‘The Exorcist: Believer’ Review — Follow-up to Trailblazing Horror Film Falls Short

You might think it would be difficult, after fifty years, to introduce something new to a motion picture series as long and as storied as “The Exorcist.” Ever since William Friedkin’s trailblazing original horror drama — as frightening as it was insightful about the fragile relevance of religion in an increasingly secular world — filmmakers as varied as John Boorman, William Peter Blatty, Renny Harlin and Paul Schrader have been stretching the concept of demonic possession as far as it they could take it. Their films have been, not always at the same time, fiercely intelligent, deeply strange, hypnotically inept, genuinely terrifying, profoundly embarrassing, and/or uncomfortably insightful.