New Exorcist: Believer trailer raises the stakes and possibly solves one mystery

The first trailer for David Gordon Green’s The Exorcist revival—The Exorcist: Believer—prominently featured the return of Ellen Burstyn, reprising her role of Chris MacNeil from the original movie. But, despite rumors saying she would also return in some way, there was no appearance from Linda Blair’s Regan MacNeil (the girl who gets exorcised in the first Exorcist). Well, this new trailer seems to have an explanation for that: She’s burning in Hell!

Granted, that’s according to one of this movie’s demon-possessed children, and if there’s one thing that demons like to say to people in Exorcist movies, it’s that their loved ones are in Hell and having a terrible time (at least that’s the implication, we don’t know how Father Karras’ mother felt about her supposed fate). So maybe it’s not totally true, since demons aren’t known for being totally trustworthy, but it does at least seem to mean that Regan is dead at this point in the saga.

But as for the actual demonic plot in this movie, it seems a bit more complicated than the “this time there are two kids who need an exorcism” setup of the first trailer: Apparently, the parents this time around won’t be able to save both kids, meaning one gets to live and one will have to be surrendered to the demons… but, again, it’s the demon saying this, and why would it bother setting up some kind of Jigsaw-esque game for these people to play when it could just terrorize and torture them for fun? Part of what makes the original movie so scary is that there’s no way to reason with the demon, it’s just a purely evil force that laughs and vomits in the face of the things that meant to give you hope, and the only way to “win” is for the possessed person to die.

We’ll see how that all works out when The Exorcist: Believer opens in theaters on October 6 (to avoid the theatrical version of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour).