24-Hours of Halloween Marathon III!

When I was a child, I was obsessed with holiday programming.

There was always a little thrill I got by going through the December TV Guides and identifying when certain Christmas specials were going to be on, the old and familiar (Rudolph!  Frosty!  Garfield!) alongside the new and untested (FOX’s 1999 special, Olive, The Other Reindeer!).  I should make it clear I didn’t necessarily watch everything that was on; even in the responsibility-free first decade of my life, how could I possibly pull that off?  But I liked knowing that the options were there.  A whole month’s worth of programming at my fingertips, even if just in “capsule description” forms.

It got to the point where I started cutting out newspaper listings and TV Guide pages and glued them to pieces of paper (yes, a literal manual “cut-and-paste” job) in order to create my very own Holiday Programming Guide, organized by date, time and channel.  That way, if one were ever so inclined, they could use this as a way to stay on top of all the different Christmas offerings; how else could you be reminded that 1997’s The Online Adventures of Ozzie the Elf was about to be on?  It should be mentioned that the applicability of this guide was always theoretical; even if some other kid or adult had been genuinely interested in using it to plan their prime-time hours accordingly, I only made one for myself and I wasn’t going to be giving it up.  

The concept of building a hypothetical programming block of holiday episodes, movies, and various miscellany never completely went away for me.  In both 2019 and 2020, back in an earlier iteration of this space, I developed a list of Halloween programming, enough to fit an entire 24-hour block, with the general idea being that, were someone so inclined, they could follow along with it and have the spooky spirit all day long.  Again, the usage is theoretical; to my knowledge, nobody has ever taken the offer up (almost as if most people can’t stay up to 4 or 5 am on a work night on a whim).  

After a few years off, I thought it’d be fun to resurrect this series from the dead!!!  What follows is exactly 24 hours worth of Halloween content from all across the decades.  Halloween is on a Thursday this year, so my recommendation is just to kick your Friday work day in the ass, enjoy the marathon and sleep in the next day.  In general, the idea is that the mood should slide from tame and family-friendly to more deranged as the night goes on.  Oh, and to add to the challenge, no double-dipping from previous years!  You can enjoy either the 2019 or 2020 editions to see what’s now off-limits.

To the list!

6:00 AM - 7:00 AM: Retro Halloween commercials! (YouTube)

As per tradition, we kick things off with a YouTube-curated hour of older Halloween commercials.  Much like the 2019 marathon, this one has a nice blend of 70’s, 80’s and 90’s advertisements, allowing for different generations to point at a dopey Lucky Charms commercial or RC Cola ad and go, “ah, the objectively best childhood was mine and mine alone!”  So as you enjoy your first cup of coffee/tea/whiskey this Halloween morning, please also enjoy the nice warm drug that is nostalgia (please use responsibly!).  Hey, is that a Spin City promo?  I remember that show!

7:00 AM - 7:30 AM: IT’S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, CHARLIE BROWN! (Apple TV)

Hey, I’ve somehow managed to never include any of the classic cartoon specials we’ve all grown up with in one of these!  I’m gonna go ahead and cash in on those now in order to provide you a Saturday morning cartoon feel to your morning.  First, let’s start with the famous 1966 Peanuts Halloween story, IT’S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, CHARLIE BROWN, where Linus sticks his neck out by expressing his weird beliefs to his friends, followed by his friends treating him like an asshole for it the entire time, culminating in Linus spending his entire night waiting for a messiah that never arrives.  The whole “Great Pumpkin” aspect of Linus’ personality is no doubt an intentional message about how sometimes having faith in something larger than yourself opens you up to criticism (but you gotta do it anyway), but goddamn, is this sometimes a frustrating watch.  Sally Brown, whose whole thing is having a crush on Linus, gets an opportunity to hang out with Linus all night in a pumpkin patch waiting for the Great Pumpkin, the kind of thing that usually becomes a core memory for young kids.  But then she starts screaming at him about wasting her Halloween night once it’s clear the Great Pumpkin doesn’t show.  These hoes aren’t loyal!

The B-plot involves Charlie Brown going out to trick-or-treat and receiving rocks instead of candy from, presumably, the adults in town.  It’s a fantastic illustration of Charlie’s “born loser” quality, but I’ve always been fascinated about the implications of this turn of events.  Do people in the unspecified town that the Peanuts gang lives in have rocks in their home just ready to go?  Was this a coordinated attack against this one eight-year old kid?  What did Charlie do to everybody?  Did he call in a bomb threat to the school or something?  What’s wrong with everyone?

You know what, actually, fuck IT’S THE GREAT PUMPKIN.  From 7:00 am to 7:30 am, watch this compilation of spooky Looney Tunes cartoons instead.  Nobody getting screamed at for holding harmless outside opinions in any of these!

7:30 AM - 8:00 AM: GARFIELD’S HALLOWEEN ADVENTURE! (PEACOCK)

One of these days, I’ll do the Big Garfield Article (don’t get too excited), in order to fully explain the weird way in which Jim Davis’ most famous creation has haunted me my entire life; in short, however, what it amounts to is that as a kid, I enjoyed the flabby tabby way too much and nobody in my life has ever let me forget it, despite now being in my mid-thirties.  Such is existence.

As a result of that childhood love, however, I’ve probably seen Garfield’s Halloween adventure more times than I’ve seen any other October special.  It’s likely the Monday-hating cat’s best holiday outing due to its superior songs (“This is the Night” and “Scaredy Cat” are top-tier Halloween tracks), classic Garfield antics (saying “gimme” instead of “Trick or Treat”?  What won’t this rapscallion do?), and its willingness to get legitimately scary from time to time, at least as far as kids’ programming goes; the old man in the house still kind of unnerves me to this day.

Besides its basic plot being remarkably similar to John Carpenter’s THE FOG, I think the thing I always remember about GARFIELD’S HALLOWEEN ADVENTURE is its music.  Lou Rawls is a really fucking funny choice for Garfield’s singing voice, especially since sometimes Garfield just sings in his Lorenzo Music character voice (like in “What Will I Be?”), but it’s an iconic choice regardless.  He has a gorgeous baritone that adds a lot of class to what is essentially an 80’s cash-in special.  And nobody is giving fucking rocks to our characters!

8:00 AM - 10:00 AM: OVER THE GARDEN WALL (Hulu)

A Cartoon Network mini-series from 2014 that I wish had existed when I was growing up, OVER THE GARDEN WALL is a ten-part whimsical animated tribute to both the retro animation styles of the 30’s and 40’s, as well as the beauty of the fall season.  It’s also arguably an existential trip to a dreamscape?  At its center is a celebrity performance from Elijah Wood, who’s pretty good (Elijah Good) as Wirt, but for my money, the star of the show is surprisingly nine-year old Collin Dean as Wirt’s brother Greg (although two close runners-up are Melanie Lynskey as the bluebird Beatrice and Christopher Lloyd as the mysterious Woodsman).

The songs are all lovely and cozy, the color palette gives off immaculate autumnal vibes, and its sort-of-twist near the end of the show (although I would refer to it as more contextual than a total rug pull) provides all kinds of implications as to the overall meaning of OVER THE GARDEN WALL.  What a beautiful way to spend your Halloween morning.

10:00 AM - 10:30 AM: THE SCOOBY-DOO PROJECT (YouTube)

I’m now pulling this marathon into a slightly different direction, although we’re still definitively in the “original Cartoon Network content” zone.  

Waaaay back on Halloween Night 1999, Cartoon Network broadcast a Scooby-Doo marathon that mostly consisted of episodes of The Scooby-Doo and Scrappy Doo Show, a far cry from their epic 25-hour marathon of the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? cartoon in 1995.  To up the ante, a series of original shorts aired throughout the 1999 marathon starring our Mystery Machine gang.  These shorts, when taken collectively, was known as The Scooby-Doo Project, a direct parody of the then-smash sensation THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT.

When I say direct, I mean direct.  Scooby and pals get lost in the woods, they end up in that fucking house at the end, Shaggy is even standing in the corner and everything, it’s heavily implied they’re all now missing…it’s surprisingly hair-raising when juxtaposed against the meta-nature of its humor and bright presentation.  In some ways, The Scooby-Doo Project putting classic cartoons into mature situations is what eventually led to Adult Swim.

I actually wrote about this thing a few years ago if you’re in the mood for a more complete write-up.  As far as this morning goes, it’s only about 20 minutes, so this gives you a little breathing room to pee or something.

10:30 AM - 11:00 AM: FUTURAMA Season 2, Episode 18 - “The Honking” (Hulu)

If I’m being honest, I’m stretching the definition of a Halloween episode juuuust a tiny bit in order to plug a thirty-minute hole here.  Strictly speaking, FUTURAMA never had an official Halloween episode during its classic run (Christmas was always more of its jam).  But this episode, in which Bender gets bitten by a werecar, is close enough for blogging work.  It takes its beats pretty directly from the classic WOLFMAN movies, there’s an act-one pitstop in a haunted house, the title is a pun on THE HOWLING…it counts!  There’s just no robot jack-o-lanterns or space trick or treaters or whatever.  I hope your heart isn’t broken.

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM: AMERICAN DAD Two-Pack! (Hulu)

One of the arcs of my life from teenager to twenty-something to thirty-something is my embrace of the Seth MacFarlane canon, then my subsequent rejection, followed by my tearful return.  A cartoon like Family Guy is the kind of thing you enjoy as a young teenage edgelord, then recognize it for the lowbrow shock-humor that it is, before eventually going, “you know?  A little Family Guy ain’t so bad.”

So it goes with the other major MacFarlane animated show, the arguably superior American Dad!, a series that has a real one-note premise (isn’t mid-00’s American jingoism fucking insane?), but has managed to leverage that into a nice universe of slightly surreal, yet character-based, comedy.  Although it’s usually pretty reliable for Christmas content, its Halloween output is a little more sporadic.  Still, I think these two episodes help you get that spooky flavor:

Season 6, Episode 3 - “Best Little Horror House in Langley Falls”

After years of being known for the best haunted house display in the neighborhood, Stan and Francine have to up the ante when a new Imagineer neighbor starts horning in on their territory.  Their million dollar idea: bring in a bunch of actual serial killers and set them loose inside their house (look, I give credit where it’s due…pretty spooky idea).  My wife and I have been quoting the navigation system of their neighbor’s spooky car for years (“at the corner, take a fright!”)

Season 12, Episode 9 - “The Witches of Langley”

Do you like THE CRAFT?  Do you like reminiscing about 90’s music?  Do I have the episode for you!  Steve Smith and his pals take up witchcraft in order to reclaim their lunch table at school.  Like all things boys take up, it leads them to becoming buttholes and menaces to their communities.  Meanwhile, Stan and Klaus start a podcast where they literally just list off the names of 90s bands they can remember, in one of the more searing indictments of the podcasting medium I can think of.  

12:00 PM - 1:15 PM: FRANKENSTEIN (1931) (Peacock, The Criterion Channel)

1:15 PM - 2:30 PM: BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935) (Peacock, The Criterion Channel)

I’ve been having a blast the last couple of Halloweens slowly making my way through the vast Classic Universal Monsters series, which contains all kinds of things people don’t typically associate with the Draculas, Wolfmans and Creatures from the Black Lagoons, including Edgar Allen Poe adaptations, offbeat sequels, and outright comedies, including Abbott and Costello crossovers.  But, this afternoon, we’re going to stick with a couple of classics, the opening entries for my personal favorite Universal Monster, Frankenstein!

First up, 1931’s FRANKENSTEIN, which gives us the introduction to Boris Karloff’s monster, Colin Clive’s scientist (who gets the classic “It’s alive!” soundbite), James Whale’s confident humanistic direction, and the gorgeous, gorgeous sets.  There is a ton of memorable and iconic imagery in the classic Universal horror films, but almost nothing sticks under your skin as much as the shot of a grieving father solemnly carrying the body of his drowned daughter through town.  It’s one of the greatest films ever made for a reason.

Naturally, we follow up immediately with its even more revered sequel, 1935’s BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN.  In this one, James Whale gives us some Christ imagery, a nice camp performance from Ernest Thesiger, some colors of comedy (Frank smoking that pipe!) and an all-time efficiency performance from Elsa Lanchester as the titular bride (who, for the uninitiated, is not the movie as much as you might think).  We get some great Una O’Connor screaming for good measure.  It’s a bold direction for a sequel, especially considering they could have just had Frankenstein go nuts on a town again and called it a day.

Many other FRANKENSTEIN sequels are worthy of your attention as well, including 1939’s SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (which replaces James Whale with Rowland Lee and manages to basically not lose a step at all).  But loading this whole section up with old FRANKENSTEIN movies would be a bit of a cheat, wouldn’t it?  It’s tempting, though.  There are a lot of them, especially when you start including the British Hammer Frankenstein flicks.  Maybe next year?

2:30 PM - 4:00 PM - BOB’S BURGERS Mini-Marathon! (Hulu)

BOB’S BURGERS has long been a comfort watch for me.  I wouldn’t call myself a super-fan or anything, but its efficient and satisfying style of comedy makes it come in handy whenever I need something to lift my spirits for thirty minutes.  It’s also a cartoon series that completely and fully leans into seasonal episodes, be it Christmas, Thanksgiving or, luckily for our sakes, Halloween.  There are literally almost a dozen Halloween episodes to choose from, so the only hard part here was choosing which three to go with to fill this ninety-minute slot.  Here’s what I landed on:

Season 6, Episode 3: “The Hauntening”

In which the Belchers do their damnedest to scare the completely unscareable Louise.  There are a lot of memorable quotes in this one (including a moment of lucidity from Gene regarding childhood in the face of certain doom), but I was frankly hooked from the opening scene in which Teddy gets repeatedly scared by the same dancing witch animatronic.

Season 9, Episode 4: “Nightmare on Ocean Avenue Street”

In which the Belcher kids determine the identity of a rogue gorilla-costumed candy-stealer on Halloween night.  This one is great if only because of the escalating decoration war Bob and Teddy find themselves in with the store-front next door.

Season 7, Episode 3 “Teen-a Witch”

In which Tina starts dabbling in witchcraft in order to get revenge on Tammy for stealing her sand-witch costume idea.  As what happens with such dabblings, she lets the power go to her head, casting spells on anybody that wrongs her.  Has she met her match when a crossing guard curses her right back?  Watch along to find out, and enjoy a guest performance from Billy Eichner for your trouble.

4:00 PM - 5:30 PM: THE FOG (1980) (Amazon Prime)

I think late Halloween afternoons are for ghost stories (or at least this one is), and one of my favorites is John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN follow-up, THE FOG.  It’s not really anywhere near as frightening as that initial Michael Myers story, nor is it as skin-crawling as other Carpenter classics like PRINCE OF DARKNESS.  What THE FOG is is remarkably cozy, at least as far as a story about ghost sailors returning to a small town to claim their gold can be.  The reason for that might be as simple as its Bay Area setting; Antonio Bay may be a fictional town, but considering most of the exterior location shooting took place in Marin County, one can do the math.

Besides its basic plot being remarkably similar to that of GARFIELD’S HALLOWEEN ADVENTURE, I think the thing I always remember about THE FOG is the beautiful radio station built inside the town lighthouse, where Adrienne Barbeau broadcasts her show out of.  It turns out to serve a crucial purpose in the movie’s story, where our ghost antagonists first make their presence known, but even if THE FOG had never left this set, I would have been happy.  More movies taking place in oddly located radio stations!  

The movie also includes Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins, Hal Holbrook and an all-time Carpenter-penned theme.  Snuggle up and get lost in THE FOG!

5:30 PM - 6:30 PM: THE X-FILES - “BAD BLOOD” (Hulu)

Pulling an episode from THE X-FILES for a Halloween episode is kind of cheating; technically, almost any random hour of the seminal sci-fi show could be a “Halloween” episode.  But this fifth-season episode is the one my wife and I always throw on during the actual night of October 31st, because it’s kind of the show in microcosm.  The conceit is not a terribly original one, and one you would be familiar with if you’ve ever seen RASHOMON (or even a parody of RASHOMON).  Scully and Mulder both debrief the spooky events of the night before, and it turns out their recollections greatly differ.  

BUT, in that classic X-FILES fashion, the writing is so fucking sharp (the various differences are fun to discover), it features a fantastic dual guest performance from none other than Luke Wilson and, most of all, it all centers so precisely around the two characters that made the show what it was: Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.  Yeah, they’re the leads, but their characters were so defined a half-decade in, both by David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson and by the elite writing staff Chris Carter had built.  The way Mulder and Scully process and visualize their previous night’s adventure is so fun because it’s so them.  BAD BLOOD is a good time!

6:30 PM - 6:45 PM: Music Video Break (YouTube)

I wanted to quickly shove this segment in to remind you all that sometimes Halloween goodness can be found in unexpected places.  To that end, here are two music videos from two different bands in two different eras that decided to hauntify their decidedly not-scary hit songs.  

“Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” - Backstreet Boys

Those who were hooked into popular music in 1997 are probably already well aware of this, but for the rest of us, this is my opportunity to inform you that one of Backstreet Boys’ biggest hits of all time has a “haunted house” music video.  Its inspirations are many: there’s some Thriller in the choreography, BSB’s costumes seem vaguely Universal Monster-inspired (Wolfman, Phantom of the Opera and the Mummy), and although the mansion it’s shot in was allegedly the one used in 1995’s CASPER, it felt to me more like if the EYES WIDE SHUT house had opened up an all-ages venue in one of its less-used wings.  Best of all, Antonio Fargas, Huggy Bear himself, plays their bus driver.  Is this music video sexual?  Yeaaaaah!

“Doing It All for My Baby” - Huey Lewis and the News

If you have even a cursory knowledge of 80’s pop hits, you’re familiar with this Huey Lewis mainstay.  But, did you know this song, seemingly about a man who’s so in love with the woman he’s with that he’s made himself a better man in order to give her the best version of himself, is actually about Frankenstein and his Bride?  I bet you didn’t, but you’ll be set straight after one watch of this music video.

More of a mini-movie than a music video, “Doing it All for My Baby” gives us Huey Lewis doing his best Peter Sellers impression, performing no less than three roles, as Dr. Frankenstein, Frankenstein’s Monster, and his scariest role of all (if the Bride’s reaction is anything to go by), Huey Lewis.  There’s absolutely no reason for this to be a big spooky movie tribute, but it is.  What a stupid little joy.  No Huggy Bear in this one, though.

6:45 PM - 7:15 PM: WANDAVISION - “ALL NEW HALLOWEEN SPOOKTACULAR!” (Disney Plus)

It remains fascinating to me how quickly the Marvel Cinematic Universe became cooked, especially relative to how long it was dominant in the pop culture zeitgeist.  Part of the issue was that the various franchises reached a level of saturation that was unsustainable, both in terms of quality assurance and audience enthusiasm.  This was accelerated by its expansion into the streaming television space, churning out multiple miniseries for the past couple of years, some of which have hit (Loki, Hawkeye), and some of which have heavily tarnished the brand (Secret Invasion).

In some ways, though, the MCU’s first official TV show* was its best.  Although people complain about WandaVision’s ending, and gripe about its awkward fit into the second Doctor Strange movie, the star vehicle for Elizabeth Olson and Paul Bettany benefited from a real “right place, right time” bump.  Premiering close to the one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, the TV show doubled as a tribute to other TV shows, the kind that people had undoubtedly been burrowing into during lockdown.  I Love Lucy.  Bewitched.  The Brady Bunch.  Full House.  The Office.  

*Especially since the actual first and best MCU TV show has appeared to have been completely forgotten about in terms of canonicity.

Or, in the case of “All-New Halloween Spooktacular!”, Malcolm in the Middle.  It’s featured here not just because it’s a random Halloween-themed episode (okay, it’s technically the exclusive reason it’s being featured, but you know what I mean), but because it’s probably WandaVision’s best outing.  Some of the show’s television homages don’t ever elevate beyond broad parody (some of the sixties stuff doesn’t feel quite right), but it feels right at home emulating late 90’s-early 00’s style sitcoms.  The bouncy incidental music, the cutaways, the deep holiday branding…it’s a lovely homage that also manages to push the show’s plot into exciting directions.  It probably helps to have seen the prior episodes, and be somewhat familiar with the MCU as a whole, but the “All-New Halloween Spooktacular” can be taken on its own off of holiday vibes alone.  

7:15 PM - 7:45 PM: I THINK YOU SHOULD LEAVE DOUBLE HEADER! (Netflix)

Tim Robinson is a modern entertainer I’d expected to be more divisive than he’s turned out to be; his brand of comedy is fairly specific, and is dependent on social awkwardness, shifts in demeanor, and a lot of yelling and swearing.  I’m sure there have been plenty of folks that have fired up his cult hit sketch series I Think You Should Leave on Netflix and immediately went, “nope, not for me”.  But for the most part, people seem to love him, including me.

The beautiful thing about his show is that more sketches than you’d think touch on holiday trappings, even if somewhat superficially; there are at least three that would be right at home in a Christmas marathon.  To that end, there are a few episodes that contain sketches that could arguably be considered “Halloween” themed.  Tonight, you get just two, but they’re goddamn good ones, and fairly representative of I Think You Should Leave as a whole.

Season 1, Episode 5: “I’m Wearing One of Their Belts Right Now”

There’s an argument to be made that this is the strongest batch of sketches I Think You Should Leave ever put together.  It opens with the famous hot dog car scene, which has been immortalized as a meme that you’ve almost certainly seen whiz by your social media feed sometime in the last five years.  It also contains a centerpiece Patti Harrison sketch, and the wonderfully unhinged “the babysitter was late” sketch.  But the reason it makes this list is the equally meme-immortalized “Night Robert Palins Murdered Me” song.  It may not necessarily be Halloween-themed, but…look, the guy asked for something spooky, okay?

Season 2, Episode 1: “They said that to me at a dinner.”

A confident season debut that gave us the instant classic “Coffin Flop” sketch, which in an of itself could qualify as Halloween content if you squint your eyes.  But, no, this episode gets the nod due to its concluding ghost tour sketch which, yes, rests a lot of its initial laurels on the shock of talking about cum and jizz.  But, in that signature Tim Robinson way, he makes this awkward and uncomfortable guy approach something resembling sympathy by the end.  He was confused about the rules!  He was just trying to make friends!

7:45 PM - 9:45 PM: THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (Amazon Prime)

In the primetime slot, let’s throw on one of the best movies of the nineties, period, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS!  It’s one I gave the full article treatment to in an earlier iteration of this blog, in case you were interested in a full review.  Needless to say, however, that it’s a movie that launched thousands of painfully unfunny people nationwide doing their “fava beans and a nice chianti” impressions in front of thousands of very patient co-workers and classmates.  Of course, Anthony Hopkins’ performance here is the stuff of Hollywood legend (although I’ve always been more of a Brian Cox guy),  but what makes SILENCE OF THE LAMBS endure for me is the beautiful characterization of Clarice (and the quiet, simmering performance by Jodie Foster), and the way Jonathan Demme’s direction and Ted Tally’s script are interested in her seeming infiltration into a male-dominated world.  The reason her scenes with Hopkins are so potent is that, ultimately, Hannibal is the only one to treat Clarice as an equal.

Spooky, thought-provoking, classic.  What better film to serve as the centerpiece of this Halloween marathon?

9:45 PM - 12:00 AM: THE EXORCIST (MAX)

Oh, yeah, that might be a better film.

Arguably one of the best movies, period, THE EXORCIST is obviously scary as fuck if you believe in hell and the devil; it’s one of the most popular depictions of demon possession for a reason endures as a horror classic because it always remembers to make the terror personal.  The fear of trying to help a child who is becoming sick beyond recognition.  The fear that established science cannot help us.  The fear of not being there for a family member in their time of need.  The fear of being forever haunted by our regrets.  The fear of eventually receiving a legacy sequel that sucks so bad that your two follow-ups get canceled and forgotten about (okay, I’m editorializing on that one).  It’s a moody nightmare, made all the more chilling for how quiet it’s willing to be for most of its runtime.  It’s a great watch anytime of the year, but I can’t think of anything better to officially kiss October 31st goodbye.

12:00 AM - 2:00 AM: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET II: FREDDY’S REVENGE (1985) (MAX)

As we officially enter November 1st, we enter what I call the “insane stand-alone sequels to famous franchise” section.  I’m taking pitches for a catchier title.
I am of the belief that the first three Freddy Krueger flicks are essentially perfect for what they’re each attempting to be.  In a pinch, I’d pick NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS as the crown jewel of the entire franchise.  However, for a couple of reasons, I’m picking the oddball Part 2 to take the midnight slot of this marathon.  For one, it’s surprisingly stand-alone, putting the story of Nancy Thompson completely on hold to bring us the tale of Jesse Walsh.  For two, FREDDY’S REVENGE is fucking bonkers.  We have a way-less jokey Krueger; he seemingly barely talks at all, a more fitting demeanor for the disgraced child murderer than the open mic night comedian we get from Part 4 on.  FREDDY’S REVENGE is also famously a thinly-disguised queer body horror tale which, considering this was released smack-dab in the middle of the Reagan era and the rise of HIV in America, makes it one of the gutsier 80’s slashers out there.  To that, er, end, it features Freddy killing the school coach by whipping his butt with a towel in the gym showers.  How could you turn it down?

2:00 AM - 3:30 AM-ish: HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (1982) (Peacock)

HALLOWEEN is one of the longest running, most beloved horror franchises of all time, and the funny part is that there’s only, like, four entries I would refer to as “quality”.  The 1978 original is, of course, one of the greatest films ever made.  HALLOWEEN IV is kind of fun in a “return to the basics” kind of way.  I’m kind of a big fan of HALLOWEEN H20: 20 YEARS LATER, in all of its late-90’s glory.  And then, of course, there’s the much-aligned HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH.

Hated upon its release, with its decision to convert HALLOWEEN into an anthology series, rather than an ongoing Michael Myers saga, only serving to confuse more than anything else, I’m actually an advocate for its low-budget, grimy charm.  I can’t sit here and tell you to your face that it’s a good movie; when compared to the masterpiece that is the John Carpenter original, this one seems like a cheap exploitative excuse.  It features some bizarre acting, a sweaty lead performance from Tom Atkins, and one of the most gratuitous, sketchy sex scenes I can think of in a mainstream film.

But…consider how I first saw it.  I was over at a friend’s house, and we caught it running as a Sunday afternoon local station feature (when such a thing existed!).  I didn’t really understand it, and I remember being confused my my friend’s mom’s existence that this was, in fact, the original HALLOWEEN (although I was much too young to have known anything about the first HALLOWEEN, even at eleven years old, I strongly sensed that this movie about zombiefied Halloween masks could not possibly have been it).  But I remember being mesmerized by the Silver Shamrock jingle all the same.

Given that core memory, you’ll forgive me for having a soft spot for HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH, a movie that features zero witches.  It does feature a healthy dose of skepticism regarding the Irish, so how bad could it be?  Stay up and check it out, and enjoy its chilly, abrupt ending!

3:30 AM-ish - 6:00 AM: Herschell Gordon Lewis Double Feature! 

Let’s get weird and loose as we approach the final descent of this spooky flight.  I do not profess to be a connoisseur of the splatter king Herschell Gordon Lewis.  I have really only seen a tiny fraction of his sizable filmography, although a full deep dive is a perpetual entry on my cinema bucket list, so potent to me is his unique mix of zero-budget, education film reel aesthetic, stiff 50’s style acting and creatively irresponsible gore stunts.  His stuff is practically made for the twilight hours of the marathon.  Check out:

BLOOD FEAST (1963) (Tubi, Kanopy)

Coming in at a brisk 67 minutes, I still haven’t stopped thinking about this nasty, loopy little thing since first watching it a few years ago.  Shot in four days, BLOOD FEAST features a real sheep’s tongue, a gloriously insane title card (where the already bloody typeset gets literally sprayed with more blood before your eyes), disastrous performances, and more discussion about Egyptian food than you might expect.  I’m sincere when I say it’s a must-watch.
TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! (1964) (Tubi)

In some senses, this other seminal Lewis work is even more unnerving to me than BLOOD FEAST.  Yes, TWO THOUSAND MANIACS feels more like an actual movie you could imagine being made by a human than BLOOD FEAST, but its story of a Southern hick town celebrating its centennial by torturing and murdering a car full of lost Yankees is plucking a string of anxiety unique to America.  Obviously, it’s wildly exaggerating, but it’s hard to deny that this is essentially what it feels like both the Northern and Southern United States think of each other.  Plus, it’s got a genuinely catchy opening song.  YEEEEEE-HAW!

6:00 AM - 7:00 AM: Take a power nap. The 28-day Thanksgiving marathon begins at 7:00 AM. First up, this YouTube rip of the 1995 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade….

The Devil Don't Care: THE EXORCIST And the Death of the Legacy Sequel

I. SAY YOUR PRAYERS

I’m a relatively godless man.

I wasn’t raised in a particularly religious household or family; they had and have their beliefs, but they weren’t expressed outwardly in times of non-crisis all that often.  I did a stint of Catholic education, but it was really late in my schooling; I went down the rare pipeline of secular K-through-8th, THEN getting taught by nuns at the age of 14.  As a result, I definitely found learning about Catholicism interesting (I’m one of those who thinks all people should do a once-through of major religious texts like The Bible, even if just as a piece of literature), but by the time high school began, the cement was probably already too dry in my head to really believe it.  There’s just too many contradictions, too many sects and groups of people who think they’re the only correct ones and everybody else in the world is wrong, even though all religions more or less believe the same things when you get right down to it.  It ain’t for me.

And yet….what the hell do I know?  I know full well the limitations of my intellect.  The mere fact that something doesn’t add up for me doesn’t really mean much in the grand schemes of things.  Hell, my non-believer status might even be the greatest single positive qualifier in favor of religion.  So who knows?  Thus, in the great family tradition, I find myself praying to a higher power in times of crisis anyway, even if it’s with a little detachment.  Who am I to say it doesn’t work?  

For instance, the other night, I prayed that the concept of the legacy sequel would be vanquished from the Earth. 

I don’t really need to explain what the “legacy sequel” is, right?  Even if you had somehow never heard the phrase, the very name describes it perfectly.  It’s a sequel that carries the “legacy” of a particular franchise or property, usually years and years, even decades, after the last nail in the coffin appeared to have been hammered in.  They’ve been around for quite a long time, especially on television, but the genre seems to have gotten turbocharged around 2015, with the one-two financial punch of JURASSIC WORLD and STAR WARS: EPISODE VII - THE FORCE AWAKENS wreaking havoc in Hollywood.  

And look, the appeal is obvious.  I don’t need to be the millionth person to get into the concept of people looking for comfort in trying times, and that comfort usually being in the form of nostalgia, one of the most powerful drugs in the world, the only concept that can make us go back in time, the closest thing we have to potential time travel.  And how, just like any other drug, nostalgia can be actively destructive in large doses, causing us to forever look backwards rather than blaze through to the future, however uncertain it may be.  Nah, there are plenty of think-pieces out there that cover all of this.  And, besides, you inherently know all this in your soul already anyway.

My problem with the concept of the “legacy sequel” is much simpler: they usually suck and are lazy, substituting the hard work of storytelling for “clapping” moments, then often fucking those up, too.  Here come the actors from the previous ones!  Here’s a location or a prop from the original!  Whoah, one of the characters just said The Line!  Are your heartstrings tugged yet?  They’re the cheapest kind of art: the disposable kind (I would be surprised if anybody saw GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE or JURASSIC WORLD - DOMINION more than once).  They’re usually not even interesting enough to be truly bad; they mostly just sit there.

I was thinking about all of this while watching THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER, the new horror legacy sequel from David Gordon Green, the other week.  I was thinking about a lot of things (mostly because it was boring).  About how transcendent the original EXORCIST still feels fifty years later.  About just how many attempts at a true and proper follow-up have been attempted since Gerald Ford was in the Oval Office and how none of them have ever truly worked.  And, most importantly, about why I was burning a free afternoon on this styrofoam cup of a movie.

The only real benefit I was able to pull from the experience is that it seems to me like the signs are forming of the legacy sequel boom coming to a close.  I might just have to keep praying hard enough.

II. WHAT AN EXCELLENT DAY FOR AN EXORCISM

The first time I ever saw THE EXORCIST, it was in the form of a Hollywood Video DVD rental, picked up in pursuit of some late-night entertainment during a teenage sleepover (I should probably clarify that I was also a teenager at the time).  Although my friends and I at that age usually aimed for such video cassette horror classics as ICE-CREAM MAN*, TERROR TOONS and JACK FROST for our cinematic indulgences (the kinds of things you rent for the night based solely off of the VHS cover), you can only hear about something being “the scariest movie of all time” for so long before you decide to class it up for a night.  It didn’t hurt that this was right around the time that the famous Director’s Cut (“The Version You’ve Never Seen!”) had hit the market, which meant THE EXORCIST was getting quite a bit of press around the time of that fateful night.

*Starring Clint Howard in the titular role!

We watched it and…I remember being only vaguely interested!  There were likely a plethora of reasons as to why.  My first guess was that, at the age of twelve, I was already firmly in my “everything is stupid and overrated” butthole phase, an era of my life that only lasted another twenty years.  With reflection, however, I’m not precisely certain how scary THE EXORCIST can really be to a thirteen-year old, especially the particularly fake-cynical type that I was.  It was definitely memorable; how could you ever forget Linda Blair vomiting up green sludge like she just walked out of Pea Soup Andersons?  Since this was the Director’s Cut, how could you ever shake the famous Spider Walk?  How could you…um…ever look at a crucifix the same way?  And yet, I definitely wasn’t scared, and I made sure everybody else at the sleepover knew it (I should mention, besides being a cynic, I was a real asshole at twelve years old).

But…what else would you really expect to happen?  THE EXORCIST, as it turns out, is not specifically designed to scare relative young-uns, although there’s enough flayed skin and gross puke contained within that it probably happens anyway.  No, it’s a horror movie for adults, and not in the “tied up naked co-eds” kind of way.  Specifically, this is a movie for people who have lived long enough to start having doubts about their previous actions.  To start wondering if maybe they’ve got it all wrong.  To begin living with unanswerable questions.

The real villain of THE EXORCIST isn’t the demon Pazuzu.  It’s regret.

The story of THE EXORCIST is still wildly famous even fifty years later, but in case you need a refresher…the main conflict of the movie begins when Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) starts acting oddly.  Where a bright, happy twelve-year old girl once stood, a strange sore-covered demon begins to form.  Nobody seems to have a clue what is going on, least of all her actress mother Chris (Ellen Burstyn).  The various doctors that take a look at her chalk it up mostly to a psychological condition, something that Chris rejects vehemently (and perhaps rightfully so, given Regan’s state).  However, by the time Chris’ director friend Burke Dennings (Jack MacGowran) is found dead outside the MacNeil house, his body found right underneath Regan’s window after going into her room alone only minutes before...it’s clear something needs to be done.

When science fails to produce answers, where else is there to turn?

Enter Fathers Lancaster Merrin and Damien Karras.

We spend quite a bit of time with these two during the first half of this movie; in fact, the first twenty minutes or so is almost a short film all its own, as we follow Merrin (Max von Sydow) as he walks the deserts of Iraq armed with proof that an old enemy has awakened.  Although some people may call the opening slow (I am not one of those people), it’s an incredibly bold, patient, and confident way* to open up a movie of this caliber, and it pays off.  The shot of von Sydow staring down the statue of Pazuzu at the end of this sequence is as rousing and engaging as any other start to a film I can think of, and Friedkin pulls it off without a fucking word of dialogue.  

*Remember when popular movies could still be slow burns?  Would the Netflix algorithm ever allow a movie to open like this?

The movie also lays the groundwork for where Father Karras (Jason Miller) is, both emotionally and spiritually, prior to his showdown with Pazuzu.  He carries a heavy load as a psychiatrist to other priests.  He confesses to a colleague that he’s questioning his faith.  Privately, crucially, he’s struggling with how to deal with his ailing mother.  She’s clearly not able to care for herself at home, yet he can’t live with himself during the brief period she’s admitted to a callous asylum*.  Although she’s ultimately able to die in her own home, Karras isn’t there for her at the end.  You get the palpable sense that Karras is going to be thinking about how things could have gone for a long time, maybe forever.

*If you haven’t picked up on it, there’s a strong anti-psychiatry streak to this movie that is inexorably linked to its pro-church theme.  I mention this because it means THE EXORCIST stands as proof that a well-constructed and compelling story can transcend one’s own personal compass.  

Karras gets connected with Chris via a mutual friend, Father Dyer.  After a visit to Regan’s room (which yields him only a face full of green puke), Karras correctly surmises that Regan is possessed by a demon and the only solution is to dust off a near-defunct church ritual: the exorcism (cue the tubular bells!).  His superiors reluctantly allow him to move forward with this, contingent on him bringing on a more experienced priest, who happens to be….Father Merrin!  The stage is set. 

It all leads to one of the most memorable sequences in 70’s horror, the climactic exorcism, where the brutality of Pazuzu (who winds up becoming an insanely formidable opponent relative to how stupid its name is) is laid bare.  Besides being shockingly foul and disgusting, both in look and in speech, it seems to have an instant read on what terrifies its foes to their core.  This results in the most chilling moment of the movie, at least for me*.  Pazuzu, using Regan as its vessel, begins to speak to Karras as his mother, asking him “why did you do this to me?  I’m afraid!”  As he clutches his ears and screams, “You are not my mother!”....well….

*I recognize that, in a movie that features, again, a possessed pre-teen masturbating with a crucifix, this may represent somewhat of a hot take on my part.

Look, I can’t claim to have had to deal with an aging, ailing parent.  But I have loads of profound regrets in other directions, and worries that maybe I should have been at places I chose not to be.  I replay lots of moments from the movie of my life, wishing I had a second take to use.  So to reach this moment in THE EXORCIST at thirty-five, it should come to no surprise that it hits waaaaay harder than it ever possibly could at the age of twelve.

Karras is ultimately in a showdown with himself.  With his regrets and doubts.  With grief.  With the memories of his mother.  The things that have merely kept him up at night now threaten to kill him.  And it speaks volumes that, in a movie that’s filled with striking and audacious moments (nearly 100% of the special effects, performed live on the set, hold up in all their grotesque glory fifty years later) and one so carefully and quietly crafted to set up character without an overload of verbal exposition*, it’s this moment that hit like a ton of fucking bricks for me.

*One of my favorite details establishing how ill-equipped Chris is for the dealing with her possessed daughter is the plethora of handlers and assistants she has milling about her house.

It didn’t help that I mostly forgot how THE EXORCIST ends.  I recalled Father Merrin being the one who dies at the end, but I had forgotten that we lose both priests before all is said and done.  Yes, we also lose Karras, and in a rather brutal fashion.  Although it makes for a bleak end, it perfectly fits.  It’s the completion of the story THE EXORCIST is telling, whether Pazuzu is defeated for good or not (can one truly defeat evil forever?).  And because the story has such a defined end, and because the story was so well-told that people went crazy for it, the movie runs into the same issue that all successful ones inevitably hit.

How do we make another one?

III. HORRIBLE, UTTERLY HORRIBLE, AND FASCINATING

I’ve given a spiel many times before about the stacked deck that pretty much every sequel faces, since they’re almost always tasked with following up movies that were already closed books.  It gets especially hilarious when franchises start realizing that they botched it with a particularly-maligned sequel and try to “fix it”, which leads to competing timelines within a series.

All one has to do is look at something like THE TERMINATOR, which flew too close to the sun after actually nailing its first follow-up (it’s not an opinion I hold, but T2: JUDGMENT DAY is generally considered better than the original) and has spent thirty years trying to come up with a proper T3 ever since.  Maybe the biggest offender in all of Hollywood is the HALLOWEEN franchise, which now boasts five separate timelines, some of which are quite entertaining (I confess to being a fan of HALLOWEEN: H20 and HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH) and most of which are total garbage (see HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION and both Rob Zombie films, at least in my opinion).

One of the more intriguing examples of this, however, happens to be THE EXORCIST franchise, which now consists of three sequels, none of which are connected to each other in any way, and two prequels, which are really just the same movie cut in different ways.  Naturally, I had to see these for myself.  Before I saw the new David Gordon Green sequel, though, I had to start at the (relative) beginning.

To both sequels’ sort-of credit, there isn’t really an attempt to just do THE EXORCIST again.  Both 1977’s THE EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC and 1990’s EXORCIST III embody decidedly different vibes than Friedkin’s original, although they both accidentally do it in similar ways.  Specifically, they both surround a major (but aging) leading man with weird performances and batshit imagery, all in the pursuit of covering up the fact that, well, there really is no movie at the core of either of them.

How could there be?  What possible loose thread could one possibly pull at by THE EXORCIST’S end?  

EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC starts with the semi-reasonable idea of picking Regan’s story back up with her as a teenager.  A new priest has entered her story, Philip Lamont (Richard Burton), who is also questioning his faith after a botched exorcism in Latin America (and by botched, I mean candles get knocked over and the possessed woman catches on fire; bad times).  A few years later, he gets assigned the duty of investigating Father’s Merrin’s death.  Apparently, there are whispers that Merrin will be marked as a posthumous heretic for performing the titular exorcism from the first movie, since the Church is modernizing and does not wish to confirm the existence of Satan (I’m not sure this makes a lot of sense but, again, I am no liturgical expert).

Father Lamont’s investigation brings him to the New York psychiatric institution Regan MacNeil now lives in, where she is monitored by Dr. Gene Tuskin (a post-CUCKOO’S NEST Louise Fletcher).  It’s here that we’re introduced to the movie’s big device, as well as the first indication that we’re not just doing the first one again: a brain synchronizer that allows its two users to “connect” via brainwaves.  Once brains start getting synchronized, EXORCIST II comes alive with its signature flourishes: flying with locusts all the way to Africa, a possessed James Earl Jones, really provocative camera overlays…there are long sequences of EXORCIST II that feel like fever nightmares.  I admit to loving the un-intuitive approach here. 

All of the above, plus an all-time on-autopilot performance from Richard Burton, makes THE HERETIC sound way more interesting of a start-to-finish experience than it actually is in practice.  One just can’t shake the feeling that director John Boorman is using audacious visuals (and they are audacious) to cover the fact that there really isn’t any movie here.  It particularly struggles with actually connecting itself to the first EXORCIST; specifically, why does the movie have this weird insistence that Father Merrin was the only one present at the first movies’ exorcism?  Seriously, is there some behind-the-scenes thing with Jason Miller that I’m not aware of?  EXORCIST II practically states as a matter of fact that Father Merrin pulled a solo act in EXORCIST I.  Does anybody know why?

It just feels like Boorman, screenwriter William Goodhart, and the film at large, struggled with actually making a movie that serves as an EXORCIST sequel, maybe because there really isn’t anything to continue with two of its driving characters dead and another one cured of her conflict.  I like to imagine, though, a parallel universe where EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC is merely an EXORCIST ripoff named THE HERETIC, the kind of movie that…well, that you’d rent from a Blockbuster twenty years ago off of its batshit cover alone and end up quite liking just for its sheer batshit energy.  Alas, as an officially sanctioned second part to the EXORCIST story, it doesn’t work.

EXORCIST III takes a decidedly different route, starting with pretending EXORCIST II never happened.  We do pick back up with a character from the original, but it’s time it’s not Regan.  No, instead they go with fan favorite...Detective William F. Kinderman!  (You remember him, don’t you?)  This time, the role isn’t played by Lee J. Cobb, but by George C. Scott.  He’s older and more somber, and is starting to worry that an old enemy is beginning to rise again.  There are signs that the Gemini Killer is on the loose again, a threat made all the scarier by the fact that the Gemini Killer was executed fifteen years ago.  Even creepier, he is called to a psychiatric ward to interview a patient who bears a striking resemblance to Damien Karras, who also died fifteen years ago…

EXORCIST III has its fans.  Don’t get me wrong, the appeal is understandable.  It’s an undeniably loony movie, with many scenes and moments that can only be described as flabbergasting; there’s an extended dream sequence where, among others, Fabio and Patrick Ewing appear as angels.  Why?  Who knows?  Plus, there’s The Famous Scene.  You know the one; it’s the one who probably first saw in the form of a YouTube video titled something like “scariest movie scene ever” or something.  Suffice it to say, the scene delivers in context, although it came way later in the runtime than I ever imagined (out of context, it always had “first scene” vibes to me).

But….Jesus Christ, is EXORCIST III a mess.  It reeks of a movie caught between multiple cuts; it vacillates too much between grounded and ungrounded, seemingly at random.  I want to love it for its clear ambition, and for it having the common decency to find a way to bring Jason Miller back, if only briefly.  But it felt mostly like a boring, vaguely pretentious slog.  I’m not as big of a fan of Brad Dourif in this as others seem to be, and I think George C. Scott is also coasting his way through this the exact same amount as Richard Burton did in PART II; he’s just more awake while doing it.  The individual pieces are really interesting and, when viewed in isolation, make it seem like a borderline gonzo masterpiece (again, “scariest movie scene ever!”).  But, when strung together, the most interesting thing that emerges is that William Peter Blatty himself directed it.

Finally, there’s the odd tale of the EXORCIST prequels, which is really the same movie twice.  Yep, 2004’s THE EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING and 2005’s DOMINION: PREQUEL TO THE EXORCIST are more or less two stabs at the same idea (and start with the same production premise of EXORCIST III: “none of the other sequels ever happened”).  The idea of an EXORCIST prequel started in 1997, and churned through possible stars and directors; Liam Neeson was the star of this project at one point, and both Tom McLoughlin and John Frankenheimer were tagged to direct at different times along the way before landing on Stellan Skarsgard and Paul Schrader by 2002.  

The two movies share a starting off point; Stellan Skarsgard is a younger Father Merrin suffering from a crisis of faith, and haunted by a traumatic Nazi-induced past.  He is now tasked with investigating a church found buried in the ground during a dig in Kenya.  As he and a companion keep looking further into it, it’s clear that the church isn’t so much built to worship something above, but perhaps to keep something down below.

This is sort of an intriguing idea for two reasons.  One: there’s a cold logic to the idea of “well, following up the end of THE EXORCIST has bombed out twice…what if we try to connect to the beginning?”.  Two: Paul Schrader is maybe the only person in the Hollywood sphere who potentially has the juice for this kind of assignment; his unique brand of human interest and nihilism fits right in with the EXORCIST universe.  If anyone could make an EXORCIST prequel work, it might be him.

Personally, though, I typically find prequels to be even more of a pointless pursuit than sequels are.  Most movies tend to start their stories at the most logical place: where the conflict begins.  Take THE EXORCIST: if it was truly all that important to establish and dramatize Merrin’s previous run-ins with the Devil prior to Iraq, the movie would have done so.  But it didn’t, because there was no need to.  As we talked about, the EXORCIST prologue sets up Merrin as a character as well as you can imagine, and with minimal dialogue.  There’s not a whole lot of further elaboration needed.  It’s fun to imagine how intense Merrin’s previous run-ins with Pazuzu might have been, but actually seeing it play out isn’t that entertaining*.

*This is also known as the STAR WARS Prequel Problem.

Morgan Creek watched the original 130-minute cut of Schrader’s movie, which was light on actual scares and heavy on pace, and naturally fucking freaked out, seemingly unaware of who Paul Schrader was.  A re-edit was demanded, then another, neither of which satisfied the studio.  Producer Sheldon Kahn was brought in to re-cut it on his own, which infuriated Schrader.  By August of 2003, Schrader was fired and the film was junked entirely.  Back to the drawing board.

This is what led to the alternate (but technically first, in terms of release date) version of the film, directed by Renny Harlin* and rewritten and recast from the ground up, although Skarsgard was retained, as well as Andrew French, who played Chuma.  The shoot was a mess (one might say….cursed?), unhelped by the fact that Harlin got hit by a car two weeks in and had to direct on crutches for a month and a half.  It was a real race to the finish, only officially finishing days before its August 20th, 2004 release.  

*The ultimate “guy whose movies you’ve seen ten of, even if you don’t know his name” guy; seriously, check his filmography some time.  DEEP BLUE SEA, THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT, NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4, CLIFFHANGER….the list goes on.

You’ll never believe this, but the 2004 version fucking sucks.  It’s not even bad on a “holy cow what were they thinking?” level.  It just sucks in the way all movies made within compromised, unconfident, stuck-in-survival-mode productions do.  Just as an example of its desperate search for tension: it takes Merrin’s internal conflict (spoilers for a movie you’re not going to watch: Merrin was once made to pick ten members of his Nazi-occupied village in the Netherlands to be executed in retaliation for the death of a German soldier) and drags it out into a long movie-length mystery, the crux of which is not revealed until almost the end.  This is, presumably, in order to drive the viewer to keep watching.  However, it’s not really all that compelling of a device, especially when the final reveal is not terribly more guilt-inducing than what your imagination might have conjured up on its own.  You also need to endure some of the most generic, mid 00’s-looking visuals I’ve seen in a while, including some truly jaw-droppingly horrendous CGI hyenas. 

Even though it only ever saw the light of day because Morgan Creek asked Schrader to finish it, it’s no surprise that the 2005 version of the EXORCIST prequel bodies the 2004 version pretty easily, probably because it contains that “humans are the real evil in the world” throughline that you’d expect from a Schrader joint.  It also plays straight with the audience; Merrin’s Netherlands village prologue just plays out in full right from the beginning, making Merrin’s internal conflict and guilt clear from the start.  Finally, I think the cast is better on the whole; just for instance, Gabriel Mann makes for a more interesting companion (and has more to do) than James D’Arcy did in the 2004 version.

However, it doesn’t solve the Big Problem: who cares?  As a set-up to the 1973 EXORCIST, it doesn’t inform the original movie in any meaningful way, or at least in a way that wasn’t already there.  I cannot imagine anybody watching either of these outside of the context of “gotta knock it out”, like, say, someone trying to see every movie Schrader directed, or, perhaps, writing a big EXORCIST article or something.  DOMINION is twice the movie BEGINNING is, but that makes it a 2/10 rather than a 1.  Either way, they should likely both be avoided.  

So there the property sat for almost twenty years.  And then, three weeks ago, THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER hit theaters.

IV. GOD PLAYED A TRICK ON US

I confess to not being intimately familiar with David Gordon Green’s entire oeuvre.  The only real sense I have for his work comes from his recently completed HALLOWEEN “trilogy”, although it’s really more of a new quadrilogy; like many HALLOWEEN sequels, it starts with the premise that none of the other previous follow-up chapters ever existed.  Thus, 2018 provided us the third movie that could reasonably be referred to as HALLOWEEN II (following 1981’s HALLOWEEN II and 2007’s HALLOWEEN II, and not counting 1998’s HALLOWEEN H20: TWENTY YEARS LATER, which is technically a follow-up to the 1981 HALLOWEEN II….I told you, the HALLOWEEN timeline is messy).

Like most, I don’t really like his set of HALLOWEEN movies; the 2018 movie is perfectly fine and perfectly watchable, although vaguely uninspired in the same way J.J. Abrams’ THE FORCE AWAKENS was.  It worries less about building a story worthy of both following up the first installment AND kicking off two subsequent movies as it does about fussing over feeling like the 1978 original, down to the credit font and the return of Jamie Lee Curtis (a move towards credibility that was already done back in 1998, but I digress).  I do think HALLOWEEN 2018 is a fine time, and the central conceit is valid; there’s something admittedly cool about Laurie spending the last forty years preparing for the next time Michael Myers enters her life by creating a HOME ALONE-esque house of traps.  But it succumbs to the same problem all of these try-hard sequels do: for all of its hand-wringing about capturing a timeless feel, it also veers too topical (two prominently-feature characters are hosts of a true-crime podcast, something that I promise will feel ancient in another five years).  It also makes Mike too brutal, which was never really his M.O. and again feels like a capitulation towards modern bloodlust than anything else.

It won’t shock you that I thought 2021’s HALLOWEEN KILLS was awful to a degree that is borderline un-understandable, starting with its stupid name*.  It’s the rare movie that accomplishes the somewhat contradictory tasks of being both infuriatingly idiotic and completely unmemorable.  There was just nothing there, a middle entry in desperate search for a reason to exist.  I think it wants to be a musing on mob justice, but it became mostly known for its constant, excessive refrain of “evil dies tonight!”.  Maybe it doesn’t want to be anything more than a completed project, and it arguably falls short of that.

*I ask again in search of a straight answer from somebody, anybody: what the fuck does “HALLOWEEN KILLS” refer to?  Does it mean the day itself yields the possibility of killing?  Does it refer to the kills that actually happen in the movie?  Something else entirely that I’m not thinking of?  I expected an explanation in the form of a stirring monologue within the movie itself that included the phrase awkwardly worked in, but alas, this moment never occurs.

The final installment, HALLOWEEN ENDS, is a step up in the sense that it at least has an interesting idea at its core (Michael “passing on” his evil to another young man in Haddonfield, a potent if simple metaphor for the cycle of violence), but when the first identifiable idea in your trilogy comes halfway through the third movie, it is catastrophically too late.  The genuine buzz that the project had in 2018 was completely dissipated by 2022.  It was starkly clear that the HALLOWEEN “trilogy” was green-lit mostly because “a new HALLOWEEN trilogy” is a simple and easy sell in the room.

All this to say that the announcement that the same creative team was handed the keys to create a new EXORCIST trilogy gave me pause.  1978’s HALLOWEEN is one of the best horror movies ever made, but THE EXORCIST might be even better in terms of aesthetic, performance and overall substance.  Also, as mentioned, nobody in fifty years had really cracked the formula towards creating one truly satisfying EXORCIST follow-up, so greenlighting three at once seemed ambitious.  Also, it should be noted that Universal and Peacock teamed up to purchase the distribution rights to this franchise at the tidy sum of $400 million.  Surely they wouldn’t have made such a bold and risky decision without the knowledge that there were creatives in charge who have made some real choices as to what they wanted to do with it.

So…now that THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER has arrived, what choices did Green and his eternal writing partner Danny McBride come up with?

Well…

Here’s the thing: it’s been a couple weeks, and BELIEVER has already been on the receiving end of some truly brutal reviews, both in print and in video.  Although this frankly didn’t surprise me, I really tried my best not to consume any of them prior to writing this.  Sometimes, when a bad movie arrives and flops, people can smell blood, a dog pile quickly forms and a race to publish the snarkiest or most performatively negative review begins.  I’m not all that interested in participating in that aspect of it; I really do try to give movies a chance, especially when I have to write about them.  So, although I didn’t have a good feeling about all of this, I was hoping that BELIEVER would at least take a big swing or two, in the same way HERETIC or EXORCIST III did.  At least they could provide me with something unalterably weird like the CGI hyenas.

You’re never going to believe this, but they played it safe.

THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER is technically about a man named Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr., who is serving a massive leading role here; he’s in essentially every scene) who is still reeling from the loss of his wife in childbirth, the result of a choice he is forced to make during their honeymoon.  Thirteen years later, Victor is completely stripped of his faith, and is just focused on performing single fatherhood as best he possibly can.  Everything begins to collapse for him again when, while going on an unscheduled adventure after school, his daughter Angela and her best friend Katherine go missing in the woods.  Three days later, they reappear and begin to act….different.  Almost like there’s something…different about them.  You might even say…they’ve each been possessed by a demon.  Now what?  All that and the “now what” is what this movie is technically about.

What it’s really all about, though, is just doing THE EXORCIST again, with some superficial changes.  This time, it’s two possessed girls!  This time, it’s a dad trying to deal with his suddenly sick daughter!  Oh, look!  It’s Ellen Burstyn, only this time, she dabbles in exorcism, which is good because the actual priest character in BELIEVER is a complete non-factor (talk about missing the fucking point).  In an infuriating move that reeks of loss of confidence, Victor is also haunted by a choice he made many years ago, only this time, it’s presented to us as a twist to pull the rug out from under us, robbing us of any sense of doom or character.  Yes, the only other EXORCIST movie this takes inspiration from is THE EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING.  Take that for what you will.

To some degree, this might be the only bullet a potential EXORCIST sequel has left to fire.  But after almost a decade of this kind of IP film-making, it is perhaps the most ruinous decision it could have possibly made.  Friedkin’s original is a lot of things, but something that has gotten lost to the sands of time is that it felt legitimately dangerous to its contemporary audiences.  People reportedly fled the theaters, they vomited in the restroom, one woman even allegedly miscarried.  Now, like all stories of hysteria like this, I highly suspect them to be largely apocryphal.  However, the fact that the tales generated in the first place indicates that 1973 EXORCIST managed to tap into a fear very, very real to the average 1970’s American, that of leaving the door open for Satan.  America is 2023 is admittedly a very different place in a lot of different ways for a lot of different reasons.  However, it’s imperative for a movie that wants so badly to feel like the original to actually tap into a similar type of innate fear.  It’s not like it’s difficult; the average 2020’s American walks around terrified of any number of things of all levels of legitimacy.  In the Internet age, personifying evil is not a difficult task.

This is not to claim that the act of actually dramatizing it in screenplay form is easy.  It is not!  It’s fucking hard!  There’s a reason nobody has ever asked me to make an EXORCIST sequel; I would do a terrible, terrible job.  But, at this moment in time, Green, McBride and Jason Blum (and many others) were asked to perform a task that many other filmmakers (a couple of which are, frankly, better artists) had failed at.  Perhaps it was a poisonous premise for a film to begin with, but the instinct to just play the hits is simply a non-starter as a potential solution.  Plus, to be frank, unlike HALLOWEEN and STAR WARS, THE EXORCIST is not a franchise so ubiquitous in pop culture that a hard palette cleanser was required, so I don’t buy that as a potential excuse.  All in all, it’s creatively dead on arrival from the jump.

After a week of being drubbed in the press, THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER is profoundly fortunate that Taylor Swift and Martin Scorsese respectively entered movie theaters the next two weekends and took up all the oxygen.  As I write this, it is now available for purchase on streaming, indicating it may be gone from theaters altogether by next week.  You get a deep sense that losses might be cut and the other two entries of this “trilogy” will be quietly cancelled and everyone will just move on; in fact, it feels like Universal is already preparing themselves to do just that.  There’s an excellent chance BELIEVER will be merely forgotten about as opposed to being held up as a legacy sequel pariah, a low point in a subgenre that’s been made up of more valleys than peaks at this point in time. 

But…it shouldn’t.  There have been higher-profile IP catastrophes this year (here’s lookin’ at you, THE FLASH and ANT-MAN: QUANTUM-MANIA).  But EXORCIST: BELIEVER does feel like a real turning point in the cynical exercise of franchise necromancy.

You take a look around, and you can sort of see the tide turning in a different way for the types of movies people are really getting excited for.  Obviously, the BARBIE/OPPENHEIMER one-two punch was a big enough success that their opening weekends felt like a true end to the pandemic mindset: people flocked to the theaters in droves, often in costume, both ironically and (mostly) unironically.  Despite all the drama between Marvel and himself, there appears to be a real fervor for Martin Scorsese’s FLOWERS OF THE KILLER MOON (stay tuned to this space, by the way!), especially, and remarkably, with the demographics 35 and under.

Obviously, sequels and “do-overs” will always be a backbone to the Hollywood system and has been since it began.  But I do think (hope, pray) that the era of “follow-up to famous movie + bringing back one or two stars from retirement* + ‘we’re doing this for the fans!’ = money and press!” may be coming to an end, or at least a pause.  Because there are legacy sequels that have something to say; insert my mandated STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI mention here, but I’ll remind everyone that it was only one year ago that everyone went ape-shit for TOP GUN: MAVERICK and its thinly-veiled commentary towards Cruise’s position as the Last Movie Star.  It wasn’t long ago that Ryan Coogler directed Stallone to an Oscar nomination for 2016’s CREED.  These things can be done well.

*This reminds me that I haven’t yet mentioned THE EXORCIST: BELIEVER’s real low point: it wasn’t the trotting out of Ellen Burstyn, it was the trotting out of Linda Blair in a surprise cameo at the end that was met with dead fucking silence in the theater the day I went.

But every one of those, we get seemingly endless amounts of JURASSIC WORLDS and RISE OF SKYWALKERS.  Thus, more attention ought to be paid to EXORCIST: BELIEVER.  It’s not the worst legacy sequel, but it’s leaden and inert enough that it deserves to be the catalyst for a new American film revolution as anything Greta Gerwig and Jonathan Nolan provided us this year.  Maybe the era of the braindead legacy sequel is actually coming to a close.

And that would be the greatest exorcism of all.