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…

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26 May 2025

4 min read

Why we should mourn the death of the semi-colon

In our busy, frenetic lives, we need that small pause more than ever.

Paul Bradbury

Paul is a pioneer minister, writer and researcher based in Poole, Dorset.

A woman stands across a busy roads, looking up from her phone in a sad way.

Su San Lee on Unsplash.

In the morning news; a headline about the decline of a species. Thankfully not a rare rhino or butterfly this time. It’s a punctuation mark. The semi-colon is an increasingly endangered creature. According to recent research it has declined in use by 50 per cent in the past two decades. This on top of a 70 per cent slide in usage between 1800 and 2000. Further research suggests that 67 per cent of students rarely use it and over 50 per cent wouldn’t know how to anyway.

I’m kind of indifferent on the merits or otherwise of the semi-colon. But I at least appreciate the option. So, its value feels worth defending. Who knows what unintended consequences in the ecology of language might occur if we lost it all together?

The semi-colon was invented in the 15th century by a scholar and printer Aldus Pius Manutius the Elder (whose name might have benefited from a semicolon itself). A hybrid between a comma and a colon, the semi-colon invites a pause; it’s a moment to breathe. And it opens enough space to reflect on what might be being said between what went before and what comes after. It signals a kind of meaning in the gap. It creates a hint of resonance beyond the plain meaning of the words of a sentence.

Despite its enthusiastic use by the likes of no less than Jane Austen and Charles Dickens it has certainly come in for some stick over the years. Kurt Vonnegut famously said of semi-colons ‘all they do is show you’ve been to college.’ Who knew two marks on a page could signal such elitism? The semi-colon says, ‘you're trying too hard’. Or it might just say, ‘why did you do that?’, since so many people fail to understand what it represents. Novelist John Irvine reckoned readers ‘think the author has killed a fruit fly directly above a comma’.

So what is killing off the semi-colon? Well, if the statistics above are to be believed it could be as simple as a decreasing understanding on how to use it. Though of course there are feedback loops here. We learn grammar and punctuation as much by reading as by being taught. Others point the finger at the breathless world of social media. As more and more of our communication is constrained by space and time, the semi-colon’s quiet request for a pause for consideration is being largely ignored.

We need semi-colons if our lives are to be more than just an incessant flow of connected moments .

If this is the case then the semi-colon is another species within a kind of mass extinction which is the result of the great acceleration of our age, alongside the coffee break, lunch break, walk round the block and long stare out of the window. These are simply things that we don’t have time for anymore; we wonder if they had any value in the first place. The semi-colon is largely being replaced by the dash. Which is pretty ironic when you think about it.

Perhaps concern over the loss of this little mark is in an awareness that it’s a kind of canary in the gold mine of our culture of acceleration. The loss of the semi-colon is a sign of the loss of something far more significant: the rhythms and cadences of our lives that afford pause, reflection; that open up the kind of spaces where creativity; meaning; imagination; spirituality happen.

The semi-colon reminds me, strangely, of the Hebrew psalms. The monastic tradition includes regular communal singing (or saying) of the psalms. Typically, these poems, which formed such a key part of Hebrew worship, work on the basis of what is known as parallelism. Essentially each thought in a psalm is composed as a sentence in two lines. The two halves of these sentences are parallel, in the sense that they both make statements about the same thing. Sometimes these statements say the same thing differently. Sometimes one half of the sentence builds on another. There are endless creative ways in which the psalmists use this simple device.

When psalms are used in prayer or worship parallelism is often observed by introducing a pause at the end of the first half of the sentence. It's an odd tradition if you are not used to it. An established monastic community naturally feels the length of pause together. Visitors to a service in a monastery often end up coming in early.

Yet, with time you begin to realise these pauses are a wonderful thing. The pauses create a rhythm and time signature that invites reflection. The pause says ‘take your time, there’s a lot of meaning here in all these similes and metaphors, what might they mean to you?’ Perhaps even ‘what, in this moment to breathe, might God be saying to you?’

There’s a feeling for so many of us that life is starting to feel a bit like the final chapter of James Joyces’ Ulysses: devoid of punctuation. We need semi-colons if our lives are to be more than just an incessant flow of connected moments. And we need to learn how to use them. We need practices that make space for the undervalued attributes of reflection, daydreaming, prayer. In that sense saying the psalms may be a practice worth giving time to.

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