12 Horror Sequels You Should Die Before You See

Remember how The Exorcist hinted at Father Merrin’s backstory but didn’t show it? It was as though William Peter Blatty’s Oscar-winning script was inviting the audience to fill in the blanks. Blatty had nothing to do with The Beginning, so Renny Harlin retools the padre as a drinking man’s Indiana Jones and sends him on a hunt for a mythical artefact, bringing him into contact with lots of bad CGI.

Desperate to build a story, the filmmakers throw in every hoary cliché they can think of, from multiple it-was-only-a-dream sequences to that old standby, the heroine investigating a power cut while wearing a towel. Most perplexing of all (no mean feat) is the scene where the Stuffy English Major, who’s just witnessed his butterfly collection come to life, attempts to halt the ‘hallucination’ by placing a gun to his head.

It ends with the most protracted, over-the-top, unintentionally hilarious exorcism since, well, The Exorcist III (1990). When a possessed hottie starts dry-humping Merrin, he whispers “The power of Christ compels you” in her ear, causing her to scurry away before flying towards him like the Warner Brothers logo in the old Looney Tunes cartoons. He defeats her easily enough, because as everyone knows, there ain’t no ass-kicker like a man of faith.