Where my CM and MB Effort posts will be.
CM:
The Exorcist: New Trilogy note
Who is it?
So... instead of Pazuzu (and confirmed in interviews with David Gordon Green), we have another Mesopotamian demon, Lamashtu, who is known for menacing expectant mothers and kidnapping children to feed on their blood and chew on their bones. Given some of the demon's actions in the film, it makes a lot of sense.
- Lamashtu subjects the two girls to an agonizing possession with Katherine begging to be released because it was hurting her too much. She also causes Angela to write "help me" into her skin.
- Much like Pazuzu, she goes into some trolling antics like mocking Ann, a former nun, who was forced to have an abortion.
- When Chris MacNeil is contacted to help (she apparently conducted a lot of research into exorcisms later writing a book based on Regan's possession which caused a falling out between the two that lasted for fifty years), Lamashtu tries taunting her by claiming that her daughter was burning in Hell before grabbing a crucifix and gouging out Chris's eyes (which kind of made Chris's appearance in this film pointless but I digress). Angela's father Victor manages to rescue her before Lamashtu could finish her off.
- During the exorcism, Lamashtu offers the two families a Sadistic Choice: one girl lives, the other dies. They would have to choose which one. She reveals that Victor was actually trying to rescue his deceased wife over his daughter as a means of breaking him.
- Father Maddox, a priest who was denied the task of exorcising the two girls due to it being deemed dangerous, has a change of heart and arrives to stop Lamashtu... only for the demon to supernaturally twist his neck around until it snapped, killing him.
- As with any horror movie, when Katherine's father intervenes saying that he chose his daughter, Angela flatlines, and Katherine seems to be fine... at least until she finds herself in the same waterway from earlier in the film with Lamashtu smugly declaring that she chooses her and drags her to Hell. The choice was never based on who got to live but rather which girl they chose to sacrifice.
Freudian Excuse? Mitigating factors?
No indications of moral agency issues and is probably just as sadistic as Pazuzu is.
Is she bad enough?
So here is where it's pretty interesting: we have ourselves a case of Schrödinger's Canon where (allegedly) the events of Believer do not ignore or contradict the middle installments, while at the same time, this film is meant to be a direct sequel of the original classic. It gets wonky especially in regards to the Exorcist TV series where Chris is killed off there whereas in Believer, she is mutilated by Lamashtu. That, and we do have the example of a child's soul being dragged into Hell for eternal torture. So there's that.
MB: TBD
