Flanagan first drew notice with original titles such as Oculus, Hush, and Before I Wake, but his fame exploded when he began signing, for cinema and television, adaptations of authors who stand as cornerstones of the horror genre—like Stephen King and Shirley Jackson—making him one of the most respected and admired names in the genre worldwide. Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep and The Life of Chuck on the big screen, and the brand-new series Carrie, are Flanagan’s King-inflected projects, which he later followed with other beloved horror series such as The Haunting (from Shirley Jackson) and The Fall of the House of Usher (from Edgar Allan Poe), but also Midnight Mass.
It is with these credentials that Flanagan approached the door of a franchise born from one of the greatest films in the history of horror and cinema as a whole, a franchise that over the decades has continued with entries that, for objective reasons or prejudice, not only remained far from the absolute peaks of the model, but often drew the ire of the most uncompromising fans. Yet Flanagan, who was born in Salem, the witch city, did not fear at all, and on March 12 his brand-new The Exorcist: The Martyrs will hit cinemas, the seventh film in the series, arriving years after David Gordon Green‘s attempt to revitalize it with The Exorcist: Believer (the first film of an imagined trilogy that never went beyond the first chapter) and featuring Scarlett Johansson in the lead, supported by a cast of both well-known and lesser-known talents of great significance. Among them: Diane Lane, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jacobi Jupe, John Leguizamo, Laurence Fishburne, Sasha Calle, Hamish Linklater, Kate Siegel, Carl Lumbly, John Gallagher Jr., Benjamin Pajak, and Carla Gugino.
The Exorcist: The Martyrs: The Official Plot and the Italian Trailer for the Film
Thirteen years ago, New York detective Julie Miller (Johansson) put an end to the reign of terror of the satanic serial killer Father Sunday. The case made her a heroine, and since then she has immersed herself completely in her work. Now a new killer writes her name in the blood of an altar boy on the walls of a church crypt, dragging her back into the darkness she believed she had buried with him.
Joined by the former prison chaplain Father William (the Oscar-nominated Chiwetel Ejiofor), who heard Father Sunday’s last confession, and by the brilliant rookie detective Gina Restrepo (Sasha Calle, The Rip), Detective Miller will uncover a throughline that links a lineage of serial killers, from H. H. Holmes to the Zodiac, capable of corrupting everyone she loves with a malevolent force that goes far beyond mortal dimensions.
Here below you can watch the first official Italian trailer for The Exorcist: The Martyrs; but after watching it, don’t stop there and keep reading, because Mike Flanagan himself will talk to us about the film in the video interview below.
On the occasion of the trailer’s premiere, Mike Flanagan met with the international press and, of course, with us at Coming Soon. As you’ve seen in the images above, The Exorcist: The Martyrs blends two cinematic subgenres: the films dealing with demonic possession and those about serial killers, as was the case in the series’ third film, directed by William Peter Blatty. This is one of the themes we discussed with Flanagan in our video interview, which you can watch in the block below.
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