Key Points
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Mike Flanagan reveals The Exorcist: Martyrs trailer, starring Scarlett Johansson.
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Flanagan explains how the material made him “wildly uncomfortable” — “which I think it should.”
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The writer-director says he wanted the film to feel “dangerous” and “unsafe.”
Mike Flanagan — the guy who gave us consistent horror hits, from The Haunting of Hill House to this month’s TV reimagining of the Stephen King classic,Carrie — once predicted that his upcoming Exorcist movie would be his “scariest” work yet.
The filmmaker felt that first in the writing of The Exorcist: Martyrs (coming in 2027). “There were times I’d be typing words and going, ‘Whew! Haven’t gone here before,'” Flanagan reflects in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. But the feeling became more palpable upon seeing the faces of his cast members reacting to scenes on set.
“He brings you in and then he scares the crap out of you,” comments Flanagan’s eight-time collaborator, Samantha Sloyan, who plays a small role in the film. “It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen him shoot, just visually. It’s gorgeous. And I think he’s so wonderful when those combinations are working for him, where you have this lush landscape and then it’s so terrifying within it.”
Based on that kind of response, “It was clear that we were in uncharted territory for me,” Flanagan says. “What makes this scary is a cruelty and a viciousness to the story that’s unavoidable based on the story we’re telling, but it’s not where I typically go. It made me wildly uncomfortable, which I think it should. It’s like that discomfort means you’re doing it right.”
Universal Pictures and Blumhouse-Atomic Monster unveiled the first teaser trailer for The Exorcist: Martyrs out of New York Comic Con on Friday. Prior to the panel, which featured Flanagan, star Chiwetel Ejiofor, and executive producers James Wan and Jason Blum, Flanagan sat down with EW to lay out his new vision for the genre-defining horror title.
The studio’s plans for The Exorcist once looked drastically different. Writer-director David Gordon Green, who successfully rebranded Halloween for more modern audiences, launched The Exorcist: Believer in 2023 as the first of a planned trilogy. But in the wake of minuscule box office returns and not-so-kind critical reviews, Green left the sequels behind, prompting Universal and Blumhouse to rethink the franchise.
That’s where Flanagan came in. The filmmaker recalls how he ”aggressively pursued” the job. “I jumped up and down and I said, ‘Ooo! Ooo! Ooo! Pick me! Pick me! I have an idea,'” he says of his enthusiasm. “My idea was very much let’s do something completely out of the box. Let’s do something that’s kind of a synthesis of two other subgenres.”
In essence, The Exorcist: Martyrs is Flanagan’s take on a serial killer story, infused with demonic possession. It should come as no surprise then that both William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist III(1990) and its, were his jumping-off points
That movie, which Flanagan considers “so under-appreciated,” followed Lieutenant William F. Kinderman (George C. Scott) — a character from the original Exorcist — as he investigates Georgetown’s demonic murders that resemble the deceased Gemini serial killer (inspired partly by the Zodiac Killer).
Scarlett Johansson now serves a similar role in The Exorcist: Martyrs. The Marvel and Jurassic World Rebirth star plays Julie Miller, a New York City Police homicide detective and mother to a 12-year-old son, Max (Jacobi Jupe). She apprehends a serial killer known as Father Sunday (John Leguizamo), who stages his murder scenes to mirror the martyrdoms of Roman Catholic saints.
Julie goes to witness the execution of Father Sunday by lethal injection and the case turns her into a hero. But even after his death 13 years later, the murders continue. This leads her down a much more unsettling path with her partner, Det. Gina Restrepo (Sasha Calle of The Flash).
“What scares me the most about The Exorcist,” Flanagan explains, “is that it seems to be a story in which Satan is very real and very active in the world, and God is absent. That’s, I think, what I find so upsetting about it. So I wanted a look of despair…I want it to be dangerous. I want it to be unsafe. I want it to be unpleasant. I want this to be a world where God is dead, and I want to feel that in the frame. I want to feel like there is no safety and there is no one coming to save you.”
Flanagan was talking about films like David Fincher’s Seven (1995) and Zodiac (2007), as well as Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), as much as William Friedkin’s seminal The Exorcist and the franchise’s third installment. He also calls out Gregory Hoblit’s Fallen (1998), starring Denzel Washington as a detective stalked by a demon that possesses those around him.
The trailer for The Exorcist: Martyrs points to anothera speech to Ejiofor’s Father William — the prison chaplain who presided over the execution of Father Sunday — in which she lists off famous serial killers like H. H. Holmes, Richard Ramirez (a.k.a. the Night Stalker), Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and David Berkowitz (a.k.a. Son of Sam). All of those men, she notes, claimed to have been possessed
“There’s a beautiful harmony between a serial killer story and a demonic possession story,” Flanagan says of that moment. “We didn’t make that up. That’s there.”
There are what he calls the more “flashy” real-life instances, like how the Son of Sam killer claimed a demon spoke to him through a dog. Flanagan, however, was more interested in the subtler examples. He points specifically to Bundy, who, amid many taped interviews with the F.B.I., called his demon “the entity.”
“There’s a really interesting thread to that,” Flanagan remarks. “Is it him manipulating the interview? Is it him trying to justify his actions? Is it seeding an insanity plea? Who knows?! But I find it fascinating.”
It was also fascinating to Johansson. The actress isn’t known for horror, though she flirted with it through films like Eight Legged Freaks (2002) and Under the Skin (2013). And yet, she loved this script who’s been watching her career unfold since 1998’s The Horse Whisperer
“I’ve never seen her do anything like this, but she carries such a profound weight to her,” Flanagan describes his star. “In so many of these possession stories, the character of the parent is someone who reacts with paralyzed horror to what is happening. Half the movie is them realizing what’s happening and the other half is them in this flailing panic over it. Scarlett’s a homicide detective whose entire job is to run as fast as she can toward that darkness, to pursue it, to hunt it, and to interrogate it. That posture changes everything. It changes absolutely everything.”
The opening scene of the trailer shows Johansson walking down a dark staircase to find the remains of a slaughtered altar boy. To Sloyan’s point about the visuals of the film, this shot came from a practical location — a crypt, hundreds of years old, that the crew found on a scout in Manhattan. The camera looking up at Johansson at the top of the stairs “rhymes so beautifully with some of the language that Friedkin established,” Flanagan says.
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Of course, there are other, less beautiful, more horrifying scenes in store. A different shot sees Johansson’s Julie following a trailer of blood to a lone barrel containing something terrifying. What’s inside the bloody barrel?
“I can’t reveal that,” Flanagan responds. “I will say, though, if you happen to know much about the method of death of Catholic martyrs, that barrel will take on some interesting meaning.”
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
