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After a Halloween reboot trilogy that delivered diminishing returns, and the total misfire that was The Exorcist: Believer, horror fans uttered a collective sigh of relief when director David Gordon Green announced he wouldn’t be making any further films in that proposed reboot trilogy. But inevitably, there’s still some curiosity wafting around about what Green’s second film—the title was to have been The Exorcist: Deceiver—would have explored, and he recently shared some details about that.
Speaking to IndieWire about his latest film, Nutcrackers (which is not a horror tale), Green—who said he’s “not afraid of strong feelings” in the context of people not enjoying certain among his horror franchise entries—shared a small tidbit about Deceiver‘s plot. “It was going to follow Ann Dowd’s character,” he said.
In Believer, Dowd plays a nurse who becomes involved in the movie’s dual possession case, both in a professional capacity and because she’s neighbors with Leslie Odom’s character, whose daughter accidentally awakens a demon. Dowd’s character, also named “Ann,” has a conflicted past involving her time as a former nun in training—and proves an important ally in the fight to save the girls’ souls.
Green further elaborated on his scrapped follow-up films, saying of the next two entries, “We had our next one written and had it mapped out for the third one … it was ambitious, complicated. We were going to Europe for some pretty extraordinary backdrops.”
So it sounds like Deceiver would not have followed up on Believer‘s reunion between the gratuitously blinded Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) and her estranged daughter Regan (Linda Blair), whose own possession propelled William Friedkin’s 1973 horror classic. Centering Dowd would have been a promising move; she’s a formidable presence whenever she’s cast, with standout turns in Hereditary, Compliance, The Leftovers, and The Handmaid’s Tale, to name a few film and TV credits. And it felt like we didn’t get to know Ann nearly well enough in Believer.
But, in the end, Green isn’t making that film at all; Universal and Blumhouse, under pressure to make good on that estimated $400 million required to snag the rights to The Exorcist, have turned to Mike Flanagan (The Fall of the House of Usher, The Haunting of Hill House, Doctor Sleep) to revitalize Pazuzu and company instead.
Flanagan, whose next release is Stephen King adaptation The Life of Chuck, has already said his film won’t be a sequel to Believer, instead teasing it as “the chance to try something fresh, bold, and terrifying within [The Exorcist] universe.” Beyond that, we don’t know much, but there’s plenty of time for speculation: it’s not slated to arrive until 2026.
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