The Devil Inside

It’s sort of developed into a general rule that “found-footage” films must end abruptly. Earlier offerings from the presently popular subgenre such as “The Blair Witch Project” and “Cloverfield” helped to establish this rule, ending their stories without warning and thus providing a chilling sense of ambiguity. William Brent Bell’s low-budget horror picture “The Devil Inside” is a found-footage film that fully obeys this rule: the screen goes all fuzzy, it cuts to black without warning and promptly ends, surrounded by a whole ton of ambiguity. Clichéd as it is, this should be a perfectly fine way to end a film such as this – the problem is that this all happens at precisely the wrong moment.

Before its ending, “The Devil Inside” is a dull and boring rip-off of “The Exorcist;” it’s only during the last five or ten minutes that it gets the slightest bit interesting. It’s during these moments that the film seems to be teetering towards some big, probably overblown climax; very strange things are happening, people are dying and everything’s going a bit wrong for our protagonists. It’s clear that the film is building up to something big and, against all odds, has somehow managed to become slightly intriguing.

And then it cuts to black. And a title card comes up, telling the audience to visit a fabricated website to find out more details. And then it ends. And we, the audience, are angry. Very angry, in fact. We’re very angry not only because the film just ended as it finally began to become interesting, but also because we suddenly realise that we, as paying moviegoers, have been had – it is then that we begin to wonder if all this was filmed just to promote the film’s supposedly factual website. Imagine Heather tripping over while holding the camera as she and Mike find the abandoned house in “The Blair Witch Project,” and the film then immediately ending, telling you to go to a website to find out more details. It is indeed that annoying.

The film opens with a title card stating that the Vatican have not endorsed the film; given how awful it is, I can’t say I blame them. We then hear a recording of a phone call to the police from 1989. The caller is an American woman, Maria Rossi (Suzan Crowley, “Wild About Harry”), who bluntly states that she has just murdered three people. We are then shown police footage of the horrible crime scene: three people have indeed been murdered inside Rossi’s home; they consist of two priests and a nun, whose blood has been splattered all across the floor and the walls. It’s a crime only a true monster could have committed.

Well, it turns out this may be true: it is soon revealed that the murders occurred during an exorcism that was being performed on Maria in her own home. Yes, Maria, who is sent away to a mental asylum in Rome, is apparently possessed by a demon, or demons. And in 2009, her 25-year-old daughter, Isabella (Fernanda Andrade, “Why Am I Doing This?”), is searching for answers: what exactly happened that night, why was her mother sent all the way to Italy, is her mother mentally ill, is she demonically possessed, and why on earth is this film so boring?

As I said earlier, the film is a member of the found-footage subgenre. The way it works here is that the film poses as a documentary following Isabella as she travels to Rome, meets her mother in an asylum and visits the Vatican School for Exorcism (which is like a much less fun Hogwarts). The problem with the format is this: the writing and the acting are so utterly dreadful that they render the believability of this supposed “found footage” inescapably low, leaving the film nearly impossible to become enthralled by. Last year’s found-footage exorcism horror “The Last Exorcism” also suffered from this problem, but made up for it by being entertaining – “The Devil Inside” could never dream of achieving this.

It’s also hopeless as a horror flick, failing to provide any sense of terror or dread it so desperately yearns for. It goes through all of the demonic possession tropes (the multiple voices, the swearing, the inhuman strength, the contortionism, etc.), yet is never scary, instead often veering towards unintentional hilarity. I must say, it’s mighty difficult to become scared by a middle-aged lady calling a priest a “faggot” and talking about “skull-fucking” – it was a much different story with the sweet and innocent little girl we watched slowly but surely turn into a monster in “The Exorcist” almost 40 years ago.

Give a stranger a camera, a slug line and a special effects budget, and they could probably make a better version of “The Devil Inside” than the one that’s currently stinking up a cinema near you. Unfortunately, the stranger that has made this film is Mr Bell, and the result is “The Devil Inside,” a tedious bore of a horror flick that will send you to sleep more than scare you to death. Demonic possession sounds like more fun than sitting through this again.

2/10