Honestly, I don’t know which is worse - an actively bad horror movie or a mediocre one. I have definitely seen my share of both over the last nine-ish years or so, and it seems like the obvious answer would be actively bad ones. You know, because they’re bad. Wooden acting, lousy writing, effects that fall apart under the merest glance, plot twists you can see coming a mile away, you name it, it’s out there. But then I get to thinking: I’ve seen some truly terrible movies that at least had some kind of energy to them, however misbegotten. Some kind of earnestness, however misplaced. Mediocre films are often in their mediocrity highly calculated, films that know which buttons to push and maybe even have some idea why, but don’t do anything beyond that. And I think I find those exercises in button-pushing somehow more offensive, because they display a contempt for their audience that offends me. Again, I realize that film - especially genre film - is a commercial exercise to one degree or another, but it’s possible to make a film with profit in mind and still come away with something interesting.
I recall an interview I read with the late Herschell Gordon Lewis regarding the making of Blood Feast, and he basically said that Blood Feast was an attempt to crank something as sensational as possible out for the late night drive-in crowd, and to do so as quickly as possible and as cheaply as possible to maximize return on investment. Lewis’ other big business was direct-mail marketing. The man was not an auteur, But Blood Feast is a fucking berserk fever dream of a film. After as certain point, intent matters less than the final product. Art can come from mercenary motives, just as the noblest of intentions can result in insufferable, stultifying bullshit. And at least either of those will leave an impression. But mediocrity - the wedding of technical competence and cynical calculation to a lack of imagination - that doesn’t yield anything that makes any contribution at all.
And that brings us to Demonic, a slick exercise in mediocrity, as characterless and generic as its title.
The opening credits and title happen over a barrage of newspaper articles and television news clips about a tragic murder-suicide at a home in rural Louisiana. A young woman attempted to conduct a séance and ended up murdering everyone there before hanging herself. There were some intimations that the séance was an attempt not to contact the dead, but to raise something…DEMONIC. End credits.
In the present day, an older man goes peeking around an abandoned house in the woods - the one from the opening credits. The chain holding the door closed has been cut, and he cautiously makes his way inside. He discovers blood on the floor and immediately bails to call the cops. So, you know, points there for handling it like that. The cop who gets the call is Detective Mark Lewis, who is busy buying a bottle of wine for the date he’s about to have to call off. He’s the closest officer and duty calls. Detective Lewis pushes a little further into the house, discovers four bodies throughout the house…and one of them is still alive. He locks the scene down and calls his erstwhile date, criminal psychologist Elizabeth Klein. There are three dead people, two missing, and only one who can explain what happened. Lewis needs Klein to find out what the survivor - a young man named John- can tell them. Cut to “One Week Earlier.”
One week earlier, John and his girlfriend Michelle are getting interviewed by a guy named Sam, who is part of a team of amateur ghost hunters convinced that this house, the site of these murders, is haunted. John has troubling visions, dreams where his mother is inside the house, telling him to let go. He has some kind of connection to the house, and so Sam, along with audiovisual tech Donny, occult expert Jules, and mastermind Bryan, want John and Michelle to come with them to investigate the house and record some potential paranormal shenanigans. Oh, also, Bryan is Michelle’s ex-boyfriend, and he’s an absolute dick. They’re going to try a séance, to communicate with whatever spirits dwell in this house where five people died after…conducting a séance.
What could go wrong?
The film is structured quite a bit like
Temple, another recent disappointment: Start with the police discovering something bad has happened, then spend the rest of the film bouncing back and forth between the investigation in the present day, and the events in the past that led up to the bad thing. To its credit, it’s much more coherent than
Temple was, and the characters more believable as people for the most part. And just as it jumps back and forth between the past and present, it jumps between third and first-person perspectives, courtesy of the cameras the ghost hunters had on them at the time and does so reasonably well. The recovered footage mostly looks like recovered footage and is well-integrated into the story. But this narrative structure does serve to kill what little momentum the film might have, though, and though it doesn’t break believability, it also doesn’t add much.
What it does add mostly is a tendency toward the obvious. It’s the story of this detective and this psychologist trying to put together what happened, relying on one person’s testimony. So you sort of know that there’s going to be some kind of shocking twist or revelation at the very end, either the detective or the psychologist will discover something that means the other is in danger as everything we’ve assumed is upended by this new discovery. And yeah, that’s exactly what happens - you might not be able to anticipate the particulars, but it’s not hard to see the broad strokes coming. You kind of land on the expectation that it’s going one of two or maybe three possible outcomes at most pretty early on, and it doesn’t really do anything unexpected. When it does finally resolve, it cheats by using a really blunt unreliable narrator device that sort of comes down to “we showed you things happening this way but ah-ha, it actually happened this way the whole time!” It’s sort of overstuffed at its climax, hurrying to cram a bunch of details into the third act. The result doesn’t feel scary, it feels like a plot being resolved. An observant viewer has seen this sort of story before, and there’s always the hope that maybe it’s going to get switched up or subverted somehow, but it doesn’t. A bunch of people went into a house with a dark past and tried to hold a ritual that would put them in touch with the spirit world and whaddaya know, shit goes south in a hurry.
So narratively, there are no surprises here. It’s put together with a solid amount of skill, however. It’s reasonably well-acted (with a couple of lead actors who are definitely working below their pay grade here), made up of mostly believable characters, some more sympathetic than others. Lewis is definitely the macho results-oriented detective, but he’s competent and professional and not without charm. Klein doesn’t fall too far into forensic psychologist cliché and gets believably freaked out when stuff gets weird. The ill-fated Scooby Gang aren’t especially fleshed-out as people but they are distinct without being reduced to caricature. The friction between John and Bryan is definitely there but never devolves into macho posturing to the degree it could, and Bryan shows just enough humanity to leaven his otherwise relentless assholishness a little. It’s like there are actual characters there, just under the surface, but we’ll never get to see them because this isn’t the kind of movie that does character study, like, at all. The cinematography is good as well, the house mostly looks like an abandoned property and not a set, though on reflection it’s probably too clean for a house that’s been abandoned for twenty years in Louisiana - there should be a lot more rot and decay given the temperature and humidity. Which feels like an oddly specific thing to notice, even to me, but as I was thinking about it afterward I kept coming back to how well-preserved everything was for a house spitting distance from a bayou. It looked like it had been abandoned for a couple of months, not a couple of decades, and that stuck with me.
So this is a film that is not in any way inept. What it is, however, is obvious. It leans too much into its music - there’s not a scene that it doesn’t score ominously, and every scare is punctuated with shrieking strings or loud, hollow booms. It’s not at all content to just let things happen in the background, everything is underscored for the viewer as if we won’t know something is scary unless the film shoves THIS IS SCARY right in our faces. And it lacks imagination on that front as well. There’s no real atmosphere to this film - the abandoned house is an abandoned house, but it doesn’t feel especially foreboding. It doesn’t do any work in the details or in the background, instead resorting pretty much exclusively to jump scares to create any tension at all. They’re mostly well-timed, but that doesn’t make them any less obvious or manipulative. I couldn’t help but compare this film to
Hell House LLC at times, because even though that film had its problems, what it had going for it was a really skillful use of recurring motifs and strange things happening in the background and slowly escalating dread built out of those little details. This film’s never really scary, just startling. There’s more to horror than just grabbing someone from behind and yelling BOO! in their ear, but this film doesn’t seem to know that.
And so that’s kind of the film’s whole deal - it’s cleanly executed on a technical level, but at every point, the parts are clearly visible. There’s no real mood or vibe or atmosphere, just an assemblage of clichés - you’ve got the abandoned house, the remains of a creepy ritual, a room with a bunch of dolls in it for some reason, a music box that starts playing by itself, objects moving by themselves, lights and cameras that stop working at opportune moments, and what little tension it manages is due entirely to jump scares. The protagonists are a little better than cannon fodder, but only a little, and because the whole thing is so obviously calculated and formulaic from the get-go, the end evokes little more than “ah, I bet this is so they can make a sequel.” There’s no heart to it, no real sense of tension, unease, horror, peril, anxiety, anything. It is deeply mechanical.
Once I’m done watching something, I’ll look it up on IMDB for details, trivia, etc. And one bit of trivia for this film leaps out at me, regarding a scene where Klein is reading something out of a book discovered in the house. A freeze-frame reveals the following text in the book:
“The Seal of the Left Hand Path is an occult symbol that means all sorts of plot relevant things, soon to be revealed to the audience in dialog, because God knods [sic], this screenshot won't play for long enough for anyone to read it. Unless they pause. But let's hope they don't..."
That’s the film in a nutshell. It’s an empty, calculated series of clichés that knows the details don’t matter, because the audience won’t pay very careful attention. They’ll be startled by the jump scares and call it good. It’s product, start to finish, as generic as its title, and supremely contemptuous of its audience. Fuck this mediocre nonsense.
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