Few who saw George Washington, David Gordon Green’s low-key debut from the year 2000, could have ever imagined the strange and twisty career that awaited him — surely not even Green himself. It used to seem odd that the guy who made small, sensitive indies like All the Real Girls also helmed the stoner comedies Pineapple Express and Your Highness. Jump a decade and he was suddenly making sequels to Halloween. Now he’s doubling down on old horror IPs: As per Variety, Green is in talks to do another sequel for another, even more shocking ’70s classic, The Exorcist.
The news was first reported by Observer, and THR confirms that Green is still “in talks” to make a follow-up to the biggest hit of 1973, from a time when Nixon-era America couldn’t get enough of watching a 12-year-old girl get possessed by a demon, vomit pea soup, spin her head 360 degrees, shout saucy expletives, and masturbate with a crucifix. Like Green’s 2018 film Halloween, it will be a direct sequel to the original, and it’s worth noting that two of its stars, Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair, are still with us. (Of course, we’ll how much of the nastiness will remain in a post-Trump/post-COVID world, but surely America will still have some, well, demons to exorcise for quite some time to come.)
The news comes mere days after the original’s director, William Friedkin, shot down rumors that he was involved in the reboot. He also had nothing to do with any of its sequels and prequels, including the notorious and brazenly nonsensical Exorcist II: The Heretic, which featured little in the way of exorcising but did include a great uptick in the number of locusts (as well as this deranged banger of an Ennio Morricone track). A threequel, helmed by the novel’s author William Peter Blatty, was better received, as was a prequel by Paul Schrader that was infamously rejected by the studio for being too slow and smart, prompting Cliffhanger’s Renny Harlin to redo it as something a whole lot dumber. But, as was the case with Green’s revisionist Halloween, you can forget all of those follow-ups ever happened.
(Via Variety and Observer)
