The ebullient acclaim levelled at one-time indie prince David Gordon Green’s Halloween reboot can, for me, a firm naysayer, be only explained by the overwhelmingly sorry state of the franchise before that point, a vague amount of something better than a big heap of nothing. It was a dumb, disjointed and tonally awkward misfire, reheating similar beats from 1998’s far superior Halloween H20 and kicked off a junky yet laughably pretentious new trilogy, which only offered brief moments of interest during its staggeringly violent second chapter.
But its major commercial success elevated Green as some sort of new safe hands horror auteur, one who can be trusted with resurrecting other iconic franchises, a grand and bizarrely undeserved new career swerve. The scouring of old properties to relaunch in the wake of other legacy sequel successes led greedy execs to inevitably land on The Exorcist, bullishly hoping to break a curse that led to two sequels, two prequels and one TV show, all almost universally loathed, and attached Green as its commander, in charge of not just one movie but three.
