The full trailer for Mike Flanagan’s The Exorcist: Martyrs has arrived, and the seventh Exorcist film looks like a terrifying return to the franchise. The trailer opens with Scarlett Johansson as NYPD homicide detective Julie Miller walking down a dark staircase into a centuries-old crypt, where she finds the remains of a slaughtered altar boy.
Thirteen years ago, Miller ended the terror reign of satanic serial killer Father Sunday (John Leguizamo), who staged his murder scenes to mirror the martyrdoms of Roman Catholic saints. The case made her a hero. Now she goes to witness Father Sunday’s execution by lethal injection, but even after his death, the murders continue. A new killer scrawls her name in an altar boy’s blood on the walls of a church crypt, dragging her back into the darkness she believed she had buried with him.
In a key trailer moment, Miller gives a speech to Father William (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the former prison chaplain who heard Father Sunday’s final confession, listing real-life killers, H. H. Holmes, Richard Ramirez, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and David Berkowitz, and noting that all of them claimed to have been possessed. “There’s a beautiful harmony between a serial killer story and a demonic possession story,” Flanagan told Entertainment Weekly. “We didn’t make that up. That’s there.”
Flanagan told EW he wanted the film to feel dangerous and unsafe. “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 cited David Fincher’s Se7en and Zodiac, The Silence of the Lambs, and the demon-possession thriller Fallen as touchstones alongside the original Exorcist and the underappreciated Exorcist III, which was his jumping-off point.
One tantalizing trailer shot follows a trail of blood to a lone barrel containing something terrifying. Asked what’s inside, Flanagan would only say, “if you happen to know much about the method of death of Catholic martyrs, that barrel will take on some interesting meaning.”
Flanagan has described his take as moving possession “out of the bedroom and out of parental torment” and into a serial-killer mystery. The film tells a standalone story with new characters within the Exorcist universe, though Flanagan has teased connections to past films.
The cast is stacked. Alongside Johansson, Ejiofor, and Jacobi Jupe as Miller’s 12-year-old son Max are Diane Lane as Mary, Miller’s mother, Sasha Calle as sharp rookie detective Gina Restrepo, Scoot McNairy as paroled convict Clay Silver, Gil Bellows as Peter Nicks, a former acolyte of Father Sunday, Laurence Fishburne as revered priest Father Nichol, and Leguizamo in what Flanagan’s circle calls the most menacing role of his career. Flanagan’s longtime collaborators are here too: Carla Gugino, Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli, and Samantha Sloyan, who has already called it “absolutely a stunning movie” and probably the scariest thing she has seen Flanagan do. Flanagan has singled out Carl Lumbly’s roughly four-minute scene near the end as crucial, calling it a key to solving what is going on.
Flanagan wrote, directed, produced, and edited the film, a Blumhouse, Atomic Monster, and Morgan Creek production in association with his Red Room Pictures. Johansson joined the project in November 2025, and filming began in New York in March 2026. The Exorcist: Martyrs opens in theaters March 12, 2027, through Universal Pictures.