The Exorcist: Martyrs Sounds Like a Sequel to The Exorcist III
Mike Flanagan's Exorcist movie brings cops and killers back to the religious horror franchise.
Even though it’s more than 50years old, The Exorcist remains both a spooky season favorite and the standard pick for “the scariest movie ever made.” That canonical status explains why legacy sequels like the 2016 television series or 2023’s The Exorcist: Believer, would stick so closely to the first movie’s characters and iconography. That also explains why one would expect Mike Flanagan to follow the first film’s model for his upcoming take The Exorcist: Martyrs.
But according to a first-look released by Esquire, it sounds like Flanagan’s moving off of the 1973 movie by William Friedkin and William Peter Blatty (who wrote the original novel, The Exorcist) at least a little. Esquire reveals that Scarlett Johansson will play an NYPD detective named Julie Miller, who gets drawn into a greater mystery after apprehending a serial killer called the Father Sunday, played by John Leguizamo. The first Exorcist movie is pretty light on detectives and serial killers, but the franchise is not. In fact, they’re the key element of the third film, making The Exorcist III, itself based on Blatty’s 1983 book Legion—a book Flanagan describes to Esquire as “a wonderful novel.”
As most horror fans know, both the novel and the film version of The Exorcist deal with the possession of young Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair), daughter of actress Chris (Ellen Burstyn). When secular methods fail to heal her daughter, Chris turns to the Catholic church, first Father Karras (Jason Miller, whose name is echoed by Johansson’s character) and then Father Merrin (Max von Sydow). The Exorcist was a huge hit, earning 10 Academy Award nominations and winning two. After the inexplicably weird sequel, 1977’s The Exorcist II: The Heretic, Blatty stepped behind the camera to adapt Legion for the third film.
In The Exorcist III, George C. Scott plays Lieutenant Kinderman (taking over from Lee J. Cobb, who played the part in the first movie), who investigates murders occurring around the Catholic church. Kinderman realizes that the killings recall the work of the Gemini Killer (Brad Dourif), despite the fact that he was executed more than a decade earlier. Moreover, Kinderman learns that Father Karras survived his encounter with Pazuzu, the demon who possessed Regan, and is now in a mental institution, claiming to be the Gemini Killer.
With its emphasis on cops and killers, The Exorcist III often plays more like a cop drama than a horror movie, despite containing one of the scariest jump scares ever committed to screen. Moreover, it feels like a real genre shift from the first film, even as it continues that movie’s plot. That may be part of the reason Exorcist III met with a mixed reception from critics and fans, and took some time to be accepted as a worthy successor to the first movie.
The underdog status of Exorcist III (and the unassailable canonicity of the first movie) might be why Flanagan chose to focus on cops and killers for his take, instead of the beleaguered parents of The Exorcist: Believer. Yet, Flanagan isn’t shying away from the franchise’s central themes. “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.”
Perhaps our familiarity with The Exorcist has made it a bit too easy to look at the devil. If so, The Exorcist: Martyrs‘s riff on the third film might be just what we need to make the devil scary again.
The Exorcist: Martyrs releases in theaters on March 12, 2027