Mike Flanagan swaps the pea soup for a blood-soaked murder case in The Exorcist: Martyrs, and Hell may be the last stop on the trail.
The devil is in the details. This time, he writes them in blood.
Scarlett Johansson joins The Exorcist family in The Exorcist: Martyrs, and she leaves the haunted bedroom behind. Her case file holds a serial killer, a trail of corpses and a possible address in Hell. Mike Flanagan, the man behind The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass, directs and writes. His Carrie series hit Prime Video on October 7, so Flanagan has chills on both the big screen and the small one. Universal will open Martyrs in theaters on March 12, 2027.
Mike Flanagan swaps the pea soup for a blood-soaked murder case, and Hell may be the last stop on the trail.
The devil is in the details. This time, he writes them in blood.
Scarlett Johansson joins The Exorcist family in The Exorcist: Martyrs, and she leaves the haunted bedroom behind. Her case file holds a serial killer, a trail of corpses and a possible address in Hell. Mike Flanagan, the man behind The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass, writes and directs. His Carrie series hit Prime Video on October 7, so Flanagan has chills on both the big screen and the small one. Universal will open The Exorcist: Martyrs in theaters on March 12, 2027.
Johansson plays Julie Miller, a New York homicide detective. Thirteen years ago, she put satanic killer Father Sunday (John Leguizamo) away and became a hero overnight. Now a new body turns up in a church crypt. A killer has butchered an altar boy and scrawled Miller’s name in his blood. Sunday’s ghost, it seems, is not done with her.
Miller turns to Father William (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a former prison chaplain who heard Sunday’s last confession. Rookie detective Gina Restrepo (Sasha Calle) rounds out the squad. Together, they dig deeper and find a chilling pattern. Some of history’s most infamous killers, among them H. H. Holmes, the Night Stalker and the Son of Sam, blamed demons for their crimes. Coincidence? Or has something ancient been passing from hand to bloody hand?
The danger creeps closer to Miller’s own door. Diane Lane plays her mother, Mary, who helps raise Julie’s 12-year-old son, Max (Jacobi Jupe). Laurence Fishburne and Kate Siegel also join the cast. Torn between the badge and the family, Miller faces an agonizing choice.
Flanagan has no interest in a greatest-hits tour. The trailer skips Mike Oldfield’s famous “Tubular Bells” entirely. Crime-scene photos, church iconography and ritual slayings fill the frame instead, and a nagging question hangs over every shot: what if the supernatural explains what psychology can’t?
Fans of The Exorcist III (1990) will feel right at home. Novelist William Peter Blatty wrote and directed that cult favorite, and he turned the franchise into a creepy police procedural. Martyrs walks a similar path, but it covers far more bloody ground. Flanagan sums up his mission in plain terms: tell audiences they’re not getting a retread.
Legion, the demon’s name in the Gospel of Mark, hints at the film’s deeper worry. Can evil leap from person to person and survive for generations? And what does a detective who has spent her career hunting human explanations do when the evidence refuses to cooperate? Miller’s old victory begins to look like a prelude. Is this killer a lone wolf, a copycat or proof that darkness never really leaves?
William Friedkin’s The Exorcist terrified moviegoers in 1973 and made a star of young Linda Blair as Regan MacNeil. The film reportedly cost $12 million to make, and it became a cultural phenomenon. Sequels, rival prequels and a TV series followed. Exorcist II: The Heretic arrived in 1977, and The Exorcist III came in 1990. Two competing prequels, Exorcist: The Beginning and Dominion, hit screens in the 2000s. The 2023 entry, The Exorcist: Believer, tried to restart the engine.
The Exorcist: Martyrs does not continue that story. It brings new characters and a new case to the franchise’s world.
The original’s shadow looms large, and nobody can out-shock it. So Flanagan changes the game. He starts with a murder, builds a historical conspiracy around it and lets the supernatural creep in slowly. Johansson, one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, anchors the dread with a grounded, emotional performance. Mark March 12, 2027 on your calendar for The Exorcist: Martyrs, and keep the lights on.
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