Mike Flanagan is making one thing clear about his take on The Exorcist: the most famous piece of music in horror history will not be part of it.
In an exclusive interview with ComicBook.com published October 9, Flanagan confirmed that Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells,” the haunting piano theme inseparable from William Friedkin’s 1973 original, will be absent entirely from The Exorcist: Martyrs.
“That was something I was pretty adamant about (not including)… for me, ‘Tubular Bells’ just kind of exists in amber in the Friedkin film. And it didn’t feel right to reach for it,” Flanagan told ComicBook.com.
The decision fits with how Flanagan has described his approach to the seventh film in the franchise. Rather than recreating what made Friedkin’s film scary, he told the outlet he was drawn to its deeper dread, the “sense of evil without remedy,” the idea that the world is inherently unsafe and there is no divine safety net. He described Friedkin’s original as “a movie where the devil feels real, and God does not.”
The Exorcist: Martyrs stars Scarlett Johansson as Detective Julie Miller, alongside Diane Lane, Jacobi Jupe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, John Leguizamo, and Laurence Fishburne, with Flanagan regulars Hamish Linklater, Carla Gugino, Rahul Kohli, Samantha Sloyan, and Kate Siegel rounding out the cast. Universal Pictures releases the film in theaters on March 12, 2027.
As TDN reported, the first trailer arrived October 9, introducing Johansson’s Miller as the detective who stopped the serial killer known as Father Sunday thirteen years earlier, only to face him again when a new wave of ritualistic murders begins.
Since you won’t be hearing it in Martyrs, here is the theme one more time for old times’ sake: