Universal Pictures has released the official trailer for The Exorcist: Martyrs, Mike Flanagan’s take on the classic horror franchise. It plays less like a possession movie and more like a grim serial killer thriller, and for effects fans it raises a fun question: how much of this nightmare is happening in camera, and how much is digital?
The trailer is on Universal Pictures’ official YouTube channel. The film opens only in theaters on March 12, 2027, according to Universal.
The story and the cast
Scarlett Johansson plays Julie Miller, an NYPD homicide detective and single mother. She arrests Father Sunday, played by John Leguizamo, a killer whose murders are modeled on the suffering of saints. After he is sentenced to death, things get much worse. Bloody Disgusting reports that thirteen years after Sunday’s reign ends, a new killer writes Miller’s name in an altar boy’s blood in a church crypt.
Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Father William, a former prison chaplain who heard Sunday’s final confession, and Sasha Calle plays rookie detective Gina Restrepo. Laurence Fishburne, Diane Lane and Jacobi Jupe round out the main cast, with Flanagan regulars like Kate Siegel, Rahul Kohli and Carla Gugino also on board, per Fangoria.
Flanagan, Blumhouse and a new direction
Flanagan wrote and directed the film and produces through Red Room Pictures, with David Robinson for Morgan Creek Entertainment and Jason Blum for Blumhouse-Atomic Monster. Flanagan has stressed that this is not a remake of William Friedkin’s 1973 film, calling it “a story within the Exorcist universe that has not been told before,” as quoted by Bloody Disgusting.
The project replaced The Exorcist: Deceiver, the planned follow-up to 2023’s The Exorcist: Believer, which was dropped in 2024, according to Inverse. Many writers have compared the new film’s detective story to The Exorcist III, and Dread Central also points to Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs.
What the trailer shows
Dread Central’s breakdown walks through the key moments. The trailer opens with Father Sunday strapped in for a lethal injection that Miller witnesses, and “things don’t go according to plan.” There are flashes of gruesome crime scenes, a wide shot of Ejiofor inside a huge church, an eerie woman looming at the top of a staircase, and a figure hanging upside down that carries over from the teaser. Inverse also notes some creepy body-hopping, as evil seems to move from one killer to the next.
Practical or digital? Reading the clues
Nobody involved has broken down the effects yet, so treat this part as an educated guess. Most of what the trailer sells is the kind of horror that works best in camera: makeup on victims, staged crime scenes, actors holding unnatural poses and well-lit sets. The upside-down figure and the woman on the stairs are classic slow-burn scares that depend on framing and performance more than big CG.
The VFX credits back that up. The Art of VFX lists Dan Schrecker as production VFX supervisor and Joseph Servodio as production VFX producer, with three vendors:
- Folks VFX, with VFX supervisor Kevin Yuille
- Mosaic Studios, with VFX supervisor Geoff Bailey
- Cadence Effects, with VFX supervisor Craig Crawford
That is a lean list for a studio horror film, with no big creature house in sight. It points to digital work that supports the practical scares: cleaning up rigs and wires, adding blood and gore where it is safer than on set, extending church interiors and smoothing out supernatural moments like the body-hopping. In other words, the kind of work you are not supposed to notice. If you want a primer on how that split usually plays out, our look at horror movie VFX, from creatures to environments covers it.
What to watch for
On your next viewing, pay attention to the upside-down figure. Hold the frame and look at how the body hangs and how the light falls; that tells you a lot about whether it is a performer on a rig or a digital assist. The film opens in theaters March 12, 2027. Until then, our Trailers category has more previews worth a close look.
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