Jenna Ortega was the guest host on Saturday Night Live this past weekend, and it was only fitting that the show would use the young scream queen – whose credits include Scream 2022, X, Studio 666, You, Insidious: Chapter 2, The Babysitter: Killer Queen, American Carnage, and the Addams Family series Wednesday – in a sketch that puts a comedic twist on a horror classic. For a sketch that spoofs the 1973 film The Exorcist (watch it HERE), Ortega stands in for Linda Blair as a possessed young girl who undergoes an unusual exorcism, courtesy of her neighbor. The sketch clip can be seen at the bottom of this article… but it’s geo-blocked, so you’ll have to be in the US or in a country that allows the use of a VPN to watch it.
The Exorcist aside, I’m not a fan of many exorcism movies. If they played out like this Saturday Night Live sketch, I’d find them to be more enjoyable.
Speaking of The Exorcist, director David Gordon Green recently wrapped production on a sequel to that classic. Green has already directed a trilogy of sequels in the Halloween franchise, and intends for this Exorcist movie to be the first in another trilogy of sequels that he will direct. He crafted the story for The Exorcist 2023 with Peter Sattler (Broken Diamonds), then wrote the screenplay with Danny McBride (who wrote all three of the new Halloweens with him) and their Halloween Kills co-writer Scott Teems. Story details are being kept under wraps.
Universal and Peacock paid an amount somewhere in the range of $400 million to acquire the rights to distribute this Exorcist trilogy. The first of the new sequels stars Leslie Odom Jr. (Hamilton) as a character who tracks down Chris MacNeil after his child becomes possessed, with original Exorcist star Ellen Burstyn reprising the role of Chris MacNeil. Also in the cast are Lidya Jewett (Nightbooks), Jennifer Nettles (The Righteous Gemstones), Ann Dowd (The Handmaid’s Tale), Okwui Okpokwasili (Master), and newcomer Olivia Marcum, playing unspecified roles, and Raphael Sbarge (Carnosaur) as a pastor.
Green’s The Exorcist is scheduled to reach theatres on October 13th. Ortega can currently be seen on the big screen in Scream VI (read our review HERE).