Mike Flanagan Will Direct ‘Radical New Take’ on ‘The Exorcist’

Another Exorcist movie is coming — but not the one that was previously announced.

Last year’s The Exorcist: Believer was supposed to be the start of a new trilogy of sequels to the classic horror movie from 1973. Then the film was a critical and commercial flop (it made our list of the worst movies of 2023) and not one but two more sequels to an unpopular horror legacyquel sounded much less appealing.

Instead, Blumhouse announced today they were bringing aboard Mike Flanagan to write, direct, and produce a “radical new take” on The Exorcist. The press release explicitly states Flanagan’s film will “tell an all-new story set in The Exorcist universe and is not a sequel to 2023’s The Exorcist: Believer.” There’s nothing vague about that; if you were invested in Believer’s storyline, I don’t think you’re going to get a resolution for it.

READ MORE: Read Our Full Review of The Exorcist: Believer

Flanagan has already tackled one massive horror icon in his career, having made a very respectable sequel to Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining with 2019’s Doctor Sleep. He has also adapted King’s Gerald’s Game as a Netflix movie and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” as streaming miniseries.

Here was his statement on the news:

The Exorcist is one of the reasons I became a filmmaker, and it is an honor to have the chance to try something fresh, bold, and terrifying within its universe. Reuniting with my friends at Blumhouse, with whom I’ve made some of my favorite pieces of work, only makes this more exciting.

Flanagan is a talented guy, and exactly the sort of horror filmmaker you’d want to see a “radical new take” on an established franchise from; he made a surprisingly effective prequel to Ouija for goodness sake. The Exorcist: Believer really stunk, and soured me on watching a new Exorcist movie anytime soon — until I heard this news.