One of the highlights of the 2016 television season was the series The Exorcist. Structured as a spiritual (pun intended) sequel of sorts to its namesake film, it followed two priests who helped a different family each season with their own cases of demonic possession. It was incredibly well done, and undeservedly canceled after two seasons. If you’re a fan of the film and haven’t seen the show, I highly recommend it.I bring the series up because, in its first season especially, it did a great job of loosely connecting itself to the classic 1973 scarefest. Now, David Gordon Green, the writer/director who brought us the Halloween continuation trilogy, has created a new, direct sequel to the original, entitled The Exorcist: Believer.Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) is a single father of middle school-aged Angela (Lidya Jewett). Angela never knew her mother and is desperate to find some connection to her. One afternoon, she and her friend Katherine (Olivia O’Neill) go into the woods by their school to attempt a ritual so Angela can speak to the spirit of her mother.Three days later, the girls are found in a barn. They have no memory of what happened, even believing they’ve only been gone a few hours. Not long after they’re cleared to go home from the hospital, the girls begin displaying signs of severe mental illness, stumping their doctors and scaring their parents.One of Victor’s neighbors, Ann (Ann Dowd), is a nurse who attended to Angela. She recognizes the symptoms from a book she read in college. It was written by Chris MacNeill (Ellen Burstyn), detailing her ordeal with her daughter’s possession back in 1973. Victor becomes convinced that this is what’s going on with the girls and seeks out Chris for help and advice.While Believer has its flaws and really didn’t wow me the way Halloween 2018 did, I still found it fascinating. Green and company found a way to tell a compelling story while kind of getting around simply repeating what came before.One thing the story does is give a better backstory to the main parent/protagonist. Odom has a lot to feed upon in crafting his character and who he is in this world. This is more than Burstyn was given in the original, where she was just a working actress, recently a single parent. Not that that was bad and/or harmed the film—it is a benchmark in horror, after all—but more time was given to fleshing out Father Karras, as he is more the main character of that story than Chris MacNeill.Speaking of Burstyn, she is one of Believer’s flaws…sort of. Unlike the return of Laurie Strode in Halloween 2018, bringing back Chris MacNeill doesn’t serve a whole lot to the story, at least not at the moment, since this is the first of a planned trilogy, Maybe she’ll be better utilized later on, but for now she feels simply like nostalgia than a significant character.On the subject of nostalgia, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the score. David Wingo and Amman Abbasi do a terrific job keeping the music pretty subtle. Yet, the first time they weave the great “Tubular Bells” into the their work, it gave me chills. I mean, I knew it would come up, but it’s at a perfect moment in the film.Another flaw is that Believer simply isn’t that scary. It’s traveling over fifty-year-old ground well-tread by all the exorcism films that came in the original’s wake. There are a few jump scares—one in particular that really got me, which is difficult to do—but for the most part Believer plays it safe, unlike how disturbingly far the original went.Still, I was entertained and pulled in enough to care about the outcome, the fates of these two young women, and that’s what’s important. So, I say give Believer a try, if for no other reason than to prove to the studio they can go ahead with the next entry.