Mike Flanagan’s ‘The Exorcist’ will be ‘scariest movie I’ve ever made’

Mike Flanagan, the horror maestro behind The Haunting of Hill House, Doctor Sleep, The Fall of the House of Usher, and so many other genre hits, is still very much working on his vision for Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. But first, he’s taking a detour.

Universal Pictures announced Flanagan as the next director to take the reins of The Exorcist. After the poor reception and box-office gross for The Exorcist: Believer, which was meant to spawn a trilogy of movies, the studio scrapped those plans and is now fully moving ahead on what’s been described as Flanagan’s “radical new take” on the material.

The filmmaker called it “the scariest movie” he’s ever made in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter to promote his latest work, The Life of Chuck.

“We aren’t making this easy on ourselves,” Flanagan told THR. “But I’ve always felt that there’s no point in going into a franchise or into a property that monolithic unless there’s something new you can bring. I chased The Exorcist very aggressively because I was convinced I had something that I could add. This is an opportunity to do something that I believe has never been done within the franchise — something that honors what came before it but isn’t built on nostalgia. I really just saw an opportunity to make the scariest movie I’ve ever made. I know expectations are high. No one’s more intimidated than I am.”

The same day THR‘s interview published, IndieWire also ran a piece with David Gordon Green, who was at the helm of the now-canceled Exorcist trilogy. Believer served as a direct sequel to 1973’s The Exorcist and starred Leslie Odom Jr. as a Victor Fielding, whose daughter, Angela, disappears into the woods with her friend, Katherine, only to resurface days later possessed by a satanic entity. Original franchise star Ellen Burstyn returned as Chris MacNeil to face this malevolence.

“That’s a long answer. It’s complicated. It’s long and complicated,” Green said of the project roadmap he had intended for the trilogy. “We had our next one written and had it mapped out for the third one. Again, it was ambitious, complicated. We were going to Europe for some pretty extraordinary backdrops. It was one of those things where all of the creative parties got together.”

The sequels, he said, would’ve followed Ann Dowd’s character, Ann, Victor’s nurse neighbor. Green, however, emphasized the importance of maintaining his creative freedom, noting, “The choices I make aren’t always the most popular ones. So it’s trying to make something that me, and my great friends at Blumhouse and [production company] Morgan Creek, want [for] that property to be fulfilled, as much as the audience is there and has the appetite for it. I don’t think they were on the journey I was excited about taking.”

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

Flanagan says he has big things in the works at Amazon, where he struck a new deal after making shows and movies for Netflix over many years, but The Exorcist “just fit in between.” His first Amazon project will be “a spooky show,” he says. Shocker!