Exorcist: The Beginning
| Exorcist: The Beginning | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Renny Harlin |
| Produced by | James G. Robinson |
| Screenplay by | Alexi Hawley |
| Story by | |
| Based on | Characters by William Peter Blatty |
| Starring | |
| Music by | Trevor Rabin |
| Cinematography | Vittorio Storaro |
| Edited by |
Mark Goldblatt Todd E. Miller |
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Production
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| Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
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Release date
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Running time
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114 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $50 million |
| Box office | $78 million |
Exorcist: The Beginning is a 2004 American horror film and the prequel to the 1973 film The Exorcist. It is the fourth installment of The Exorcist series. It was adapted by William Wisher Jr., Caleb Carr, and Alexi Hawley and was directed by Renny Harlin. The film stars Stellan Skarsgård, Izabella Scorupco, James D'Arcy, Ben Cross, Ralph Brown, and Alan Ford.
Exorcist: The Beginning was retooled from Paul Schrader's already completed Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, which Morgan Creek Productions executives feared would be unsuccessful. Reviews for Harlin's film were overwhelmingly negative, and it was not a financial success. Schrader was subsequently allowed to release his version of Dominion, which was somewhat better reviewed than Harlin's film but still earned mostly negative reviews.
The film opens with a bloodied and terrified priest slowly making his way across an ancient battlefield full of the bodies of thousands of dead soldiers. There are many crows and hyenas roving around the bodies. The priest reaches the dead body of another priest and tries take a small demon idol of the head of Pazuzu from his hand, but, suddenly, the dead priest briefly comes back to life and stops the living priest from taking it. The camera pulls back to reveal that the entire valley is littered with dead soldiers, many have been crucified upside down. The film then cuts to Cairo, Egypt in 1949, where the young Father Lankester Merrin (played by Skarsgård, who played the same part in Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist) has taken a sabbatical from the Church and devoted himself to history and archaeology as he struggles with his shattered faith. He is haunted especially by an incident in a small village in the occupied Netherlands during World War II, where he served as parish priest: near the end of the war, a sadistic Nazi SS commander, in retaliation for the murder of a German trooper, forces Merrin to participate in arbitrary executions in order to save a full village from slaughter.
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Wikipedia