Two days after Mike Flanagan’s “Carrie” landed on Prime Video, Universal Pictures and Blumhouse released a trailer for Flanagan’s next project: “The Exorcist: Martyrs.”
The trailer released online Friday after playing before screenings of “Other Mommy” and debuting at New York Comic-Con. The spooky new footage shows Scarlett Johansson as New York City detective Julie Miller, who gained notoriety for catching the satanic serial killer known as Father Sunday. Thirteen years later, Miller (now mother to Max, played by “Hamnet’s” Jacobi Jupe) finds her name written in an altar boy’s blood, signaling the start of a haunting new case.
“Aided by former prison chaplain Father William (Academy Award nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor), who heard Father Sunday’s final confession, and sharp rookie detective Gina Restrepo (Sasha Calle, The Rip), Detective Miller will discover a filament linking a lineage of serial killers, from H.H. Holmes to the Zodiac, that could corrupt everything, and everyone, she loves with an evil that goes well beyond the mortal,” a plot description from Universal reads.
You can watch the chilling trailer below:
Flanagan has become known as a modern master of horror — particularly horror adaptations — shepherding a number of high-profile projects based on the works of Stephen King, Edgar Allen Poe, Shirley Jackson and more. He also penned the initial screenplay for the forthcoming “Clayface” film, the first horror project set in the new DC universe.
But “The Exorcist: Martyrs” — Flanagan’s first time playing in the sandbox that started with William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel and was brought to film in William Friedkin and Blatty’s 1973 adaptation — looks to be of a slightly different temperature from the filmmaker’s other horror work. The trailer is bleak, tense and very, very scary, hopefully breathing new life into this long-running franchise.
David Gordon Green previously attempted to revamp the “Exorcist” series with 2023’s “The Exorcist: Believer,” which he cowrote with Peter Sattler. Though that film was meant to be the start of a new trilogy, the follow-up film, “The Exorcist: Deceiver,” was pulled from the slate after Green departed the project.
“The Exorcist: Martyrs” releases in theaters on March 12, 2027.
