A new killer has written Julie Miller’s name in an altar boy’s blood, in a church crypt, thirteen years after the New York detective ended the reign of a satanic serial killer called Father Sunday. Her case turns up a thread connecting serial killers from H.H. Holmes to the Zodiac, and the full trailer for Mike Flanagan’s The Exorcist: Martyrs is out now from Universal Pictures. Scarlett Johansson stars as Julie, and the film opens in theaters on March 12, 2027.
The trailer landed Friday evening, three days after the first teaser and the first plot details.
Father Sunday Gets the Needle
Father Sunday, played by John Leguizamo, staged his murders on the martyrdoms of Catholic saints. Julie caught him and watched him die by lethal injection, and the trailer shows him moments before the needle. The killings did not stop with him.
Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Father William, the former prison chaplain who heard Sunday’s final confession, and Sasha Calle plays rookie detective Gina Restrepo. The two work the new case alongside Julie. Laurence Fishburne plays a priest with knowledge of ancient rituals, Diane Lane is Julie’s mother, Mary, and Jacobi Jupe plays her 12-year-old son, Max.
Holmes and the Zodiac Are Real Cases
Both names come from the real record. H.H. Holmes, who ran a Chicago hotel during the 1893 World’s Fair, confessed to 27 murders and was hanged in Philadelphia in 1896. The Zodiac sent taunting letters and ciphers to San Francisco Bay Area newspapers starting in 1969 and has never been officially identified.
The trailer floats the idea that history’s famous killers may have had demonic help, and it is the boldest swing in the cut. It takes a franchise that began in one girl’s bedroom and turns it into a theory of American crime. Blatty’s own The Exorcist III made an executed killer work in this series once before, and that is still the best film in it after the original.
Flanagan Calls It a New Story
Flanagan wrote and directed the film for Universal and Blumhouse, with Jason Blum producing and Flanagan regulars Carla Gugino, Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli and Samantha Sloyan in the ensemble. He told Esquire it is neither a remake nor a reboot of William Friedkin’s 1973 film, but a new story in the same universe, “taking it in a very different direction.”