First Look at Mike Flanagan’s THE EXORCIST: MARTYRS and Story Details Reveal a Demonic Serial Killer Mystery
We finally have some details on Mike Flanagan’s new The Exorcist: Martyrs, and this isn’t shaping up to be another familiar story about a possessed kid trapped in a bedroom.
Flanagan is taking The Exorcist into serial killer territory, mixing demonic possession with the kind of crime procedural you’d expect from Se7en or The Silence of the Lambs.
We also have our first images from the film, along with new details about Scarlett Johansson’s character and how this story fits into the larger Exorcist franchise.
The movie arrives in theaters March 12, 2027, following the disappointing 2023 reboot The Exorcist: Believer. Rather than continuing down that road, Flanagan is coming at the franchise from a completely different direction.
Johansson stars as an NYPD homicide detective investigating a case involving serial killer Father Sunday, played by John Leguizamo. The case ultimately leads to Father Sunday’s execution, but something goes very wrong during the process.
That’s where Chiwetel Ejiofor and Laurence Fishburne enter the picture as a pair of priests. Sasha Calle plays another detective, while Jacobi Jupe, who appeared in Hamnet, plays Johansson’s 12-year-old son.
Flanagan explained how he approached combining a police thriller with the supernatural horror expected from The Exorcist:
“How can we explore those ideas in a serial-killer thriller in a way that starts to combine these subgenres a little, that takes what we love about a movie like Se7en or The Silence of the Lambs and combines it with what we love about a movie like The Exorcist? We’re talking about humans under the influence—or in some cases direct control—of evil itself.”
That opens up some interesting possibilities for what the movie’s central mystery might actually involve. We know demonic possession will be part of the story, but Flanagan isn’t revealing exactly who gets possessed or how Father Sunday’s crimes connect to what happens next.
Johansson’s son certainly looks like an obvious possibility, but it sounds like the supernatural element reaches well beyond one family.
“It does have that one job from the title,” Flanagan said. “We do have to deliver that for sure. But hopefully it’s a lot more than a simple possession story. The connections to the serial-killer mystery are where it gets really fun and takes the possession out of the bedroom and out of parental torment and into something much, much bigger.”
That’s a pretty interesting direction for The Exorcist. The franchise has spent decades returning to variations on possession, priests, families, and exorcisms. Flanagan appears interested in keeping those ingredients while changing the kind of movie built around them.
The filmmaker, who is also developing a new adaptation of Carrie, says The Exorcist: Martyrs will have connections to previous Exorcist movies. At the same time, audiences won’t need to treat this as another remake of William Friedkin’s 1973 classic or a repeat of what has already been done.
“I think the first job is to tell people they’re not seeing a retread of The Exorcist,” Flanagan said. “They’re not seeing any attempt to reboot or remake or to step into the Friedkin film.
“They’re actually seeing a story within the Exorcist universe that has not been told before, that is unique within the franchise and taking it in a very different direction than it’s gone in the past. That’s what I’m hoping. We’re doing something very, very different than what people might’ve expected.”
The big question now is exactly what happens during Father Sunday’s execution and how that event unleashes the horror that follows. For now, Flanagan is keeping those answers locked away.
The newly released images offer our first look at the film and its characters, with more details available through Esquire.
The Exorcist: Martyrs opens in theaters March 12, 2027.
