Supposed to be scary. Isn’t.
Dear Hollywood,
We horror fans are getting really sick of your shit. You generally ignore us and our beloved genre in favor of your insipid action flicks, pandering-to-princesses garbage, and Super Giant Tentpole Mega-Movies… even though we’re always relatively cheap to make, bring you mountains of cash, and sometimes even save your miserable asses. Yet, how do you repay us? You force us to wait for years with horror masterpieces like Cabin in the Woods collecting dust on your shelves, while you fill our multiplexes with absolute shit.
Could have been creepy. Wasn’t.
Let’s not be vague about this shit. January 2012 brought us loyal fans out in droves to see The Devil Inside, just like weak-sauce The Rite did the same a year before. Both movies are blatant cash-ins on the success of surprising hits like The Last Exorcism and Paranormal Activity. We don’t fault you for the cash-grab though. What really grinds our gears is that you market these pieces of garbage as though they are Something New, Something Important – which is why we horror nuts are some of the few who still regularly GO to the damn theaters in the first place. We like to be scared. We like to be shocked. We like surprises. So when you market your picture as The Next Big Thing scaring the bejeebus out of people – you damn well better at least try to live up to that. You don’t have to succeed – you just have to try.
Supposed to show emotion. Didn’t.
Which brings me to your little hunk of Grade F beef: The Devil Inside. With an effective trailer, the “maybe real” marketing, and the blitzkrieg ”oooh it’s making people freak out!” advertising… we fans showed up in droves. For our loyalty we were rewarded with stiff line-reading as “acting,” a nonsensical plot with more holes than Swiss cheese, and a void of anything resembling a scary moment. The only thing this 83-minute Study in Audience-Patience has going for it is a contortionist and a semi-creepy 10-seconds of audio – both witnessed in the far-superior trailer. Every potential moment is wasted by emotionless actors and worse scripting, by over-use of the “shaky” aspect of the shaky-cam, or by half-assed editing. Yet even that wasn’t the most egregious of the film’s faults.
Couldn’t be a throw-away character. Totally was.
It’s that ending. Or should we say – what ending? Because there isn’t one, as most horror fans already know – what there is is a quick cut to black and then a final screen with some text telling us to go to a website to learn more. Yep. A crummy commercial. That’s the end to this movie – and more insulting still, the site itself is garbage. They could have paid a 10-year-old to do a better job. It’s a cheap, Blair Witch-in-reverse, marketing website with the exact same information we just saw in the movie. It worked for The Blair Witch Project because the news about ‘missing kids’ was marketing-leaked prior to the movie getting released (some people thought it was real - heightening the suspense)… with The Devil Inside, we’re forced to watch a terrible film first and then told to go to a phony website to find out what really happened. Did you think we were that stupid? Well, yeah… we guess you did.
Shouldn’t be Religious Symbols. But there they are. Everywhere. (Plot Hole #927958860)
Remember that loyalty we were talking about? With this one film, this one ending – you may as well have given all of us the middle finger and asked us to stop supporting you. It is one thing to stop a film abruptly – something which makes sense in the entire structure of “found footage”. It’s entirely another to cut to black and tell us to go to a phony, useless website. You made a killing off of this movie, Hollywood – and that makes us angry. We won’t be fooled liked this again. We’re perfectly happy sitting at home and watching movies on our home theaters – it’s what we do to support our genre anyway. Besides, other countries have been putting out better horror fare for years now – you need to step up your game just to catch up! Remember: We’re the fans who watch horror movies because we like to – we even support bad films who try hard. What we won’t continue to support is bad filmmakers who intentionally rob us blind.
Signed,
All Horror Fans, Everywhere
The Devil Inside is available – if you’re feeling curious – on Paramount’s YouTube, Amazon Instant, the Playstation Store, and for purchase in stores everywhere.
