d still rather see Quentin Tarantino’s exorcism flick over anything else in the same realm, but I’m not yet ready to scream “The powder of white compels you!” at Fox execs for getting behind this.
And now while I prepare a lunch of pea soup and cheese stick crucifixes, let us know what you think about this below.
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