Russell Crowe Goes Meta With The Exorcism In New Horror Thriller, See The Strangeness
In Russell Crowe’s latest film, The Exorcism, he plays an actor in a horror film that goes so meta that he actually gets possessed by something evil. The official logline for the upcoming demon extraction flick states that Crowe plays Anthony Miller, a “troubled actor who begins to unravel while shooting a supernatural horror film.” But is he going crazy, or is there something more sinister afoot? Watch the trailer below.
The trailer for Russell Crowe’s The Exorcism sets the stage by showing Crowe’s Miller and his estranged daughter Lee (Ryan Simpkins) enter the set of the horror movie, where Miller will be playing a priest who performs an exorcism. Lee chats with one of the other actors on set (Chloe Bailey, who plays Blake Holloway), who tells her, “All kinds of messed up stuff happened when they were making movies like The Omen or The Exorcist… And the guy your dad replaced? Everything’s cursed.”
The director claims the idea came from his childhood when his father, Jason Miller, played the ill-fated Father Karras in the original The Exorcist in 1973.
She’s referring to the known and very real phenomenon of strange and unusual events occurring on the set of horror films.
The trailer then flashes to scenes of Russell Crowe looking particularly worried as the music begins to rise and audiences get glimpses of their first look at what terrifying events The Exorcism has in store.
Starring Russell Crowe, Ryan Simpkins, Sam Worthington, and Samantha Mathis, The Exorcism comes from the minds of M.A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller. It’s Fortin and Miller’s third project together, following the hit series Queen of The South which they co-created, and the horror comedy The Final Girls, which they co-wrote. Miller will be directing The Exorcism in his sophomore directorial project, following The Mao Game, an independent drama he helmed in 1999.
Is Russell Crowe’s character going crazy, or is there something more sinister afoot?
Long before he could ever hope to get star power like Russell Crowe involved, The Exorcism has been an idea stuck in Miller’s mind. The director claims the idea came from his childhood when his father, Jason Miller, played the ill-fated Father Karras in the original The Exorcist in 1973. Miller watched his father fling himself out a window in one of the final scenes of the classic horror film.
“If that wasn’t haunting enough on its own, my dad never shied away from telling me stories of just how ‘cursed’ the movie was: the mysterious fires that plagued the production, the strange deaths, the lifelong injuries — the list went on and on. The lore of any ‘cursed film’ has captivated me ever since,” Miller said of the movie and the inspiration for Russell Crowe’s character in The Exorcism.
Russell Crowe has been following a bit of a theme lately. Prior to working on The Exorcism, he released a film last year called The Pope’s Exorcist. In The Pope’s Exorcist, Crowe also played a priest. However, in that film, he played an actual priest (not an actor playing an actor playing a priest) and the Vatican’s leading exorcist who uncovers a chilling conspiracy.
“If that wasn’t haunting enough on its own, my dad never shied away from telling me stories of just how ‘cursed’ the movie was: the mysterious fires that plagued the production, the strange deaths, the lifelong injuries — the list went on and on. The lore of any ‘cursed film’ has captivated me ever since.”
Joshua John Miller, the director of The Exorcism
But even with the similarities, Crowe isn’t letting himself become typecast—he has five other movies on the horizon, including Nuremberg, Kraven The Hunter, and Rothko, which range from drama to adventure, to crime.
You’ll be able to see Russell Crowe fight off the forces of darkness in The Exorcism in an exclusive theatrical release beginning on June 7.
