Al Pacino and Dan Stevens repossess The Exorcist's origins in The Ritual trailer

The exorcism that inspired The Exorcist gets its day on screen in The Ritual.

By Matt Schimkowitz  |  May 6, 2025 | 7:21pm
Screenshot: YouTube
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Al Pacino and Dan Stevens repossess The Exorcist's origins in The Ritual trailer

The power of Christ compels studios to keep digging around The Exorcist for scraps. Last year’s The Exorcism explored the film’s haunted production. 2023’s legacy sequel, Exorcist: Believer, imagined a world where Chris MacNeil is still battling Pazuzu. The Ritual, a new horror movie starring Al Pacino, Dan Stevens, and Patricia Heaton, will bring the “true story” that inspired The Exorcist to the screen.

The movie dramatizes the exorcism of Emma Schmidt, a young girl who became “the most documented case” of demonic possession in history and whose experience inspired the controversial 1935 book Begone Satan! A Soul-tiring Account Of Diaboloical Possession In Iowa, which tells of Schmidt’s 1928 exorcism. The story was adapted in the 2016 British film The Exorcism Of Anna Ecklund, which we doubt even the Ritual filmmakers saw. Like Exorcist, Pacino and Stevens play two priests on opposite sides of the faith line. Pacino plays the real-life Theophilus Riesinger, the German-born priest who performed Schmidt’s exorcism and gave his account to Begone Satan-author Reverend Carl Vogel. Stevens plays Father Joseph Steiger, who assisted in the exorcism as a plucky upstart and believes there must be a reasonable explanation for all this.

The Ritual opens on June 6.

 
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