The Exorcist Martyrs Full Trailer Is Out, and It Looks Properly Bleak

The Exorcist: Martyrs is Mike Flanagan's next chapter in the long-running Exorcist franchise, and its first full trailer landed this week. I have already watched it more times than I am willing to admit in print. It is grim in exactly the way I was hoping for: slow, cold, and a bit too quiet in the places where you expect noise.

If you missed the teaser a few days ago, here is the quick version. This film spent months being called "the untitled Exorcist sequel" by everyone, myself included, before it finally got its name. The full trailer is the first proper look at tone, cast and how bad things are about to get, and Bloody Disgusting broke it down in detail, including a line being attributed to Flanagan that has been doing the rounds all week, about this being the scariest thing he has made. You can watch the trailer and read their write-up for yourself here.

What is actually in this trailer

According to Bloody Disgusting's coverage, Scarlett Johansson is the face the trailer keeps returning to, and from what is on screen she is carrying a lot of the film's weight on her own. There is no single big jump scare doing the selling here, which is exactly what caught my attention. Instead the trailer leans on mood: long corridors, bad light, the sense that something has already gone badly wrong before the film even starts. It is the kind of trailer that trusts you to sit with discomfort rather than jumping you out of your seat every twenty seconds, and after a few too many exorcism films that rely on the second option, I will take the sitting-with-discomfort version every time.

Why everyone keeps comparing it to Se7en

The comparison that kept coming up this week, in that same Flanagan quote covered by Bloody Disgusting, is Se7en, David Fincher's 1995 thriller about a detective hunting a killer who is working his way through the seven deadly sins. If you have never seen it, the thing Se7en is remembered for is not a monster or a ghost. It is the atmosphere: grey, wet and relentless, building to an ending that people were still arguing about decades later. Lining this film up against that is a proper statement of intent. It says this is not a film chasing cheap scares, it is a film trying to make you feel unwell in a way that stays with you on the drive home.

It also tracks with how Flanagan tends to work. The stuff of his I keep coming back to, Hill House and Midnight Mass, was never about the thing jumping out of the dark. It was about the dread sitting in the room with you long before anything appeared. If this trailer is pulling from that same instinct and pointing it at Se7en instead of the usual exorcism playbook, that is a far more interesting promise than another spinning head and another priest shouting Latin at a bed.

When we might actually get to see it

Bloody Disgusting's piece has the release being talked about as sometime in 2027, and I will be honest, that is a long way off for a trailer that has already got under my skin this badly. I went into this slightly tired of exorcism films as a genre. There are only so many times the same ritual can land before it stops working. What has actually won me over is a director comparing his own film to a cold, miserable detective thriller rather than to any of the Exorcist films that came before it, because that tells me he is not trying to out-shout the back catalogue. He is trying to make something that sits in your chest differently, and settles in rather than jumping out.

So 2027 has gone from a date I vaguely knew existed to one that is properly circled on my calendar, dread and all. Tell me I am not the only one rearranging an entire year of cosy horror plans around a film that is still this far away, because I am going to need company for the wait.