Five decades have passed, and we still can’t look at a 12-year-old girl without thinking of her head possibly spinning around and green vomit ejecting from her mouth. Of course, not every 12-year-old girl is straight out of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, but that certainly doesn’t mean we’re any less horrified. Flash forward to 2023, and horror fanatics and Exorcist die-hards are gearing up for The Exorcist: Believer — the spine-tingling direct sequel to the ‘73 original crafted by Blumhouse and scheduled to drop in early October.
One of the biggest questions surrounding the upcoming sequel is in regards to its jaw-dropping runtime — a revelation which has left plenty of fans surprised. As far as the OG piece of cinema is concerned, The Exorcist featured a stretched runtime of 2 hours and 2 minutes — which was absolutely crawling with unforgettable moments and eerie sequences that have yet to leave our minds even decades later.
What is the runtime for The Exorcist: Believer?
Unlike Friedkin’s horrific original, The Exorcist: Believer features a far more shocking runtime — mainly for the fact that the horror movie will be significantly shorter than initially expected. As it turns out, the 2023 sequel features a runtime of 1 hour and 51 minutes, as confirmed by Blumhouse earlier this week.
As shocking as the runtime might be, one could argue that this decision could prove to work out in the sequel’s favor — especially when you consider that a large portion of folks rarely want to pay attention for too long during a movie. In fact, plenty of moviegoers had originally complained about Oppenheimer’s runtime — which was a staggering 3 hours long.
Luckily, most horror movies stick to a similar formula and manage to trim the unnecessary fat of a film and keep it below a certain runtime. All of this is not to say that a shorter runtime means fewer bone-chilling moments will happen in the first chapter of David Gordon Green’s trilogy, but it’s obvious a fair amount of deleted scenes will likely be released at a later point due to being cut from the actual project.
The Exorcist: Believer is set to haunt theaters starting Oct. 6.