Mike Flanagan has a new horror movie coming out in 2027, and the man best known for his Stephen King adaptations and Netflix horror miniseries is tackling The Exorcist next. Flanagan’s upcoming movie is called The Exorcist: Martyrs, and it stars Scarlett Johansson as a police detective named Julie Miller investigating murders that seem very similar to those of a past serial killer who was already caught. This is when she begins to question whether the murders and the serial killers in general might be caused by demonic possession. Joining Johansson in the cast are Chiwetel Ejiofor as a prison chaplain, Diane Lane as Julie’s mother, Scoot McNairy as a paroled convict, Laurence Fishburne as a priest, and John Leguizamo as an infamous satanic serial killer.
The look at the first trailer for The Exorcist: Martyrs shows that Flanagan is not paying as much attention to the exorcism aspects of the story. This makes it look like his sequel is not playing in the same playground as the first Oscar-nominated movie. Instead, it seems that The Exorcist: Martyrs is more of a follow-up to The Exorcist III than any other film in the franchise.
One would expect Mike Flanagan to look to the original 1973 William Friedkin movie for influence. However, that doesn’t appear to be what Flanagan is doing with his movie at all. That possession story is the key plot line that the 2023 sequel, The Exorcist: Believer, focused on, and that ended up as a critical disappointment. Flanagan’s film isn’t about a possessed child and the priests who want to save them. This is about a police investigation and serial killers. While the first movie had nothing to do with that at all, it was a key element of the story in The Exorcist III. It looks like The Exorcist: Martyrs might be more of a sequel to that movie than to the original.
The first Exorcist movie, and the novel it is based on, follows a young girl named Regan MacNeil who was possessed by a demon. Two priests arrive to help her, and horrific moments follow. The Exorcist: Believer used a similar plot, with two girls possessed and the parents being forced to choose one to live and another to die, and it even brought back Regan’s mother, but it wasn’t enough, and it didn’t find the same critical success as the original Oscar-nominated film. While The Exorcist III never received the same acclaim as the first, it is a cult classic and starred George C. Scott as Lieutenant Kinderman, an officer investigating murders around the Catholic Church.
The Exorcist: Martyrs trailer even connects the new movie to both the first and third. Scarlett Johansson plays Julie Miller, a homicide detective working for the NYPD, but in one scene in the trailer she has a name tag on under her badge that reads “Kinderman.” As mentioned, Scott played Lieutenant Kinderman, and Lee J. Cobb played the same character in the first Exorcist. While Cobb’s role was minor in the first movie, Scott’s Kinderman was the lead character, and it seems that Johansson’s detective might be related to the Kinderman from the earlier films.
In the trailer for the new movie, Detective Miller speaks to a priest and mentions how several past serial killers claimed to be possessed by demons. She cites real-life serial killers who made these claims, a detail that echoes the story of The Exorcist III. In that movie, Kinderman investigates murders that are similar to those committed by the Gemini Killer (Brad Dourif), but that man was executed years earlier. He also learns that Father Karras from the first film is in a mental asylum, claiming he is the Gemini Killer. With the cops and killers and the idea that demons create serial killers, it is obvious that The Exorcist: Martyrs is more like The Exorcist III than any other movie in the franchise.
It took a long time for people to accept The Exorcist III as the great movie that it is because people wanted to see a movie that was more like The Exorcist. However, it has become a cult classic and is often called the second-best movie in the franchise. With the disappointment of The Exorcist: Believer, which tried to mimic the first movie, fans today might be more willing to see something that is more like The Exorcist III. The good news is that Mike Flanagan has said that he is a fan of the book that sequel was based on, Legion. That word was actually used in the trailer when it was what a man from the Bible declares: “My name is Legion, for we are many.”
Flanagan said that Legion was a “wonderful novel,” and that might be what played into his idea to make his movie more of a procedural than a straight exorcism movie. There have been way too many movies about priests trying to cast out demons in exorcisms, but there aren’t enough movies about actually tackling the issue head-on. The big thing about religious horror in fiction is staring the devil in the face and figuring out a way to beat the demons, and that appears to be where Flanagan is heading with his movie, similar to what The Exorcist III did years ago.
What are your thoughts on Mike Flanagan’s trailer for The Exorcist: Martyrs? Let us know what you think about The Exorcist III and its comparisons to the new movie in the comments below.
