Blumhouse has been at the top of the horror game for a decade and David Gordon Green is horror’s new savior, it’s no surprise a future for that team is developing. Green’s Halloween was critically and commercially loved, bringing an iconic franchise back to it’s former glory. It appears now that he’ll be catching that Shatner faced lightning in a bottle twice, as the Halloween Kills trailer dropped a few days ago and looks to be just as faithful to the originals theme while adding an insane level of mayhem. It’s easy to see a pattern developing where this group of creatives could succeed where studios like Platinum Dunes tried and failed…successfully reviving iconic horror titles.
If you’re going to bring something back from the dead, why not aim high? The Exorcist, after nearly 50 years, is still heralded by most as the scariest film of all time. Personally, even thinking about certain scenes of the film make me uneasy if I’m alone. While there were four more films and a tv show in the franchise (one of which would have been great if it just had a different name) they failed to come close to the achievements of the original. This is where Jason Blum has set his sights next.
While doing press for The Forever Purge Jason Blum sat down with the guys at DenOfGeek and spoke about tackling The Exorcist once the new Halloween trilogy was wrapped up, saying:
“It’s going to be like David’s Halloween sequel, I think it’s going to pleasantly surprise all the skeptics out there. We had a lot of skeptics about Halloween and David turned them around, and I think he’s going to turn it around with The Exorcist.”
There is no doubt in my mind that these guys know how to tap into the secret sauce of what made these films iconic in the first place, that’s the piece that’s usually missing. My concern is two-fold. First, the market saturation of possession movies…I mean, they’re everywhere. Just this month we saw The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It and there were at least 3 possession titles hitting VOD. Second, and I suppose this runs contrary to my first point, the world is much different then it was when the original came out. Religion was much more at the forefront, alot of the impact of The Exorcist came from peoples familiarity in the content and belief that, unlike most movie monsters, this one was very real. So while it can (and will) be terrifying, it will be harder to live up to the cultural impact with this property then it was with Halloween.
If anyone can do it, it’s these guys. I just can’t wait to see the result (not by myself though…)
