Here’s yet another movie which sneers at skepticism and rational thought. It’s called The Rite and it follows a skeptical seminary student who meets an unorthodox priest played by Anthony Hopkins, and gets sucked into the dark world of exorcisms. The trailer makes it pretty clear that movie’s about forcing him to abandon his skepticism to become a true believer. It’s a pretty familiar theme, one already covered just in the past couple of months by The Last Exorcism, Devil, and Hereafter. Here we go again.

The first trailer for The Rite is online. Watch Hollywood tell you how deluded you’d have to be not to believe in the supernatural, all over again in HD on Apple or embedded below.

There doesn’t seem to be a lot here which hasn’t already been covered by other exorcism movies. This movie, like all of them, claims to be based on a true story. You’re supposed to be particularly scared by the numbers it throws out: Half a million reports of exorcism. The Vatican putting exorcists in all their diocese. Except, well, there are a lot of superstitious, uneducated people in the world. Is that a surprise to anyone? And The Vatican has to cater to those superstitious people, plus they like making money. Is it any surprise they’d set put up an “Exorcisms 25 Cents” sign on their churches in Mexico? That’s not scary, that’s capitalism at work.

The scariest moment in The Rite trailer isn’t its attempt to attach bogus real-life significance to what’s going on, it’s that shot of Anthony Hopkins sneaking up on a girl with a cross. But I guess they’ve already made that movie too, I think it was called Doubt.