- Primary Subject: The Exorcist: Martyrs
- Key Update: Universal Pictures revealed the first look and story details for Mike Flanagan’s upcoming horror film starring Scarlett Johansson as Detective Julie Miller.
- Status: Confirmed
- Last Verified: October 7, 2026
- Quick Answer: Detective Julie Miller investigates serial murders connected to demonic possession in Mike Flanagan’s radical new franchise installment, The Exorcist: Martyrs, releasing March 12, 2027.
Two years after its first announcement, Universal Pictures has finally dropped the first look at Mike Flanagan’s The Exorcist: Martyrs, revealing not only Scarlett Johansson’s role as a detective but also the film’s story details.
The seventh film in the iconic horror franchise, Martyrs is set to take The Exorcist in a “radical new” direction, with Flanagan promising a story unlike anything seen in the franchise before.
So, after the poor reception of the last The Exorcist film, Believer, can Flanagan redeem the acclaimed horror franchise with Martyrs?
What Is Mike Flanagan’s The Exorcist: Martyrs About?
After a couple of delays, Mike Flanagan’s The Exorcist: Martyrs has finally unveiled its first teaser, hinting at a mix of crime, horror, and demonic possession.
It all starts with Scarlett Johansson playing Detective Julie Miller, standing at the top of a dark staircase before slowly making her way down with a flashlight in hand.
The scene then shifts to Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Father William inside a church, followed by John Leguizamo’s serial killer Father Sunday preparing for a lethal injection as protesters gather outside.
And true to the franchise’s fashion, a boy named Max, played by Jacobi Jupe, can be seen crawling backward as ominous events begin to unfold.
According to its premise, the film follows Miller, a single-mother cop who investigates a new series of murders after taking down a notorious satanic serial killer 13 years earlier. As her past comes back to haunt her, her 12-year-old son, Max, becomes the target of a terrifying demonic force.
You can watch the teaser below:
Mike Flanagan Talks About The Exorcist: Martyrs’ Characters & What to Expect
Mike Flanagan has been known for his hit Netflix horror series, such as The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass. He is also behind the upcoming TV adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie.
As telling supernatural stories has become his signature style, this makes him a fitting choice to direct the next The Exorcist movie, Martyrs.
“Part of the great thing about religious horror and part of the way we’ve used the horror genre since, I mean, geez, going back into the ancient world, is to try to take the horrors of being alive on the earth and confront them,” he told Esquire. “In fiction, we can stare the devil in the face.”
From there, he started talking about the film characters, with Scarlett Johansson playing NYPD homicide detective Julie Miller, a single mother to Max.
“Because being a homicide detective is one of those jobs that pulls you completely out of your life when you’re on call, you might not come home for days while you’re chasing a case,” he explained. “A lot of the slack is picked up by her own mother, Mary.”
He then went on to describe John Leguizamo’s serial killer character, Father Sunday, who stages brutal murder scenes depicting Roman Catholic saints being martyred.
Miller manages to stop Sunday early in the story and witnesses his execution, but it doesn’t exactly go as planned.
“Anyone raised Catholic, and even those who aren’t but have any kind of religious or historical literacy, are going to recognize a lot of that in the trailer, just in the crime scenes that we’re staging. That iconography’s right there,” Flanagan teased.
However, as the killings don’t stop after Sunday’s execution, Miller ends up working with fellow NYPD homicide detective Gina Restrepo (Sasha Calle), putting the film in both the horror and crime procedural genres. Flanagan describes it as combining elements he loves from fan-favorite thriller films Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs with the original themes of The Exorcist.
As for Chiwetel Ejiofor, he plays Father William, who presided over Sunday’s execution and found himself in a “vocational crisis, a crisis of faith” after that fateful night.
Laurence Fishburne also joins the cast as a priest with experience in ancient rituals. He becomes involved when the killings begin to threaten Miller’s son, Max, and her mother, Mary Miller (Diane Lane).
As the demonic possession storyline unfolds alongside the serial killer mystery and crime procedural elements, Flanagan hopes Martyrs will be “a lot more than a simple possession story,” and something audiences have never seen before in the franchise.
“The connections to the serial-killer mystery are where it gets really fun and takes the possession out of the bedroom and out of parental torment and into something much, much bigger,” he added.
The Exorcist: Martyrs is set to be released on March 12, 2027.
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