The Exorcist Reboot Writer Reveals Approach to Upcoming Film

Back in 2018, filmmaker David Gordon Green delivered audiences a new entry in the Halloween franchise, which served as a continuation of the original 1978 that also revived interest in the entire concept, which led to him moving forward on new takes on both Hellraiser and The Exorcist. In the case of the latter, Green enlisted Halloween Kills co-writer Scott Teems to help develop the story for a new Exorcist, with Teems recently detailing how he and the rest of the team behind the project aimed to capture the terror of the original movie. Teems’ latest film, Firestarter, hits Peacock and theaters on May 13th.

“It’s a different beast than Halloween because of the way it’s revered in a different way,” Teems detailed to ComicBook.com. “They both are massively successful and massively popular films, but there’s something about The Exorcist that, for whatever reason, people look at it a little more like it’s more of a ‘film’ as opposed to a ‘movie,’ or however you might want to say it. I feel more pressure in The Exorcist, but I also just, end of the day, we all vowed not to tell this story unless we could tell it in a way that we felt honored.”

He continued, “So we were breaking the story and trying to figure it all out well before there was any deal. Before we even tried to make a deal or to figure out the rights and all that, we wanted to be sure we could figure out a story. So that was our early COVID project, is every Friday morning during the beginning of COVID in early 2020 we would meet over Zoom, me and David and Danny [McBride], Jason Blum, and we would pitch ideas and we would bounce ideas around and I’d go off and write and David would go off and write and we’d come back together and pitch ideas and spent a couple of months doing that. And then we got this story we were excited about and presented it. So it wasn’t until we were really sure … We didn’t want to just do it to do it. We knew it had to be something we all believed in. And we did, we found it.”

While the original The Exorcist earned a number of sequels, it was mostly recently adapted in the form of a TV series that ran for two seasons.

The new Firestarter is described, “For more than a decade, parents Andy (Zac Efron; Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile; The Greatest Showman) and Vicky (Sydney Lemmon; Fear the Walking Dead, Succession) have been on the run, desperate to hide their daughter Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong; American Horror Story: Double Feature, The Tomorrow War) from a shadowy federal agency that wants to harness her unprecedented gift for creating fire into a weapon of mass destruction. Andy has taught Charlie how to defuse her power, which is triggered by anger or pain. But as Charlie turns 11, the fire becomes harder and harder to control. After an incident reveals the family’s location, a mysterious operative (Michael Greyeyes; Wild Indian, Rutherford Falls) is deployed to hunt down the family and seize Charlie once and for all. Charlie has other plans.”

Stay tuned for details on the new The Exorcist. Firestarter hits Peacock and theaters on May 13th.

Are you looking forward to the new The Exorcist? Let us know in the comments below or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things horror and Star Wars!