Every few years, somebody at a film studio opens a drawer, finds the rights to The Exorcist, and decides that this time it will definitely go well. The latest person to be handed the crucifix is Mike Flanagan, and his film finally has a name. Universal has announced that it will be called The Exorcist: Martyrs, released a first look at the thing, and pencilled it in for cinemas on 12th March 2027. The full trailer is due this Friday, 9th October, which gives you roughly 48 hours to locate a priest and a sturdy pair of trousers.
Scarlett Johansson plays Julie Miller, an NYPD homicide detective and single mother to 12-year-old Max, played by Jacobi Jupe from Hamnet. According to plot details Flanagan shared with Esquire, Miller arrests a serial killer known as “Father Sunday”, played by John Leguizamo, and later watches him executed. This, it turns out, is only the beginning of her problems, because killers in Exorcist films have never once had the decency to stay dead. Possession duly follows, and Chiwetel Ejiofor and Laurence Fishburne turn up as priests, presumably having drawn the short straws at the seminary.
Diane Lane and Sasha Calle are also in the cast, along with what looks like Flanagan’s entire address book: Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, Samantha Sloyan, Hamish Linklater, Carla Gugino and several more faces from The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass. At this point the Flanagan repertory company is less a group of actors than a touring parish. Flanagan writes and directs, and Blumhouse, Atomic Monster and Morgan Creek produce, with Red Room Pictures also involved.
Flanagan is keen to stress that this is not a remake. Audiences, he told Esquire, are “not seeing any attempt to reboot or remake or to step into the Friedkin film”, but “a story within the Exorcist universe that has not been told before”. Which is fair enough, but anyone who has seen The Exorcist III may be quietly raising an eyebrow. That 1990 film, written and directed by William Peter Blatty from his own novel Legion, also has a homicide detective (George C. Scott’s splendidly grumpy Lt Kinderman), also has a serial killer who was put to death years earlier (Brad Dourif’s Gemini Killer), and also has the inconvenient discovery that execution does not stop a determined murderer when there’s a demon willing to give him a lift. Bloody Disgusting has gently noted the resemblance. We’ll say it out loud: on paper, Martyrs looks like Flanagan’s love letter to the best Exorcist sequel almost nobody saw.
That would be no bad thing. Exorcist III was badly mauled by its studio, which insisted that a film called The Exorcist really ought to contain an exorcism and had one bolted on in reshoots. The studio in question was Morgan Creek, now back as a producer on Martyrs, so one hopes someone has had a quiet word. Blatty’s film has since been rescued by cult reputation and a director’s cut, and its hospital-corridor scare remains one of the great jolts of the genre. If you haven’t seen it, the trailer’s arrival is a good excuse.
The franchise could certainly use the help. Since William Friedkin’s 1973 original, we’ve had John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic, with its locusts and Richard Burton looking faintly lost, and two competing prequels, Paul Schrader’s Dominion and Renny Harlin’s Exorcist: The Beginning, made because the studio didn’t like the first one. Then came 2023’s The Exorcist: Believer, the opening shot of a trilogy that Universal and Blumhouse had bought the rights for at a reported $400 million. It took $137 million worldwide, reviews were savage, and the trilogy was quietly given the last rites. Flanagan was brought in the following year. British viewers, of course, have a more complicated relationship with the original, which was kept off home video in the UK for fifteen years until the BBFC finally relented in 1999. A generation of us knew it chiefly from playground descriptions, which were, if anything, worse.
Then there’s the title. Horror fans will hear Martyrs and think of Pascal Laugier’s 2008 French film of the same name, which is about as far from a fun night out as cinema gets. Whether that’s a deliberate nod or simply the marketing department reaching for the nearest Catholic-sounding noun, we’ll have to wait and see. Flanagan himself promises “something very, very different than what people might’ve expected”, which is either reassuring or a warning, depending on how well you sleep.
It has been quite a week for the man. His Stephen King Carrie series arrived on Prime Video on 7th October, and he co-wrote DC’s Clayface, which is in UK cinemas on 23rd October. At this rate, Flanagan will soon be responsible for the majority of the world’s grief-stricken monologues delivered in dim lighting.
The Exorcist: Martyrs is due in cinemas on 12th March 2027 (a UK date has not yet been confirmed separately), with the trailer landing on Friday. We’ll bring it to you when it does, and we’ll be watching the corridors very closely indeed.
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