There isn’t a better time of the year to drop a trailer like this.
Just as we’ve stormed our way into the second week of October, racing towards a head-on collision with the greatest of our horrific loves, Halloween, acclaimed writer/director Mike Flanagan injects his latest vial of celluloid creepy into our bloodstream.
The first trailer for The Exorcist: Martyrs just dropped earlier this evening. Although the film is based on William Peter Blatty’s characters and situations from this writer’s greatest horror film of all time, 1973’s The Exorcist, and is the seventh film is the horror franchise, this iteration honours the storied past while being entirely its own thing.
Such is the creative juice that is Flanagan, who has given us, among many other chills, Doctor Sleep (2019), Midnight Mass (2021), The Fall of the House of Usher (2023) and, most recently, Carrie (2026).
The Exorcist: Martyrs has a wonderful and talented cast that includes Scarlett Johansson, Diane Lane, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Laurence Fishburne and John Leguizamo, among many others. It tells the story of a single-mother New York City police officer, experienced in serial killers and satanism, investigating a new series of murders that are connected to her past.
With religious iconography and perverted allusions, the horror is dialed up to eleven and surely makes us viewers think: what entities actually pull the strings of their human-host puppets? We’ll have to wait a few months to find out.
The Exorcist: Martyrs is released on March 12, 2027.
So, what do you think of the trailer?
