Say Your Prayers: An Exclusive First Look at Scarlett Johansson in The Exorcist: Martyrs

5 min readOne 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.”Photo credit: Universal Pictures and BlumhouseIntroducing Scarlett Johansson’s Detective Julie Miller, a homicide detective with the NYPD.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.”Photo credit: Universal Pictures and BlumhouseJohn Leguizamo’s killer—who was known by the criminal pseudonym “Father Sunday”—awaits his fate.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.Leguizamo’s killer was known by the criminal pseudonym “Father Sunday,” whose MO was staging bloody murder scenes reminiscent of the brutal martyrdom of individual Roman Catholic saints—torturous slayings that were often designed to shatter the beliefs of the faithful who followed the victims. “Anyone raised Catholic, and even those who aren’t but have any kind of religious or historical literacy, are going to recognize a lot of that in the trailer, just in the crime scenes that we’re staging. That iconography’s right there,” Flanagan says.Photo credit: Universal Pictures and BlumhouseHorror awaits Detective Miller’s son Max (Jacobi Jupe), who’s just turned 12 years old.Johansson’s Detective Miller is among the witnesses as “Father Sunday” is put to death, but not all of the people carrying out this act of justice are willing to openly face what they are doing. “The men behind him are kind of interesting,” Flanagan says. “We learned that this is something that occasionally does happen, where people who participate in these executions will make these masks to protect their anonymity. So that’s what you’re seeing in that picture.”As you might predict, the end of Father Sunday does not mean the end of the killing, which continues to trouble Johansson’s character and fellow NYPD homicide detective Gina Restrepo, played by Sasha Calle, who’s best known as Supergirl from the Flash film. Martyrs is crafted as a crime procedural, even if it is building a case against a wickedness that is otherworldly.Photo credit: Universal Pictures and BlumhouseDetective Miller (Johansson) works alongside fellow NYPD homicide detective Gina Restrepo, played by Sasha Calle.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.”While William Friedkin’s The Exorcist remains an unassailable classic, the various follow-ups, including 1977’s Exorcist II: The Heretic and 2023’s attempted reboot The Exorcist: Believer, have often failed to live up to audience expectations. A prequel from the early 2000s had such a troubled production that it was entirely remade before it was released.One exception that has amassed a cult following despite its flaws is 1990’s The Exorcist III, directed by the original Exorcist novelist William Peter Blatty and based on his sequel novel Legion. It has one of the most effective and memorable jump-scares ever, and Flanagan praises the book as “a wonderful novel” that helped inspire his own version.Universal Pictures and BlumhouseEvery story in this world needs a priest or two, and this one has a new padre: Father William, who is played by Chiwetel Ejiofor.“We wanted very much for this to stand on its own two legs, encapsulating a brand-new plotline with brand-new characters,” Flanagan says. There still might be connective threads back to the classic elements of The Exorcist, but for now those are surprises for the movie itself to reveal.Every story in this world needs a priest or two, and this one has a new padre played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. “He plays Father William, who was a career prison chaplain, who presided over the execution of Father Sunday,” Flanagan says, “and since then, in the years that have gone by since that execution, has found himself in a vocational crisis, a crisis of faith, based on the things that happened that night.”Photo credit: Universal Pictures and BlumhouseEventually, otherworldly trouble reaches Detective Miller’s personal life, endangering her mother and her young son.Laurence Fishburne plays another priest, familiar with ancient rituals, who is brought into the situation when the killings start to get too close to Detective Miller’s personal life, endangering her mother (played by Diane Lane) and her young son (played by Jacobi Jupe, best known as the doomed little boy of Hamnet).There is, of course, a demonic possession in this story. Maybe that should go without saying. “It does have that one job from the title,” Flanagan jokes. “We do have to deliver that for sure. But hopefully it’s a lot more than a simple possession story. The connections to the serial-killer mystery are where it gets really fun and takes the possession out of the bedroom and out of parental torment and into something much, much bigger.”Photo credit: Michele K. Short / Universal Pictures and Blumhouse“We wanted very much for this to stand on its own two legs, encapsulating a brand-new plotline with brand-new characters,” says The Excorcist: Martyrs director Mike Flanagan (above).He assures fans that his goal was to deliver something unexpected. “I think the first job is to tell people they’re not seeing a retread of The Exorcist,” Flanagan says. “They’re not seeing any attempt to reboot or remake or to step into the Friedkin film. They’re actually seeing a story within the Exorcist universe that has not been told before, that is unique within the franchise and taking it in a very different direction than it’s gone in the past. That’s what I’m hoping. We’re doing something very, very different than what people might’ve expected.”Hope is the key word. It’s what the devil despises most.