“The Exorcist” Being Remade, But For Television

In the world of horror movies, there is William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, and then there is everything else. Possibly the most disturbing horror film ever made, it still stands as the only movie of its kind to break out of the usual horror movie niche and become a genuine blockbuster. (adjusted for 2012 dollars, would have made $875 million domestically today) Even a horror buff like me can’t watch it in a dark room alone.  I know there are certain people out there that the movie doesn’t scare, but I usually find them to be the kind of people who don’t understand the difference between being “startled” and being “frightened.” The Exorcist get under your skin and stays there forever; it truly frightens.

So in the creatively bankrupt past decade in Hollywood (for horror films anyway) the one classic film that has remained untouched has remained The Exorcist. Until now. But it looks like it won’t be coming back to the big screen, but to television instead. According to the Vulture,  Sean Durkin, director of the indie movie Martha Marcy May Marlene, is developing The Exorcist into a ten-episode TV series with Roy Lee, the executive producer of The Ring. It seems Durkin’s version of The Exorcist follows the events leading up to a demonic possession and especially the after-effects of how the MacNeil family copes with it.

Since this is only being shopped as a ten episode series, it should be obvious this will end up on cable and not a network. While I usually loathe remakes, especially horror remakes, I see this is as less a shitty cash in from a studio who happens to own a property, and rather a new interpretation of a classic novel in a different medium. Not only can the original film never be topped as another film, no studio would dare make a mainstream film as scandalous and blasphemous as the original again, especially in our current cultural climate. This isn’t the free wheeling, experimental 70’s anymore; the MPAA has become considerably more conservative than they were forty years ago. There is no way that the classic movie would get anything but an NC-17 these days. Meanwhile, most HBO fare is much racier than your average Hollywood movie….the average episode of True Blood would get an NC-17 from the MPAA if it was a movie. Cable has become the new home of “racy” material, in the way movie theaters were in the past.

The Exorcist is currently being shopped around to various networks, and is said to have a lot of interested parties chomping at the bit. I’d guess we might have this new version premiere next year, the 40th Anniversary of the original film.