Movies

Evil Awakens

Prequel to horror classic set to scare

 Did You Know : After filming started, director Paul Schrader was fired and 90 percent of the film was re-shot by new director Renny Harlin. Apparently, Schrader�s film wasn�t bloody enough.

Photographs courtesy of Fox-WB

Father Lankester Merrin thinks that he has glimpsed the face of evil. In the years following World War II, Merrin (Stellan Skarsgard) is relentlessly haunted by memories of the unspeakable brutality perpetrated against the innocent people of his church.

In the wake of all he has seen, both his faith in his fellow man and the Almighty have deserted him. He can no longer honestly call himself a man of God.

ESCAPE TO AFRICA

Merrin has travelled far from his native Holland in a desperate attempt to escape the horrors that he witnessed there. While drifting through Cairo, he is approached by a collector of rare antiquities and asked to join a British archeological excavation in the remote Turkana region of Kenya. Researchers have unearthed a Christian Byzantine church in inexplicably pristine condition � as if it had been buried on the day it was completed. The collector wants Merrin, an Oxford-educated archeologist, to covertly search the site for a religious artifact, a small sculpture that he wants to secret away from the British for his own private collection. Intrigued, Merrin agrees to take on the job.

MOUTH OF MADNESS

But Merrin isn�t the only one looking for this relic. Along with the British, the Catholic Church also wants to get its hands on the object. Soon, Merrin unhappily finds himself joined by Father Francis, an ideological young priest originally sent to Africa to do missionary work.

All is not right, however. Beneath the church, something much older sleeps, waiting to be awoken. Soon people begin getting sick and the locals refuse to enter the church. Madness soon descends upon the area, as the local tribes become convinced that the presence of the outsiders is responsible for the evil that has engulfed them.

Merrin watches helplessly as the atrocities of war are repeated against another innocent village � atrocities he had prayed never to see again. The blood of innocents flows freely on the East African plain, and the horror has only just begun.

The priest becomes convinced that the source of the escalating violence lies not within the church itself, but below it, where the oldest evil has been lying in wait for an eternity, waiting to be released.

But if he is to have any chance of defeating it, Merrin will have to recover the faith he thought was lost to him forever. In the place where Evil was born, Merrin will finally see its true face.

Exorcist: The Beginning is the prequel to the 1973 horror classic The Exorcist. Catch it in theatres from September 30.

Vocabulary

brutality (n): violent and cruel behaviour
perpetrate (v): to commit a crime or do something wrong or evil
antiquity (n): an object from ancient times
pristine (adj): not developed or changed in any way; left in its original condition
covertly (adv): secretly
ideological (adj): having a strong set of ideas or beliefs
engulf (v): to surround or to cover somebody/something completely