There’s a lot to be excited about at this year’s NYCC, not least of which being the first trailer for Mike Flanagan’s The Exorcist: Martyrs. The previous attempt at reinvigorating this iconic horror franchise didn’t go so well, but if anyone can turn the ship around, it’s the man behind The Haunting of Hill House and the new Carrie series.
IGN’s Tom Jorgensen was able to sit down with Flanagan and take a deep dive into the trailer. Flanagan breaks down the key characters seen in this new footage and how the film builds on the foundation of the underrated gem that is The Exorcist III. Check out our video interview above or read on to see what he had to say about the film, including the all-important question of whether or not we’ll hear “Tubular Bells” in the new film.
Tom Jorgensen for IGN: [Let’s start with] the first shot of the trailer, which is Scarlett [Johansson] coming down the stairs into that crime scene. Explain why that was the image that you wanted to come right out of the gate with for this trailer.
Mike Flanagan: So when we were filming that, we had this incredible location. And I mean, if you’re talking about The Exorcist and you have a staircase like that, it’s kind of a requirement for a genre like this. That image, I think, not only evokes the descent of Scarlett’s character into our story in a really profound way, but is also so evocative to me of the stairs from the original film and of the poster. If you look at the poster for The Exorcist III, check out that poster against that shot. It’s kind of wild.
IGN: You mentioned The Exorcist III, and you’ve hinted prior to this that this movie is going to be taking some cues from that sequel. And I think you were maybe understating that a little bit from watching this trailer. What was so appealing about using The Exorcist III as the jumping-off point for this story?
Flanagan: The Exorcist III is an awesome movie. It’s so underappreciated. Outside of the original, it’s my favorite of the franchise. I think it’s just a marvelous film. It’s terrifying, it’s sophisticated, it’s beautifully acted. And the thing is that Blatty, both in the novel Legion on which it’s based, and then in the film which he directed, is starting to play with the synthesis of two subgenres. And I think that’s where I was like, “Aha, what a phenomenal idea. And there’s so much we can do to take that idea and run with it.” To harmonize a serial killer investigative thriller with the demonic possession story is something that I think that movie first tries to introduce and gives us a chance to truly run with, and that was irresistible.
IGN: Yeah, I’ll tell you, I figured it was going to be relevant. I had actually not seen The Exorcist III before this weekend, and I just had something itching at me saying it was going to be relevant and that was a good investment of my time. And you’re right, the movie is incredible.
Flanagan: Great movie.
IGN: This trailer is littered with references to the Gemini Killer. We have crucified victims, victims being mutilated in quite specific ways. What is this movie’s relationship to the events of The Exorcist III? Do you consider this a direct sequel?
Flanagan: Well, it’s a tricky question. I think this movie was absolutely designed to stand on its own two feet with people like yourself a week ago who had not seen The Exorcist III. So it is absolutely a self-contained story that is utterly accessible and hopefully thrilling for people who have no knowledge of The Exorcist III, or even frankly of Friedkin’s film or Blatty’s original novel. It really is its own thing.
However, that said, if you are a fan of The Exorcist III, there’s just extra bits in here that will delight you. And there is a thread for the super fans to pick up that runs all the way back through the Exorcist III to Friedkin’s original for those who are excited by those things. But it was absolutely crafted very intentionally to stand on its own.
“There is a thread for the super fans to pick up that runs all the way back through the Exorcist III to Friedkin’s original for those who are excited by those things.”
IGN: Well, I’m going to be one of those people freakishly pulling at those threads for sure. A centerpiece moment of the trailer is Scarlett’s character attending the execution of Rivera, who is played by John Leguizamo — incredible casting there by the way — surrounded by hooded executioners. That hood is a motif that recurs throughout the back half of the trailer. What can you tease about Rivera and his significance to this story?
Flanagan: Rivera is a serial killer who would leave crime scenes with a very particular religious tableau. Scarlett comes across him very early in the story, and it starts her career as a detective to close that case and to send him away to kind of a final justice. But then elements of that case and of his crime scenes begin to recur in a way that is a bit impossible, that goes beyond what would be possible for a simple copycat. And this case comes back into her life more than a decade later, now that she’s a fully established homicide detective and a single mother, and it all kind of comes together.
IGN: I’ll just say this: I’ve never paid more attention to which finger of a victim’s was severed in a trailer than I have in this trailer right here. We see Scarlett chasing an orange-hooded character out of her house with a gun. Clearly this evil is starting to encroach. Does that theme have a relevance to what you’re doing here, the idea of evil coming inside?
Flanagan: I think that’s kind of at the very heart of every possession story, the incursion of evil onto the human heart, and in this case the human body, into the safety of the family and into innocence itself. That’s some of what is fundamentally disturbing about an exorcist story. But the other difference is that the incursion of evil upon society, the incursion of violence upon a civilized world, and how that inspires despair in us when we see the evils of the world and the atrocities with which people can deal with each other — how that despair is something that we can’t really escape. And once that infiltrates us, how do you get rid of that? The interesting thing about the synthesis of these two subgenres for me is that typically our protagonists in stories like this react in paralyzed horror to that incursion.
Scarlett’s character does not have that luxury. She’s a homicide detective. She is eye to eye with the greatest horrors that humans can inflict upon each other on a regular basis, and so it is her job — to that scene you’re describing in the trailer — to chase down that evil, to run right toward it, to run headfirst into the darkness. [That’s] another thing I love about that image of her at the staircase, because that’s a moment of observation before you know she’s going down there. That’s her mission, her job, and it’s also who she is, and that makes for a wonderful protagonist that gets to drive this narrative into a lot of places a lot of other possession stories can’t go, because there’s stories of people running from the darkness, whereas ours is running into it.
IGN: It seems like there are also two priests that are going to be allied with Scarlett, very appropriate for The Exorcist, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Laurence Fishburne. Holy hell.
Flanagan: I know, right? A lot of power in that room.
IGN: Excellent voices to be potentially booming some ancient rites. What can you tell us about these two priests?
Flanagan: Well, I can tell you Chiwetel plays a character named Father William, who’s a prison chaplain, which I think is a fascinating look into a corner of the priesthood that is not really shown before in this franchise or in other Exorcist movies that I could find or think of. When you talk about the level of evil we’re dealing with — and I’ve said before, I truly believe this is the scariest movie I’ve ever gotten to work on by quite a lot — there’s a profound darkness. There’s an epistle darkness at the heart of this story and it is vicious. This is a story about the fight against that kind of darkness. And if you’re going to be depicting that fight, you need fighters of a certain weight. And when you talk about Laurence Fishburne, this is someone who carries that weight with him the second he steps into a room in a way that is pretty profound. So yeah, there’s a bit of a heavyweight matchup here.
IGN: I think my favorite performance of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s ever is actually The Operative in Serenity, that almost religious, dogmatic appreciation for something. Was that role at all on your mind when you cast him?
Flanagan: Oh, I love that movie so much. I geeked out on him when we did Life of Chuck about Serenity, and particularly there’s one line in this beautiful high-angle shot at the end where he says, “There’s nothing left to see.” It’s a haunting sign-off for this true believer that is so misguided. It’s a wonderful character. But yeah, I think Chiwetel’s an extraordinary actor, one of the best I’ve ever worked with. And that’s why after we did Life of Chuck, I was determined to work with him again. But this part lets him do a number of things that’ll be very surprising.
IGN: Cannot wait to see it.
Flanagan: Yeah, it’s a wonderful role for him and I think one of my favorite of his performances.
IGN: There’s this really excellent image that I loved of this bloody barrel in that abandoned mall. It gets paid off later in very gory fashion. What do you notice most about how both The Exorcist and The Exorcist III evoke terror, and how do you go about honoring that in this movie with imagery like that?
Flanagan: Well, I think the thing that terrified me the most about The Exorcist — and there are visceral scares throughout, images, sounds, things that hit you on this primal level — isn’t the rotating heads or the vomit or the levitation. The thing that scares me about The Exorcist is that it paints a portrait of a world where Satan is clearly real and active and God seems nowhere to be found. And that chills me. There’s no safety net. It’s a world where innocent children can die horribly and no God will intervene on their behalf, which coincidentally is the world we live in. I think that is at its heart what makes it so upsetting, and I think where these films and the books especially tap into something that I think really affects people is that it roots this in a perversion of religious iconography.
It takes things that are meant to be sacred and makes them a sacrilege. That barrel, if you have a certain level of knowledge of the method of death of Catholic saints and martyrs, means something and it’s a twisted perversion of something that is holy in the church. As someone who was raised Catholic and who was horrified and fascinated by martyrdom and by the method of death of so many Catholic saints — which are, I have to say, some of the worst ways you can imagine a human being dying in a lot of cases — to imagine a mockery of that where there appears to be no safety net and no intervention from anything good regardless of the nature of the victim made the story horrifying to me. That’s what terrifies me about it. There’s scares, there’s imagery, there’s all sorts of stuff that’s truly unsettling, but the thing that unsettles me the most is unchecked evil in the human world that there appears to be no remedy for. That to me is just horrifying.
IGN: On the way out the door: “Tubular Bells,” yes or no?
Flanagan: No!
For more, check out IGN’s review of the Carrie series and our full breakdown of the show’s ending.
