With the air cooling and the leaves falling from their branches, I wanted to start my October off with a bang. As a long-time fan of horror movies, I was excited to enter the theater and get the Halloween ball rolling with a scary movie. The Exorcist (1973) is one of my favorite horror movies of all time and I thought that seeing the sequel, The Exorcist: Believer, would be a great way to start off the season. While I didn’t expect the movie to reach the heights the original did, I certainly didn’t think The Exorcist: Believer would crash and burn so spectacularly.

Coming exactly 50 years late to the party on October 6^th of this year, this soft reboot-style sequel to one of the most influential horror movies ever created was doomed to fail. Being written and directed by David Gordon Green—aka the J.J. Abrams of horror movies—only exasperated that fact. However, what The Exorcist: Believer ultimately suffers from is an overreliance on its predecessor’s story.

The movie takes place in modern day Georgia and was filmed in Savannah and Atlanta. The plot focuses on Victor (Leslie Odom Jr.), a single dad whose wife died, and his daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett), who obsesses over contacting her mother from beyond the grave. These attempts to speak with her spirit give way to Angela and her friend Katherine (Olivia O’Neill) being dragged into hell and going missing for three days.

The best part of this movie is Jewett and O’Neill’s performances. Their characters are by far the most grounded, and their possession scenes are some of the best scenes in the movie. Unfortunately, when they reappear, any thread of originality is pulled from the fabric of the script. The girls are subjected to extensive and intrusive medical procedures that don’t even come close to the impact of the original The Exorcist’s spinal tap scene. In the original The Exorcist, we spend a substantial amount of time watching Chris McNeil (Ellen Burstyn) utilize every medical procedure available to help her daughter, Regan (Linda Blair). It is horrific because even though Regan has undergone every possible scientific treatment, she still cannot be cured. In The Exorcist: Believer, they attempt to condense this plot point into one five-minute montage and expect us to feel the same impact. Even when borrowing directly from its predecessor, it fails to affect the audience in the same way.

The Exorcist: Believer was so desperate to copy The Exorcist, it even features Burstyn as Chris McNeil for the first time since the original film. Burstyn negotiated to be paid over double her normal salary, which she plans to donate to charity. Thanks to the fortune NBCUniversal was willing to drop on her, Victor is able to visit and ask Chris about the exorcism process. Chris tells him she was never present for an exorcism because she was “not a member of their damn patriarchy.” Clearly, they struggled with how to incorporate her character in a tasteful manner.

The poor usage of Burstyn’s character begs the question: Why did they spend all that money on Burstyn only to squander it? That question could be extended to the entire movie. NBCUniversal paid a whopping $400 million to acquire The Exorcist intellectual property, and the first movie only grossed $57 million worldwide. Not exactly a strong start for the first installment in a new The Exorcist trilogy.

The Exorcist: Believer is the perfect example of what happens when a company relies on the intellectual property of a movie instead of investing resources into making it good. Green decided to chew up the plotline of The Exorcist, spit it out onto a piece of paper, and claim that it was a new script. While the odds were stacked against it, The Exorcist: Believer proved everyone wrong by being worse than we could’ve ever guessed, earning it a 2 out of 5 stars.