‘The Exorcist’ On Fox A Family Tragedy, Real Life Exorcists Are Covert


The Exorcist is coming to Fox TV this fall, and there are few things that might echo the contents of the original, but the story is going to be completely different with a new setting and new characters. Fans of the original The Exorcist might be expecting a mother-daughter duo with the last names of MacNeill, but that is not the case with the TV series spinoff coming to Fox.

There were many things about The Exorcist back in 1973 that scared the pants off of people all across the world. The Exorcist was so popular that it became one of the highest-grossing movies of all time, and certainly the highest grossing horror movie. Just consider the elements about The Exorcist that made it so scary. It was more about the extreme shock value than it was about the horror, although there was plenty of that in it along with gore.

The Exorcist at its core was about a possessed young girl who did such atrocious things that it made people faint in movie theaters. She was the daughter of a woman who was a movie star and they were on their own with the exception of the hired help. They sought help from many different sources but ended up with the Catholic Church coming to their rescue.

The Exorcist on Fox this year will echo many of the same things about the original film, but will have completely different characters and the family will have the dad there, as reported by Deadline.

The Exorcist on Fox is executive produced by Jeremy Slater and Rupert Wyatt. Both were on hand this year the for the annual TCA Press Tour and they gave reporters quite a bit of revealing information about what to expect from the Fox TV show.

“The problem with all the [Exorcist] sequels is that they were trying to duplicate the beats of the original film,” Jeremy Slater told reporters, dismissing The Exorcist III as having that problem. “We’re conscious of that: We can’t retell the same story. We can only make a show that you haven’t seen before with new characters.”

There is also a unique angle that fans of The Exorcist may not have known about the original movie. William Friedkin, who directed The Exorcist in 1973, was not a big spiritual kind of guy. He approached the subject matter of the Catholic Church and the Christian religion with skepticism, which may have helped deliver a unique perspective in the film that audiences really seemed to love.

“If you look at the original [Exorcist], Friedkin — by way of his background and the films he was making at this time and coming from documentary filmmaking — approached the subject matter as an agnostic, a non-believer,” Rupert Wyatt said. “The subsequent films were more in the style of the genre.”

Slater also wanted to add that “Evil has grander ambitions than targeting one girl in Georgetown,” when speaking about The Exorcist TV series on Fox.

They also spoke about how real life exorcists still operate in the Catholic Church, but do so covertly, much like a C.I.A. spy might, according to The Wrap.

“It really comes down to protecting exorcists,” Rupert Wyatt told reporters at the TCA event. “They don’t like to show their faces or blow their cover.”

The Exorcist TV series star, Oscar-winning actress Geena Davis, takes a more skeptical approach to the whole idea of demonic possession.

“I believe there is evil in the world,” Geena Davis told TCA reporters. “We’ve certainly seen instances of it historically and currently. Everybody’s capable of an extreme range of behaviors.”

[Image via Fox]

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