Mike Flanagan is officially dragging The Exorcist back into the crime scene, and he’s bringing the Gemini Killer’s legacy with him. The first trailer for The Exorcist: Martyrs debuted at NYCC 2026, revealing a full-franchise reboot centered on a New York homicide detective played by Scarlett Johansson and framed as a fusion of police procedural and demonic-possession nightmare. The film is set to hit theaters on March 12, 2027, positioning it as the seventh Exorcist entry but explicitly separate from last year’s The Exorcist: Believer.
The trailer’s opening shot — Johansson’s character descending a narrow staircase into a grisly crime scene — is Flanagan’s mission statement in a single image. He told IGN that the shot was chosen because staircases are practically a requirement in this franchise and because it echoes both the iconic Georgetown steps from the 1973 original and the ominous imagery on the Exorcist III poster. From there the footage leans hard into serial-killer iconography: crucified bodies, ritualistic mutilations, and repeated nods to the Gemini Killer, the murderer whose reign of terror anchored William Peter Blatty’s cult-classic The Exorcist III. That earlier film followed Lt. Kinderman as he investigated murders that mirrored the Gemini Killer’s methods while a demonic force linked to the original possession story lurked in the background, a blend of procedural grit and supernatural dread that Flanagan clearly sees as fertile ground.
In multiple interviews, Flanagan has called The Exorcist III his favorite film in the franchise outside of the original and “an awesome movie” that never got the mainstream respect it deserved. What hooked him, he explained, was Blatty’s “synthesis of two subgenres” — the pursuit of a serial killer fused with a demonic-possession narrative — and his conviction that there was far more that could be done with that hybrid structure. The Exorcist: Martyrs, he says, is built to take that idea and run with it, “harmonizing” investigative thriller beats with exorcism horror so that each fuels the other instead of feeling like two movies spliced together. At the same time, Flanagan stressed to IGN that Martyrs is designed to stand on its own, accessible to viewers who have never seen The Exorcist III, even as it quietly rewards fans who recognize the Gemini Killer callbacks and visual rhymes with Blatty’s film.
While plot specifics are still being kept deliberately hazy, a consistent picture is emerging from early coverage. Johansson plays Julie Miller, an NYPD homicide detective and single mother whose 12-year-old son, Max, is pulled into the orbit of a demonic force. Years earlier, Julie apprehended a notorious satanic serial killer known as Father Sunday, portrayed by John Leguizamo, whose obsession with Catholic imagery and ritualized murders feels like a spiritual cousin to the Gemini Killer mythos. Reports indicate that Martyrs picks up more than a decade after that arrest, as a fresh wave of killings echo Father Sunday’s methods and force Julie to confront whether her past case truly ended — all while her son becomes the battleground for whatever entity has stepped into the killer’s shoes. That premise positions Martyrs as a kind of generational curse story where the sins of a closed file bleed into the next generation through possession, a natural extension of Exorcist III’s concern with legacy, guilt, and institutional failure.
Flanagan isn’t doing this alone, and the production backing reflects Universal’s desire to salvage the Exorcist brand after its recent misfire. The Exorcist: Martyrs is produced by Blumhouse and Atomic Monster in partnership with Morgan Creek, with Flanagan writing and directing and joining Jason Blum and longtime Exorcist producer David Robinson on the producing team. The cast list reads like a genre all-star roll call: alongside Johansson and Jacobi Jupe as Max, the film features Diane Lane, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Laurence Fishburne, Sasha Calle, John Leguizamo, and a phalanx of Flanagan regulars including Carla Gugino, Samantha Sloyan, Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, and Hamish Linklater. Dark Horizons reports that Flanagan was essentially given carte blanche to reimagine the franchise, allowing him to mount Martyrs as a full reboot instead of another direct continuation of the earlier films’ continuity. Crucially, outlets like Yahoo and Polygon have emphasized that Martyrs is not connected to 2023’s The Exorcist: Believer, signaling a clean break from that poorly received attempt to revive the series.
Tonally, Martyrs looks and sounds like Flanagan at his most ferocious. In an exclusive interview, he described the film as “vicious,” “scariest and darkest” work of his career, and a “huge swing” that pushes even further than Midnight Mass or Doctor Sleep in confronting faith, grief, and cosmic horror head-on. Entertainment Weekly’s trailer breakdown highlights the way the footage grounds its terror in everyday spaces — cramped New York apartments, police precincts, hospital corridors — before detonating them with religious iconography and escalating supernatural phenomena, a style that dovetails with Flanagan’s reputation for emotionally driven, slow-burn horror. IGN’s conversation with him also touched on the franchise’s sonic legacy, including that all-important question of whether “Tubular Bells” will echo through Martyrs; Flanagan clearly understands how central the theme is to Exorcist mythology, even as he hints at a desire to carve out a new musical identity for this incarnation. All of it suggests a film that wants to honor the original’s atmosphere and Exorcist III’s structural experimentation without being shackled to nostalgia.
For fans, the bigger story is what Martyrs represents for the Exorcist brand in 2027. After The Exorcist: Believer stumbled with critics and audiences, Universal appears to be betting that an auteur-led reinvention — one that leans into procedural horror and the cult-beloved Exorcist III rather than simply replaying the 1973 possession template — is the way forward. Flanagan’s body of work, from The Haunting of Hill House to Midnight Mass and his upcoming Carrie series, has consistently explored faith, institutional power, and psychological trauma, making him an unusually apt choice to inherit a franchise built on crises of belief. By foregrounding the Gemini Killer legacy, Father Sunday’s crimes, and a mother-cop torn between her duty and her possessed child, The Exorcist: Martyrs aims to reframe the saga as a story about how evil permeates systems as much as people. If the trailer is any indication, March 12, 2027 will be the moment Exorcist fans finally get the spiritual successor to Blatty’s underrated gem they’ve been waiting for — and a fresh reason to fear the sound of footsteps on a staircase.
