The first teaser for Mike Flanagan’s The Exorcist: Martyrs is here, and it is doing exactly what a horror teaser should do: showing almost nothing and scaring you anyway. The brief clip promotes the March 12, 2027 release and confirms what we already suspected: Flanagan is not here to play nice with the Exorcist franchise. He is here to break it and rebuild it in his own image.
The teaser opens with atmospheric shots of New York City at night, a statue of a martyr, and the sound of whispered prayers that gradually become something else. Then things get worse. There are quick cuts of Johansson looking terrified, a child in distress, and something moving in the shadows that you cannot quite identify. The score is minimal and oppressive. The pacing is deliberately slow until it is not. By the end, you remember that Flanagan called this “the scariest movie I’ve ever made,” and you believe him.
Martyrs is not a sequel to The Exorcist: Believer, which disappointed critics and underperformed at the box office despite bringing back Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair. Universal spent $400 million on the rights to a planned trilogy, watched Believer earn $136 million, and promptly scrapped the whole thing. Flanagan’s film is a reset. It exists in the same universe as the 1973 original but tells its own story with its own rules, which is exactly what this franchise needs after Believer tried to coast on nostalgia and failed.
Johansson leads as a mother whose son becomes possessed. Ejiofor plays an ex-con turned priest. Leguizamo, Fishburne, Lane, and a dozen Flanagan regulars round out the cast. The film wrapped production in June after shooting in New York, and the teaser confirms that Flanagan’s signature slow-burn approach is intact. There are no jump scares in the teaser. Just dread, building and building, until you realize you have been holding your breath for thirty seconds.
The Exorcist is a franchise that has been copied so many times it became its own subgenre. Flanagan’s challenge is making it feel fresh without abandoning what made the original terrifying. The teaser suggests he is succeeding. It feels like a crime procedural that slowly realizes it is a horror movie, which is exactly the right approach for a director who understands that the scariest thing is not the demon. It is the moment you realize the demon has already won, and nobody is coming to help.
March 12, 2027. Mark your calendars. And maybe sleep with the lights on until then.
Also Read: First Martyrs Images: Johansson, Ejiofor, Leguizamo