Leslie Odom Jr. heads a cast that includes Ann Dowd and Ellen Burstyn, the latter reprising her role from William Friedkin’s 1973 horror classic for the first time.

Any love you had for David Gordon Green’s attempts to reanimate John Carpenter’s game-changing Halloween franchise will probably more or less correspond to your feelings about The Exorcist: Believer, the director’s bid to do the same for William Friedkin’s canonical demonic possession chiller. For those of us former Catholic school kids with vivid recall of being scared witless in our younger years by that 1973 classic, the new film is as deceptive a trickster as the Satanic visitor that takes up residence this time in not just one innocent girl but two.

Working with co-writer Peter Sattler (Camp X-Ray) from a story he developed with Halloween collaborators Scott Teems and Danny McBride, Green follows the Friedkin model by patiently developing the story and characters.

The phenomenally successful 1973 Friedkin film remains among the most influential horror ever made for various reasons, not least because it legitimized the genre as serious drama and dialed up the intensity by grounding the supernatural elements in religious belief and the social anxieties that followed the tumult of the late ‘60s protest movement.

Arguably the biggest blunder Green makes is diluting the imprint of Catholicism on the story. Instead of making the cleansing of impure spirits the exclusive domain of a shadowy arm of the Church that answers to the Vatican, the movie throws in Pentecostal holy rollers, spiritual healing methods and folk medicine rooted in African culture and — God save us — the power of group solidarity.

Details of that last element are delivered in a laborious info dump by poor Ellen Burstyn, returning for the first time to the role of Chris MacNeill, which landed her a 1974 best actress Oscar nomination. Chris has given up acting and spent a decade after the events of the original film becoming an expert educator on demonic possession. She published a bestseller called “A Mother’s Explanation,” which caused the estrangement of her daughter Regan, whose young soul was The Exorcist’s battleground.

She’s not the only one given big speechy mouthfuls to chew on, however, as Ann Dowd also gets a groaner at the end about the nature of good and evil in the modern world.

Playing a nurse named Ann who lives next door to distraught widowed father Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) and his 13-year-old daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett), Dowd is given a clunky backstory as a one-time novitiate nun, who abandoned plans to join the convent after breaking her commitment. The thing about backstories is that Satan knows all of them, which prompts Ann to assume exorcism duties as her God-given vocation and gives Dowd some juicy fire-and-brimstone arias to play.

A prologue set during photographer Victor’s honeymoon in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, opens with the startling image of dogs savagely fighting on the beach before tracking his wife Sorenne (Tracey Graves) as she gets coaxed in the city marketplace into a ritualistic blessing for the protection of the baby she’s carrying. But when Sorenne sustains near-fatal injuries in an earthquake, Victor is forced to make an impossible choice between saving the mother or the child. That choice, later revealed to be not as it appears, is schematically echoed during the feverish heights of the exorcism.