Here Comes the Devil

Studio: Magnet
Directed by Adrian Garcia Bogliano

Dec 11, 2013 By Stephen Danay Web Exclusive

After their teenage son and daughter go missing on family hiking trip in the Mexican countryside, Felix and Sol are grateful when they turn up unharmed the following morning. However, the weeks following their return home descend into a spiral of fear, paranoia, and murder as disturbing events and strange rumors about the site of their disappearance force the young couple to consider their children are no longer what they seem.

The recent revival of grindhouse filmmaking has produced several great films, and many terrible films cloaking their poor quality in a mask of irony. Somewhere on the spectrum between these two poles is Here Comes the Devil, which draws elements from 1970’s Satanic cult films, Carrie, and over-emotional telenovelas to create a film which is as frequently ludicrous as it is creepy. As the dark journey of a mother discovering her children may have become monsters, the film builds to an effectively tense climax, but spends much of its runtime bogged down by tonally incongruous sub-plots that alternate between boring and nonsensical. Every moment of genuine terror—what the kids are actually up to is truly disturbing—is ultimately undone by tired tropes like people going somewhere they shouldn’t by themselves or hiding crucial information for no clear reason. Over the top music cues and some fairly tasteless nudity will make this seem like an exercise in self-awareness, but the film never goes for the full-blown insanity many viewers will be looking for when they watch a low-budget horror movie.

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