Mike Flanagan has a clear vision for the atmosphere of The Exorcist: Martyrs. “I wanted a look of despair,” Flanagan told Entertainment Weekly. “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.”
He also described how uncomfortable the script made him. “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,” Flanagan told Entertainment Weekly on Oct. 9, 2026.
The Exorcist: Martyrs is set for its theatrical release on March 12, 2027. It is the newest entry in The Exorcist franchise, and it is a pivot away from the planned trilogy that began with David Gordon Green’s The Exorcist: Believer released in 2023.
That trilogy and its story plans were cancelled after the 2023 movie failed to connect with audiences the way it was expected to. As far as anyone knows Martyrs is not connected to Believer in any way.
Instead, The Exorcist: Martyrs is a new, stand-alone movie within the franchise. It combines a serial killer narrative with a possession movie, which sounds reminiscent of The Exorcist III (which is an amazing movie).
Though, his past work has shown that Mike Flanagan isn’t interested in recreating work done well previously, so it’s pretty much a guarantee that his Exorcist movie will go in a different direction from what was done in The Exorcist III. The trailer seems to indicate as much.
The Exorcist: Martyrs stars Scarlett Johansson as a NYPD homicide detective who is working on a case involving a serial killer called Father Sunday (John Leguizamo). Father Sunday stages his murders to reference the martyrdoms of Roman Catholic saints, but when he’s stopped, the killings continue.
