If you haven’t yet come around to FOX’s batsh*t bonkers new horror series The Exorcist, you need to. At a panel today at New York Comic Con, Executive Producer and Showrunner Jeremy Slater along with stars Geena Davis and Brianne Howey discussed the intense nature of the new show and what fans can expect for the rest of the season.
“We have some sick and twisted writers,” says Slater of the insane ideas they’ve come up with so far. With an incredible final scene capping off the second episode, it showed the direction that the series is headed. “The first season is designed to be the story of the possession of the Rance family,” said Slater. “By the end of the season, you’re going to get a beginning, a middle, and an end to the story of what’s happening to Casey Rance.”
Fans of the original film will be pleasantly surprised with the way the series is paying serious homage to its source material. In episode one, the infamous vomit scene comes back up (so to speak). But this time, the show is inviting some early speculation as to the cause of the ‘refunded material’. “Did you notice that we were having green soup for dinner?” says Davis. Howey adds that “A lot of the direction that everyone was chiming in with was ‘let’s just play it like she’s bi-polar’ so we don’t really know what’s going on.”
Episode three continues paying homage to the original movie too. “In the first two episodes, the demon inside Casey is playing possum. It’s trying not to get caught,” says Slater. “And episode three is when we’re going to see that demon starting to manifest for the first time.”
Things are just starting to warm up in The Exorcist series, with a lot still to reveal. By the sounds of things, the Rance’s are in for a bumpy ride. Already starting with a family in crisis, with the father and husband, Henry (played by Ferris Bueller’s Day Off star Alan Ruck) dealing with a brain injury following an accident, and daughter Kat’s (Brianne Howey) car accident, the Rance family are having a rough time of it. “Evil may have set its sights on this family for a very long time,” says Slater. “Some of these accidents may not necessarily be accidents.”
The series isn’t going to be holding back on getting through the story either. “Starting with this episode [three], the show is accelerating in a big way,” says Slater. “We have a lot of story to get through, so we want to be really aggressive with our twists and turns. Episode five… is basically 43 minutes of real-time exorcism. It’s scary as hell.”
It will be interesting to see how the writers and producers stay true to the original while ramping up the scares to audiences more used to the insanity of shows like American Horror Story. The exorcism episode, which airs on FOX on Oct 21, could really make or break the series. However, so far, things are looking positive — or not if you’re a member of the Rance family.