Is it time for the world of The Exorcist to get good again? Deadline reports that Mike Flanagan—he of The Fall of the House of Usher and, perhaps more relevantly here, Midnight Mass—is in talks to direct the next film in the current Exorcist trilogy.
In the words of resident Exorcist and Mike Flanagan expert Leah Schnelbach, “he’s so good at ‘furious former catholic’ he might be too right for this gig?”
Flanagan is, we must note, a very busy man; one of the plentiful things on his plate is an adaptation of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. He is also adapting King’s “The Life of Chuck” into a film with a very good cast.
But one assumes that Blumhouse and Universal’s Exorcist sequel might be too tempting for Flanagan to pass up. (If you have seen Midnight Mass, you get it.) The last film in the series, The Exorcist: Believer, was directed by David Gordon Green and released last fall, and was not generally beloved. Green then left the franchise.
The second film in the trilogy is, or was, titled The Exorcist: Deceiver.
The entire Exorcist Cinematic Universe is an epic tale full of ups (the William Friedkin-directed original film) and downs (Renny Harlin?), some of which Schnelbach gets into in their review of The Exorcist: Believer. Given that that piece is titled “The Exorcist: Believer Will Make You Doubt Your Faith in Movies,” it seems clear that this series is presently at a point from which it can only go up. And Flanagan might just take it into the stratosphere.
