First Look at Mike Flanagan's 'The Exorcist: Martyrs'

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One of the most chilling passages in biblical scripture is when Christ confronts a man possessed by an “unclean spirit.” “My name is Legion,” the being declares in Mark 5:9. “For we are many.” This is even more ominous when you consider this passage from a few verses before: “This man lived in the tombs and no one could any longer bind him, even with chains.”

We all know evil exists in the world and that there are countless perpetrators of it. But what if it’s not possible to stop it? What if you can’t protect yourself—or anyone else? That hopelessness is what encroaches on Scarlett Johansson’s homicide detective in The Exorcist: Martyrs, filmmaker Mike Flanagan’s new chapter in the demonic-possession series, which aims to reignite old fears that date back not just to the 1973 original movie but to something primal and immemorial.

“What do we do about the problem of evil?” Flanagan tells Esquire for this exclusive first look. “There are so many things we see and say it’s inhuman. That act, that behavior, that kind of crime, that kind of atrocity, it’s hard to believe it could be conceived of and committed by a human being.”

This disbelief over evil can be countered by belief in decency. Flanagan, best known for The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, and the new Carrie series, says that’s what compels him to tell supernatural stories. They are allegories for the otherwise unspeakable. “Part of the great thing about religious horror and part of the way we’ve used the horror genre since, I mean, geez, going back into the ancient world, is to try to take the horrors of being alive on the earth and confront them,” he says. “In fiction, we can stare the devil in the face.”

In The Exorcist: Martyrs, our champion in this staring contest is Johansson’s Detective Julie Miller, who has devoted her life to capturing bad guys, punishing wrongdoers, and trying to keep her part of the world a little bit safer. “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 says. “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.”

Then Detective Miller encounters someone who is very much like the Bible’s man living among the tombs: a nightmarish presence that can’t be captured, contained, or brought to a halt. “John Leguizamo plays a serial killer who Scarlett apprehends very early in the story, and she’s there to witness his execution, which doesn’t go exactly as they expect it to, which ... yeah, it’s an odd thing to say today,” Flanagan says, on the afternoon after the real-life botched execution of Tennessee death-row inmate Christa Pike.

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Flanagan says he asked himself, “How can we explore those ideas in a serial-killer thriller in a way that starts to combine these subgenres a little, that takes what we love about a movie like Se7en or The Silence of the Lambs and combines it with what we love about a movie like The Exorcist? We’re talking about humans under the influence—or in some cases direct control—of evil itself.”

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