The first trailer for Mike Flanagan's The Exorcist: Martyrs releases this Friday, and Universal Pictures has shared a brief teaser featuring some unsettling shots of the movie's main characters, along with a sinister glimpse of some very familiar steps.
Former Black Widow Scarlett Johansson plays Detective Julie Miller, who witnesses the execution of Father Sunday (John Leguizamo), a serial killer known for staging gruesome murder scenes reminiscent of the brutal martyrdom of individual Roman Catholic saints.
The execution does not go according to plan.
“She’s a homicide detective with the NYPD and a single mother of a young boy named Max, who’s just turned 12 years old,” Flanagan tells Esquire. “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. A lot of the slack is picked up by her own mother, Mary.”
The filmmaker may have revealed a little more than he meant to here.
Possible spoilers follow.
There's a good chance Johannson is actually playing Julie Kinderman, daughter of Mary and William Kinderman, the police lieutenant played by Lee J. Cobb in William Friedkin's classic and George C. Scott in The Exorcist III.
In the third film, Kinderman faced the demon known as Pazuzu and the spirit of the Gemini Killer (Brad Dourif), which had both possessed Father Karras (Jason Miller) as he lay dying at the bottom of the steps after giving his life to save Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) at the end of the original movie.
“I think the first job is to tell people they’re not seeing a retread of The Exorcist,” Flanagan says. “They’re not seeing any attempt to reboot or remake or to step into the Friedkin film. They’re actually seeing a story within the Exorcist universe that has not been told before, that is unique within the franchise and taking it in a very different direction than it’s gone in the past. That’s what I’m hoping. We’re doing something very, very different than what people might’ve expected.”
The Exorcist: Martyrs also stars Sasha Calle as homicide detective Gina Restrepo; Chiwetel Ejiofor as Father William, and Lawrence Fishburne as a mysterious priest who is brought in when "the killings start to get too close to Detective Miller’s personal life, endangering her mother (played by Diane Lane) and her young son (played by Jacobi Jupe, best known as the doomed little boy of Hamnet)."
“It does have that one job from the title,” Flanagan says, confirming that we will see an exorcism in the movie. “We do have to deliver that for sure. But hopefully it’s a lot more than a simple possession story. 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.”
Check out the teaser and some promo images at the links below.