In exorcist movies, there is never much new under the black hole sun.
The one development in the genre over the last decade has been to see it merge, on occasion, with the haunted-house film — a comfortable enough mashup, though it’s kind of like pairing two pop stars to create a hit single out of their combined demos.
If the head-spinning success of “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” (2005), and the resurgence of the exorcist film that it inspired, proved anything, it’s that the tropes of demonic possession — the young victims tied to their beds, their faces gray-blue and mottled with sores; the tauntingly blasphemous devil voice that sounds like Darth Vader as the announcer at a strip club; the priests brandishing their tiny crosses and spewing their “Cast thee out!” liturgical spells — have become the horror equivalent of classic rock.
They’re the golden oldies that never change,
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