The Exorcist in the Age of AI: When Seeing Would No Longer Settle Belief
Would You Believe Regan? The Exorcist After the Smartphone
Who Would Believe a Possessed Child?
Imagine Chris MacNeil recording her daughter’s bedroom because she needs someone to understand what happens there. The camera catches a noise, a movement and a voice she cannot reconcile with the child she knows. She sends the recording to someone she trusts. A copy reaches a stranger. By morning, people who have never met Regan are arguing about what she is.
If The Exorcist happened today, Regan would probably find believers quickly. Finding someone who could help her without exploiting, dismissing or misidentifying her experience would be harder. A modern version would turn the film’s struggle over faith into a struggle over who gets to interpret a child’s distress, and what that authority allows them to do.
Chris Would Search Before She Found a Priest
The first modern change would happen before any spectacular event. Chris would have a search history.
She might begin with ordinary questions about sleep, changes in behaviour and whether something at home or school was upsetting her daughter. As her concern grew, the wording could become more urgent. She would look for other families whose descriptions resembled hers, hoping that somebody had already reached an answer.
That search could help. Parents can find useful information, discover services and learn how to describe a problem more clearly. A modern retelling that made every screen an instrument of evil would miss the practical reasons a frightened person reaches for one.
The difficulty would be sorting useful similarities from superficial ones. Two children might display something that looks alike in a short recording while experiencing very different problems. A moving personal account could offer recognition without providing a reliable explanation for Regan.
Chris’s vulnerability would lie in the gap between those things. Someone telling her that they understood might feel more helpful than someone explaining why they still needed information. One gives her a story she can hold. The other asks her to endure uncertainty while her daughter suffers.
The original medical scenes already make that endurance painful. Chris seeks professional help, yet the investigations do not deliver the relief she needs. A contemporary version could preserve her frustration without suggesting that responsible medicine owes every family an instant answer.
Her search would become most dangerous when certainty started to feel like evidence of competence.
The First Video Would Change the Family’s Problem
Recording Regan would not automatically make Chris an exploitative parent. A private recording could be an attempt to show a clinician something difficult to describe or absent during an appointment. The ethical turning point would come when documentation became public display.
Suppose the first clip showed only a small part of an episode. Viewers would not know what happened beforehand, what treatment had already been sought or whether the sound had been altered. They would nevertheless have enough material to attach explanations.
One audience might see possession. Another might suspect performance. Others could accuse Chris of harming her daughter or condemn the strangers making those accusations. Each interpretation could produce a new version of the same footage, with its own caption and selected details.
For Chris, correcting one false claim would risk spreading the original image further. Remaining silent could be interpreted as evasion. Explaining Regan’s medical history might answer a question while exposing information her daughter could never make private again.
This would give the screenplay a conflict more difficult than simply turning off a phone. Chris could stop contributing without stopping circulation. She might have to choose between challenging a public accusation and protecting the details needed to challenge it.
Regan would meanwhile remain in the bedroom. The arguments outside it would not tell her mother whether she had eaten, whether she was comfortable or whether the next person arriving could be trusted.
A Camera Could Record the Impossible Without Settling It
Would clear footage solve the question of possession? Within a modern horror story, it could make the question more complicated.
A recording of something extraordinary would require examination. Who made it? Was the original available? Had it been edited? Could independent witnesses corroborate what it appeared to show? Those questions would be reasonable even if the audience knew that the fictional event was real.
The possibility of manipulated media creates a useful dramatic distinction between what happened and what a distant viewer can establish. Calling a clip fake would not prove it false. Calling it authentic would not establish the cause of everything visible in it.
A careful screenplay would avoid pretending that artificial intelligence makes all evidence worthless. Corroboration would still matter. So would direct observation, reliable records and examination by people with relevant expertise. A story in which no fact could ever be checked would soon lose its tension because nothing could change anyone’s understanding.
Instead, Chris could face a narrower frustration. The evidence that convinced a person in the room might fail to convince someone encountering a compressed, captioned copy. The public argument could remain fixed while the private investigation advanced.
That would produce two different timelines. Inside the house, people would make decisions based on what they had learned. Online, an earlier version of events might continue to circulate as if nothing had changed.
For a filmmaker, the suspense would come from that mismatch. Help could arrive at the door while the internet was still demanding proof of the wrong thing.
Father Karras Would Disappoint Both Sides
Father Damien Karras is especially valuable to this reimagining because he resists a simple division between science and religion. He is a Catholic priest and a psychiatrist, struggling with faith and guilt over his mother.
His hesitation belongs to the original story. A present-day adaptation would not need to invent a sceptical priest to make the film seem more sophisticated. It would need to preserve a character whose responsibilities make instant certainty difficult.
Online, that position could satisfy almost nobody. Those convinced of possession might resent his caution. Those certain it was impossible might condemn his willingness to investigate. An edited extract from one conversation could make him appear to endorse a conclusion he had not reached.
The best modern Karras would understand that he owed Regan more than a public position. He could take Chris seriously without agreeing with every explanation she offered. He could examine a claim without promising to validate it.
That distinction would shape his conversations with the child. Listening would mean leaving room for something other than the answer adults expected. It would also mean recognising that a distressed person’s account deserves attention even when its cause remains uncertain.
A less thoughtful adaptation might give Karras a podcast and a follower count. A stronger one would make him someone whose refusal to perform certainty gradually earns the family’s trust. His authority would come from staying with the problem when neither easy reassurance nor confident dismissal was adequate.
The Church Would Not Simply Authorise a Livestream
It would be easy to write a modern exorcist as a celebrity arriving with a production team. It would also flatten the distinction between institutional religious practice and a fictional entrepreneur using religious language.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ published guidance calls for medical, psychological and psychiatric examination before referral for a final determination about alleged possession. It also stresses confidentiality and warns against sensationalism. These are statements of Church practice and belief, not scientific verification of demons.
For this imagined story, those principles create useful friction. A responsible religious figure might be the person most firmly opposing publicity. Chris could discover that the priest willing to proceed cautiously was less immediately reassuring than an outsider promising to act that night.
The outsider need not be secretly cynical. Someone sincerely convinced that they had a special calling could still overestimate their competence, reject criticism and place Regan at risk. The character would be more unsettling if confidence and goodwill were present alongside poor judgement.
Chris would then face a practical test of trust: who accepted limits on their own authority? Who welcomed scrutiny? Who needed the family to make an immediate commitment before another opinion could be heard?
Such questions would keep the religious conflict grounded in behaviour. The audience would not have to share a character’s beliefs to recognise the difference between careful assistance and a demand for control.
The Demon Would Find an Audience Already Divided
Within the film’s supernatural premise, the possessing force does more than frighten people. It targets emotional weaknesses. Karras’s grief makes the confrontation personal; the struggle reaches into his relationship with his mother.
A contemporary version could extend that cruelty into the information surrounding the family. Private messages, old photographs and public accusations could become material for humiliation. The demon would not need to become a technical genius for the story to explore the damage caused by intimate knowledge used without mercy.
The interesting possibility is that other people would do some of its work voluntarily. An amateur investigator might publish a supposed revelation. A critic could repeat it while condemning it. A supporter could expose another private detail in an attempt to defend Chris.
No single participant would need to intend the final harm. Each could believe that their contribution was justified by curiosity, concern or the need to correct someone else.
That would distinguish this imagined antagonist from one that merely possesses devices. Its advantage would be understanding the people holding them. It could provoke actions that felt righteous to those performing them while leaving the family more isolated.
The comparison with Hereditary’s manipulation of a grieving family is useful here. Both stories invite attention to vulnerability and the people who claim to understand it. This modern Exorcist could make the danger less organised: strangers with incompatible motives might still produce a shared catastrophe.
Chris’s Fame Would Bring Access and Suspicion
Chris is an actress. Keeping that detail would prevent the modern story from becoming a generic account of an anonymous family going viral.
Her public identity could help her reach people who might otherwise be difficult to contact. It could also make every decision appear strategic. An appeal for assistance might be interpreted as promotion. An effort to protect Regan’s privacy could be recast as reputation management.
A publicist would make a useful supporting character without needing to become a villain. Advising silence might protect a child from exposure. Drafting a statement might contain a damaging rumour. Yet the language of managing a story could become unbearable to a mother whose immediate concern was keeping her daughter safe.
Chris would also confront the limits of speaking for Regan. Parents routinely make decisions for children, especially during emergencies. That responsibility does not mean every intimate detail belongs to the parent to publish permanently.
The film could explore that tension through a modest decision. Chris might have a recording that would improve her own public standing but humiliate her daughter. Deleting it would not solve the possession. Refusing to release it could nevertheless mark a change in what she understood protection to require.
The choice would be stronger if the audience understood the cost. Chris would have to tolerate being misunderstood rather than purchase vindication with Regan’s privacy.
Believing a Child Is Different From Believing a Theory
The headline contains a trap. Asking who would believe a possessed child can make accepting possession sound equivalent to taking the child seriously. They are different decisions.
An adult can believe that a child is frightened, listen carefully to what she describes and seek help without accepting a supernatural explanation. Equally, someone can proclaim absolute belief in possession while ignoring what the child says she needs.
That distinction becomes essential when moving from cinema to actual safeguarding. The Metropolitan Police’s guidance identifies abuse linked to accusations of possession, including emotional abuse, physical harm and neglect. It describes how children can be isolated or denied appropriate care. The documented concern is what adults do to children under those beliefs.
This does not justify treating religious families as inherently dangerous. The relevant questions concern conduct: whether a child is safe, whether care is being provided and whether anyone is using a belief to excuse harm.
A modern Exorcist should understand the difference even while retaining its supernatural plot. A story can ask viewers to accept a demon in one fictional bedroom without presenting suspicion of possession as a useful real-world diagnosis.
The moral centre would be clearer if Regan’s distress remained important before its explanation was settled. In The Shining, the immediate need to protect Danny does not depend on solving every mystery of the Overlook. A modern Regan should be afforded the same urgency. Adults should not require agreement about the supernatural before recognising danger.
A Better Remake Would Let Regan Have an Ordinary Life
There is a creative risk in building all this machinery around her. The child could disappear beneath the competing interpretations, becoming a device through which adults discuss religion, technology and responsibility.
The film would need scenes that resisted that outcome. Before the crisis, Regan should have interests, annoyances and friendships that do not exist merely to foreshadow possession. A conversation with a friend could establish what she finds funny. An unfinished project could matter because she wants to finish it.
During the ordeal, such details would help Chris distinguish the daughter she knows from the public character being invented around her. The audience would have something specific to want restored beyond a normal-looking face and a quiet bedroom.
Regan should also be allowed complicated feelings about the people trying to save her. Gratitude would not prevent anger about being filmed. Love for her mother would not erase embarrassment over disclosures made without her understanding.
Those responses would give the aftermath dramatic weight. A successful intervention would begin another stage of care rather than settle every relationship. Chris might have acted from fear and still need to apologise. Other adults could have helped in one respect while causing damage in another.
This would keep the screenplay from confusing rescue with ownership. Regan’s survival would not give anyone an unlimited claim to tell her story.
Karras’s Ending Would Resist the Demand for Proof
The original climax ends with Merrin dead and Karras demanding that the demon enter him. After it does, Karras throws himself through the window and down the steps, freeing Regan at the cost of his life.
Within the film, the act completes his movement through doubt towards sacrifice. It is a fictional supernatural resolution, not a model for real-world intervention.
A contemporary retelling could preserve its emotional force while allowing the public account to remain disputed. People outside the house might never possess a complete record. They might argue over what Karras did, what motivated him and whether the surviving family had told the whole truth.
That uncertainty would test Chris again. Would she feel obliged to expose everything in order to defend him? Could she honour his help while withholding material that belonged to her daughter?
The story would become weaker if it ended with an upload that forced the entire world to agree. Such a conclusion would make universal recognition the final reward. The more demanding ending would allow the rescue to matter even when it could not be converted into an uncontested public verdict.
Karras’s achievement would remain with the person he helped. Other people’s refusal to understand it would not reverse her survival.
The Last Threat Would Be the Search Result
The final modern change would concern what Regan could leave behind.
Escaping the room would not necessarily mean escaping the images made inside it. Copies could outlast the account that first published them. Someone discovering the footage later could revive an argument that the family had spent years trying to leave.
This is where a contemporary Exorcist could find its most disturbing final scene without adding another supernatural attack. An older Regan might meet someone who recognises her for an experience she did not choose to share. She would have to decide whether to explain, deny recognition or walk away.
The scene would give the question of belief a different meaning. Regan would no longer be asking anyone to accept an extraordinary event. She would be asking to be encountered as a person whose life continued afterwards.
The strongest version could end more quietly still. Chris receives a request for the original recording. It offers money, a sympathetic account and the chance to correct the story. She closes the message and returns to something ordinary she is doing with her daughter.
No one outside the house would know about that decision. Regan would not have to thank her for it. For once, protecting the child would produce nothing for the audience to watch.
Sources
British Film Institute — The Exorcist: 50th Anniversary Programme Notes — Film credits, premise and critical context for faith and interpretation.
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops — Exorcism — The Church’s stated approach to assessment, confidentiality and avoiding sensationalism; religious guidance, not scientific evidence of possession.
Metropolitan Police — Child Abuse Linked to Faith or Belief — Safeguarding concerns where accusations of possession are used to justify harm or neglect.
Next Reads
Hereditary Explained: Paimon, the Cult, Charlie and the Ending — Another supernatural story in which family vulnerability gives outsiders access and power.
The Shining Explained: Jack Torrance, the Overlook Hotel and the Ending — How a child’s danger becomes clear before every supernatural question is resolved.
The Real Stories Behind 10 Of Horror’s Most Famous Films Are More Disturbing Than The Movies Suggest — A companion piece separating the inspirations behind horror films from the claims their fiction appears to confirm.
