Same Year, Same Demon, Very Different Catering Budgets
Here at Mockbusters.tv we have a running bit — and we want to be crystal clear that it is a bit — in which we pretend the scrappy, low-budget films came first and the glossy studio versions are the ones doing the copying. It's a joke. A house style. A wink. Nobody in our editorial office actually believes Hollywood accountants are studying direct-to-VOD horror for material. But every so often the universe hands us a case so perfectly aligned that the bit writes itself, and The Exorcists versus The Exorcist: Believer is exhibit A.
Both arrived in 2023. Both are about a child who is, in the clinical parlance, "not quite a child anymore." Both involve a desperate parent recruiting outside help because doctors and standard-issue faith have failed. And both end with the unsettling suggestion that whatever's been dealt with is only the opening act for something much bigger. According to our own catalog data, that's where the overlap in premise ends and the delightful divergence in execution begins.
The "Original": Three Exorcists, One Overworked Demon
Jose Prendes' The Exorcists solves its central problem — a possessed child and an uncertain method — by refusing to pick a lane. Instead of one exorcist doing the traditional Latin-and-holy-water routine, the film's grieving father brings in three, each with a different technique and, presumably, a different opinion about how the other two are doing it wrong. Three methods, three egos, one demon: it's a setup that sounds almost like a workplace comedy that wandered into a horror film by mistake, and that tonal tightrope — played, per the catalog description, "with a straight face" — is exactly the kind of commitment we love to celebrate. Low budgets force filmmakers to get clever with what they've got, and stacking three exorcists into one haunted bedroom is the kind of clever that a bigger check might have quietly talked someone out of.
