A woman in a dark coat climbs into silhouette at the top of a long stairwell, backlit through bare winter branches, and that is where the new “The Exorcist: Martyrs” trailer begins. Suspenseful music plays under it, and a camera shutter clicks somewhere off screen. That patience is the whole pitch for Mike Flanagan’s take on this franchise, and it probably should not work as well as it does. Universal Pictures and Blumhouse dropped the footage online Friday, October 9th, after unveiling it in person at New York Comic Con, where Flanagan and Chiwetel Ejiofor walked onto the BlumFest panel stage together to introduce it.
The trailer moves to crime scene photography, the shutter clicking as a voice asks “How old?” and gets corrected from “Fifteen” to “Sixteen, tops. Altar boy from the church,” which tells you what the story is built around before a single frame of the actual case appears. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “The Exorcist: Martyrs” trailer and its official synopsis.
A woman in a dark coat climbs into silhouette at the top of a long stairwell, backlit through bare winter branches, and that is where the new “The Exorcist: Martyrs” trailer begins.”
From there the trailer cuts to a wide shot of two detectives standing with their backs to the camera in a vaulted, gothic church interior. They face a figure posed against a stained glass window, its arms stretched out in a crucifixion shape, and someone says, quietly, “Think I have something.” That staging matches what Flanagan already told Esquire earlier in the week about Father Sunday (John Leguizamo), the executed serial killer whose signature was restaging the martyrdoms of Catholic saints. Now we are watching his method play out on screen rather than hearing it described secondhand. An aerial shot follows, a cemetery full of headstones with Lower Manhattan’s skyline hazy behind it, One World Trade Center poking through the fog. A narrator, identified in the official captions only as “the detective,” starts laying out the trailer’s real thesis over footage of Detective Julie Miller (Scarlett Johansson) examining evidence by flashlight.
“The FBI didn’t start interviewing serial killers until the 1970s,” the voice says, and then runs the receipts: “H.H. Holmes, America’s first serial killer, said he was possessed by Satan. And the same goes for the Night Stalker, Jeffrey Dahmer, Bundy, Gacy, the Son of Sam.” A gasp, a swell of music cutting out, and the thought lands: “All of them claimed to be possessed.” It is a genuinely clever piece of trailer writing. It reframes “The Exorcist” less as a horror franchise about one girl in one bedroom and more as a question about every killer who has ever used the devil as an excuse. Earlier in the week, Flanagan pitched the film to Esquire as Se7en crossed with The Silence of the Lambs crossed with The Exorcist, and this is the montage where that pitch actually earns its keep on screen instead of just sounding good in an interview.
Then the trailer gets overtly biblical. A priest, captioned simply as “the priest” but shown in close-up wearing a Roman collar as Chiwetel Ejiofor’s face comes into focus, starts reciting scripture: “Mark, chapter five,” and then, after the footage cuts away and comes back nearly fifteen seconds later, “verse nine.” The passage is the one where Jesus asks a possessed man his name and gets the answer “My name is Legion, for we are many.” If that phrase sounds familiar, it is the same verse that gave William Peter Blatty’s 1983 novel “Legion” its title, the book he adapted himself into “The Exorcist III,” the movie this project keeps getting compared to. That Exorcist III lineage is well established by now, so the interesting part is how the trailer chose to spell the connection out, in scripture, rather than leave it as a wink reserved for people who already know the lore.
The domestic half of the trailer is shorter and colder. A child’s voice, off screen, asks “What is it, Mom?” over a bed of sinister music, cutting to Johansson standing in a dim room with a kid’s colorful drawing taped to the wall behind her, and her reply lands wrong on purpose: “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t call me that.” The trailer never shows us who is talking to her in that exact cut, and no outlet covering the footage states it outright either, so we are not going to pretend we know whether that is her son Max (Jacobi Jupe) or something wearing his voice. A separate shot in the same stretch shows a boy standing in a doorway, back to the camera, with a dark hooded sweatshirt pulled up over his face. He says nothing, and the image does not need dialog to work. Two more beats close it out: a brief flash of blood spattered across a checkerboard tile floor, and a final distorted, inhuman voice right before the screen cuts to black.
Universal’s own synopsis, released alongside the trailer and quoted directly by TheWrap, fills in the shape of the case: “Aided by former prison chaplain Father William (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who heard Father Sunday’s final confession, and sharp rookie detective Gina Restrepo (Sasha Calle), 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.” Deadline and Bloody Disgusting both independently add that thirteen years pass between Father Sunday’s execution and the new case. The new killer announces himself by writing Miller’s name in a murdered altar boy’s blood on the walls of a church crypt. That gives this story a far more personal hook than a generic copycat investigation would have had on its own. Restrepo is pitched as a rookie, which sets up the partnership as a mentorship as much as a case.
Flanagan addressed the tone directly from the BlumFest stage. “This movie is unlike any other ‘Exorcist’ movie that’s ever been made, which was something that we were really determined to do from the very beginning, to take this franchise in a completely different direction,” he said. “And one of the things that we all kind of agreed on going in was that it had to be scary. It had to just be goddamn scary, like to your bones scary.” That is a confident thing to say about a franchise that has mostly been punished for ambition since 1973. In a separate exclusive interview with ComicBook, he went further on what he was willing to throw out to get there, confirming that the “Tubular Bells” theme, the single most recognizable piece of music in horror, will not appear anywhere in “Martyrs.” “That was something I was pretty adamant about not including,” he said, adding that it felt like “we were surrendering some of our unique identity in favor of trying to pull that.” And then: “For me, ‘Tubular Bells’ just kind of exists in amber in the Friedkin film, and it didn’t feel right to reach for it.” Asked what actually scared him about the original movie, he landed on something closer to theology than jump scares. “I feel like in Friedkin’s film, it’s a movie where the devil feels real, and God does not,” he said, and later, “There’s no safety net for us cosmically,” and that line works as a mission statement for a serial killer procedural wearing an Exorcist title.
Early reaction split along a predictable line. SlashFilm called the “every famous serial killer may have been possessed” conceit “a little hokey” while still finding the Exorcist III lineage thrilling as a horror fan. That tension, a premise that sounds silly stated plainly but plays unsettling on screen, could end up being the whole conversation around this movie between now and March. A new teaser poster went up alongside the trailer too, using that same stairwell silhouette as its key art in stark black and pale blue, the first official one-sheet the film has had. The trailer’s own closing card locks in the date, “MARCH 12,” over the Blumhouse and Morgan Creek logos, and every outlet covering the footage agrees on March 12th, 2027.
What Do You Think? Does the serial killer procedural angle make this feel more like The Exorcist III than a true sequel to the original, and is that a compliment? Does cutting “Tubular Bells” entirely read as confidence or as throwing away the franchise’s most recognizable asset? And after that stairwell opening, are you more or less convinced Flanagan can make 2027 the year this franchise finally works again?
See you on the next binge!
