While David Gordon Green‘s franchise trilogy capper Halloween Ends is in cinemas now, the director provided updates on another upcoming horror project: the Universal and Blumhouse reboot of The Exorcist, conceived as a trilogy. Ellen Burstyn is set to reprise her role as Chris MacNeil, the mother who hired two Catholic priests to perform an exorcism on her possessed daughter (Linda Blair) in the original 1973 film.
The filmmaker told The Hollywood Reporter that he was ready to move on from the horror genre post-Halloween, until producer Jason Blum tempted him with another classic horror IP, The Exorcist.
“That’s the truth,” Green said. “If anybody’s followed my career, I’m always about left turns. Once I feel comfortable, I’ve got to get out of there and go do something that I don’t know and that is dangerous and vulnerable. That’s the stuff that really appeals to me. Fortunately, I’ve been able to exercise that through a lot of comedic work on television and some other things I’ve been able to do in between horror projects.
“But I really did have every intention of saying, ‘I’m going to push pause on horror,’ as much as I love the genre. It was just time to move on until the perfect property and the perfect idea happened at the same time…
“So we’re developing The Exorcist, and Ellen Burstyn, along with an amazing cast, is coming together for that, with a script I’m really excited about. Technically, it’s an extraordinarily different film from Halloween. I guess it’s in the subgenre of horror, but dramatically, I’m approaching it very academically. So we’ll see. It’s bringing a lot of the same team together in terms of our makeup and effects team and our cinematographer, but at the same time, we’re bringing in a new group as well to complement and evolve in different ways and to make sure it doesn’t feel redundant or repetitive.”
Speaking later to Variety, Green revealed that the Exorcist project was getting ready to begin filming in as little as two weeks. The first film of The Exorcist trilogy is slated for release in 2023.
