When horror is horrifyingly bad

A classic horror film’s sequel deeply disappoints priest Yaroslav Walker, missing opportunities to address psychological and spiritual power.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

A man and a women stand looking in the same direction with concerned faces.

Ellen Burstyn and Leslie Odom Jr are concerned about the reviews.

Universal Pictures.

That’s it. I have nothing more to say about the film in this review - The Exorcist: Believer. If you want a proper, knowledgeable, definitive derogatory diatribe against this dreadful waste of celluloid, may I suggest you watch this review by Mark Kermode. The good Doctor loves the original Exorcist more than any other reviewer I’m aware of and is the expert witness you need if you want to understand the absolute abomination this ‘film’ is (and, more importantly, is not!). I don’t have the energy. However, I do have the Church’s authority to speak on matters of faith and doctrine, so instead of my usual theology-smuggle at the end of a review, can we just dive right into it?

SPOILERS AHEAD – trust me, it doesn’t matter…

You can’t comment on an exorcism film without reference to the original – The Exorcist. Believer is David Gordon Green making a something of a sequel to the original; this went well with his first Halloween film, and then turned horrifyingly, stupidly bad with the second and third outings (and such treatment is promised for the Exorcist franchise). The Exorcist is a club sandwich of thematic wonder. William Peter Blatty was both a tremendously talented writer and also a thoughtful, intelligent, and committed Roman Catholic. When he wrote the novel of The Exorcist, he created a popular (slightly bloated) theological masterpiece. Adapting the script for William Friedkin to direct, he took the core themes and trimmed all the fat. The result is gorgeously lean, muscular, agile film that moves at a clip and doesn’t allow you a moment to forget the searing questions of faith, and doubt, and family, and failure, and sin.

Believer raises no such questions. If it has any sort of theme or message it seems to be this. The demonic is there not to sow random chaos, horror, pain and destruction (a good understanding of ‘evil’ as ‘nothing’, very much in keeping with a conception of evil formalised in Western theology by St Augustine almost a few millennia ago, which Blatty presents with perfection). It is there to offer people an ironic monkey’s-paw-esque bargain to reveal their own weakness and hypocrisy…yeh? Believer isn’t just terrible film, and not just a terrible sequel to a remarkable film; it is the lazy desecration of a cinematic theological legacy.

The original gave a gorgeous visual commentary on the human spirit remaining resilient in the face of evil as the absolute negation of ‘what is’.

To name the overarching source of my incandescence, it is this question: What is the demonic doing in this film? What is it achieving? The original Exorcist is clear – Fr Merrin (the eponymous exorcist) explains that the possession of a child is intended as random, purely nihilistic, awful chaos that grinds down the resolve of righteous. It has no point, no substance – it is genuine ‘evil’, nothingness collapsing in on itself. In Believer the demon seems to be wanting to make a social commentary on parenting…maybe? At the start of the film the voodoo-blessed mother is caught in a building collapse after a Haitian earthquake, and as she lies dying in a makeshift hospital the father is presented with a terrible choice: the surgeon can only save one or the other, mother or baby. SPOILER – he may have a daughter, but he didn’t choose her. There’s another girl who is something of a free spirit with parents who are very light touch. One father didn’t want his daughter, the other doesn’t seem to be too bothered about his daughter having structure…you know? Parents, children, the sins of the father…you know?

The great climax has the demon(s) presenting the assembled non-exorcists with a choice. Fathers – choose your daughter and she’ll live, first come, first served. One father recognises the immorality, the pointless and annihilating ‘evil’, of letting a girl die, the other doesn’t. He’s been pretty much a non-entity throughout the film, has no real understanding of what is going on, is about as psychologically traumatised as it is possible to be, and is presented with the opportunity to save his daughter…of course he makes the wrong choice…because this is a ‘clever film’…The demon reveals the girl who was chosen will die. TWIST. Didn’t see that coming – admittedly this film is so stupid I didn’t see anything coming. Why? Why let one girl live? Why is this demon – this figure of total and destructive evil – teaching the people a lesson about self-sacrifice and never being willing to sacrifice an innocent? Is the demon making an important point? WHAT IS GOING ON!? Well, the mistakes of Heretic are being repeated, but this is a point for the cognoscenti…

The original gave a gorgeous visual commentary on the human spirit remaining resilient in the face of evil as the absolute negation of ‘what is’; it ends with a broken man finding his faith and his redemption in a Christ-like act of self-sacrifice (Fr Karras – the junior exorcist – takes the demon into himself and commits suicide). There is, in this final act, a moving and absolute statement on the indomitability of creation (and humanity as the pinnacle of creation) as that which God has willed into being and continues to will ‘to be’. We are here! We are loved! We are to be redeemed! We cannot be seduced by the lie that decay and dissolution and destruction and nothingness is our ultimate destiny. Believer has people stumbling by accident to a conclusion that says nothing about God, or the devil, or heaven, or hell, or faith, or doubt, or family, OR GOOD AND EVIL, or anything serious.

I despise this film. I pray to God the other two films in the proposed trilogy do not get made. They probably will…maybe that’s not the end of the world. Maybe the inevitable sequels will, in the very fact of their being filmed and released, be a better exposition of the reality of banal and destructive evil, which seeks to find the beauty of ‘what is’ and tarnish it, than their actual stories. Maybe…

Star rating? At the sight of this film the stars themselves hid…

Article

Culture

Digital

Identity

Music

5 December 2024

4 min read

What Spotify Wrapped really tells us about ourselves

We listen, therefore we are.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Spotify.

Since 2016, Spotify has offered its users an annual feature that gathers up and presents us with the details of our own usage, allowing us to look back over the year through the specific lens of our listening habits. While this may initially sound more than a little dull, it’s actually quite the piece of marketing genius. It’s the story of our 2024, as narrated by Spotify. The state of our souls, as outed by our devotion to Taylor Swift.

Every year, ‘Spotify Wrapped’ becomes more and more of a social ritual.

In fact, this year, people were actively waiting on it to happen, checking their app daily, longing for Spotify HQ to announce its 2024 arrival. News outlets were writing pieces on how to best engage with it – there were actual bets being placed on when the feature might drop. How crazy is that? Spotify Wrapped has become as synonymous with this time of year as advent calendars and getting Christmas decorations out of the attic.

Bravo, Spotify. I hope whoever thought the whole thing up has enjoyed one heck of a promotion.

Now, I’m very aware that this may be somewhat of a storm in a teacup, the teacup being Gen. Z. But it is a storm, nonetheless. And I think our ever-growing obsession with it has a lot to teach us about.. well… us.

Because what’s even more interesting is that these deeply personal insights Spotify are offering us, initially manufactured for our eyes only, are being plastered on social media. Spotify Wrapped has become a kind of soft-launch of our own brand, a low-stakes way of putting ourselves out there. Over the past days, thousands upon thousands of people have taken the data provided by Spotify and shared it with the world, sort of as a means through which they are sharing themselves with the world. Their top artists, the songs they’ve had on repeat, the number of minutes they’ve spent in the company of their favourite albums and podcasts - their listening habits have been served to us on a lime-green plate.

(I say ‘their’, not because I’m immune to the craving but more because my own data is too strewn with Taylor Swift and The Smiths for it to ever be something I’m eager to share with the masses).

And, I guess I have a simple question: why?

Why are we doing this? My instinct is telling me that the answer is an incredibly simple, albeit salient, one. My hunch is simply that we want to be known.

I think it’s utter genius wrapped in a guise of triviality. It underhandedly nudges us to acknowledge that we want to belong.

We have a nagging need to show people who we are, in the hopes that we’ll be repaid with acceptance. Approval, even. Admiration, if we’re really lucky.

It’s a symptom of what some (perhaps most notable, Charles Taylor) have labelled ‘expressive individualism’. We live in a cultural moment that tells us that we are tasked with discovering and defining who we are, it’s down to us. It’s the responsibility of each individual to build themselves up, from the inside out. And then we get to show the world what we have crafted – ourselves, made in our own image.

We get to be the masterpiece and the master, the creator and the created, the poet and the poem.

It sounds wonderfully freeing, doesn’t it? There’s just one problem, no person can actually bear the weight of such responsibility. It’s crippling.

And so, if, once a year, we can outsource this monumental task to a Swedish streaming platform – why wouldn’t we? For a brief moment, we can put our existential-crisis-in-waiting on hold, we can put our feet up, sigh with relief, and simply declare - I listen, therefore I am.

For one day only, we can let our music tastes define us, we can leave it to our streaming habits to imbue our lives with meaning.

We can rest.

I’m in no way belittling this. On the contrary, I appreciate it. I think that Spotify Wrapped shows us far more about each other (and ourselves) than how much Oasis we listened to this summer. I’m really grateful that it allows us to drop our façade for a moment, reminding us how much we long to know and be known, see and be seen, love and be loved. I think it’s utter genius wrapped in a guise of triviality. It underhandedly nudges us to acknowledge that we want to belong. And so, I’m not convinced it’s ‘individualistic’ behaviour at all - how about we call it a symptom of ‘expressive want-to-belong-ism’, instead?

Spotify Wrapped’s success is wild. It is a cultural moment, and its underlying heart-cry is a particularly loud one. Even louder than the three-thousand minutes’ worth of Beyonce I blared this year. Apparently.

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