This 2004 Horror Prequel Gave Us the Origin for One of the Scariest Movies Ever Made – SYFY

After hitting theaters in late 1973, The Exorcist became a full-blown cultural phenomenon, which meant that sequels set in the same universe were bound to follow eventually. A direct sequel, Exorcist II: The Heretic, landed four years later, while a loosely connected follow-up, The Exorcist III, emerged in 1990.

But it wasn’t until three decades after the original film that audiences got a look at a prequel which set the stage for The Exorcist‘s final demonic confrontation. Released in the summer of 2004, Exorcist: The Beginning (now streaming on SYFY) offered an earlier tale of possession set in the same world, and gave us an origin story for one of the scariest movies ever made.

How The Beginning set up The Exorcist

Early in The Exorcist film, Father Lankester Merrin (Max von Sydow) is on an archeological dig in the Middle East, when he discovers a statue of the demon Pazuzu. There’s a sense from the beginning that there’s a history between this particular demon and this particular priest, something that will be important later in the film, when Merrin arrives in Georgetown to perform an exorcism on young Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair), who seems to be possessed by a version of the same demon Merrin encountered earlier.

With Exorcist: The Beginning, filmmakers hoped to craft an origin story for both Merrin (Stellan Skarsgård) as an exorcist and his personal relationship with the demonic entity known as Pazuzu. To do that, screenwriters William Wisher, Caleb Carr, and later Alexi Hawley crafted a story built around an archeological dig in British-occupied Kenya in the late 1940s. The film picks up with Merrin, a priest who turned away from God after witnessing the atrocities of the Nazi regime in Europe firsthand, working as an archeologist in Cairo, before he’s hired by an antiquities collector to head to Kenya and bring back a rumored demonic artifact from a dig there.

At the dig, Merrin and his colleagues unearth what appears to be an intact, deliberately buried Byzantine church, an anachronism for the region since Christianity didn’t arrive there until after the era from which the church dates. Based on various design quirks in the church, including several angel statues with spears pointing down as though deliberately guarding something, Merrin deduces that the church was built to seal up something demonic beneath it, and eventually finds a cave featuring demonic figures and an area apparently used for human sacrifices. 

It’s clear that something very evil is lurking beneath the cave, and that Merrin and company are in danger, particularly when the locals start suffering from strange physical and psychological ailments seemingly related to the dig. If he has any hope of repelling the evil, Merrin must work to rediscover his faith, step up for the first time as an exorcist, and defeat the demonic presence beneath the church. 

Set nearly 25 years before the first film, The Beginning establishes both how hard Merrin has to fight to regain his faith and what it means for him to take on a demon like Pazuzu. It’s evil on a Biblical scale, bigger even than what he faces in The Exorcist, and while the prequel film draws few direct lines to the 1973 classic other than Merrin’s character, it’s still a must-see for Exorcist completists looking for a little more color in Merrin’s character.

Exorcist: The Beginning is now streaming on SYFY.

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