By Melissa Antoinette Garza
I like Sarah Hyland. I’m a fan of the sitcom MODERN FAMILY and her contributions to the show are endless.
I’m also one who has read the works of Anton Szandor LaVey in depth. When I was much younger, my mother repeatedly threw out the SATANIC BIBLE, which I would of course go out and buy again. I noticed footage of LaVey in one of the trailers and wondered how they would use him. LaVey’s Satanism at its core is the opposite of Christianity. It’s actually taking oneself as a God and there is very little that is scary about LaVey’s Satanism.
LaVey is often used as a scary mascot of sorts and his core beliefs often misrepresented. That said, I have no issues with fictional accounts and I love horror movies. Tell a good story and I’m in. If one wants to know what LaVey was really about and what the Church of Satan’s core beliefs are, read the books and decide for yourself what you think. If someone thinks that this movie is attempting to be a representation of Satanism, they have issues; so personally, I went into this movie with a complete open-mind and a bit of curiosity.
The film centers on two couples that travel to LA for a two-day goth adventure before going to Coachella. Chloe (Sarah Hyland) and her boyfriend David’s (Steven Krueger) main objective is the music festival and hey have no interest in the Goth fandom that Chloe’s cousin Elise (Clara Mamet) and boyfriend Seth (Justin Chon) dedicate their existence to.
They rent a hotel room where Lainey Gore had slit her wrists and bathed in her blood, years before as a tribute to Satan. Now for the record, Gore is a fictionalized character and so obviously never had any real association with LaVey.
The two couples play an Ouija board without any contact, get bored and decide to drive around. The four travel to a store where a bunch of Satanic memorabilia is kept. There’s incantations, books of spells, skulls and an angry store owner that orders them to leave when Seth starts snooping around.
Later, they find the storekeeper and secretly follow him to a wooden ranch. They see a young woman, Alice (Sophie Dalah) with a knife held to her. Chloe yells for them to stop and the four are chased away.
Seth drops his phone while running away. Alice finds it and calls them. They decide to let her crash with them at the hotel as she has nowhere to go. Alice instantly recognizes the room as Lainey Gore’s and she asks them if they would help her summon her.
They all join hands and it soon becomes apparent that Lainey is using Alice. She goes to the wall and draws an upside down pentagram on the wall, much to David’s dismay, Chloe’s fear, and Seth and Elise’s excitement.
Alice explains that Lainey had found the doorway, tells them she will see them soon and then slashes her own throat. The four go to the police and the LAPD tells them they need to stay there for another day. David gets consent to sleep at his cousin’s house in the Palisades.
Elise becomes a bitch and basically blatantly blames her cousin for the entire situation as it was Chloe’s initial idea to allow Alice to stay with them.
Things only become worse as Lainey Gore, Alice’s death and the wall within the hotel seems to have followed them.
Nightmares plague Chloe, Seth hears chanting, upside-down pentagrams show up on mirrors, and the entire house seems to be turned upside down in seconds. Silverware sticks to the ceiling and a black bird is thrown through the window attached to the Ouija board while other crows are dead and bloodied in a swimming pool.
The group determine they’re leaving LA despite what the police say. They each feel as though they’ve been marked and just want to go home. Still, nothing prevents the devil from getting his due. Through Satanic stigmata, phone disconnections, disappearances and outright murder, Satan is coming for each one of them.
This film is taking a lot of heat, but I don’t think it’s all bad. It definitely lacked focus and character development. Elyse, Seth and David were particularly unlikable. David was at times too righteous saying how he believed in the only true God, while being all too willing to mess with anyone who wasn’t Christian. If there had been some conversation regarding his hypocrisy, this could have actually helped the character develop more, but instead he just came across as an arrogant douche who never turned to God at his worst point.
Even when it’s obvious that Satanic activity is occurring, this would be a perfect time for David to try his own faith. Even if it didn’t work or somehow worked against him, it would have been great for him to acknowledge his Christianity when being tested.
Elyse and Seth are all too into the goth scene until it gets too real. They are incredibly stereotypical and don’t have believable dialogue to give their characters a genuine nature. This may have worked in their favor had Satanism been completely different than what everyone including the audience perceived. If the movie was able to build on the premise that these two people were morons and then show that the viewer was just as wrong. It would have been entertaining. With all the YOUTUBE channels and documentaries dedicated to how the industry as a whole is linked to Satanism through the Illuminati, that could have been an avenue to explore. They were in L.A! Why not have them run into a celebrity who frequents the Satanic store and have a callback later on or have them watching a music video from their favorite artist and have that be what opens the gates of hell rather than a summons or Ouija board. Let those be unnecessary props and the upside down Pentagram just decoration in preparation for the big reveal. Alas, it does not do that. Elyse and Seth are destined to just be dumb, goth kids.
Chloe on the other hand does have depth. She’s the one who tries to go along with everything for the group, has a heart when it comes to Alice and is openly afraid of the odd things that happen from jump. This combined with Hyland’s likability is what sold the film.
As for the scares, the biggest issue is that they “tell” rather than “show.” The largest horror segment aside from the outright conclusion, was in David’s cousin’s home. Instead, of showing the cabinets open, the silverware flying, the birds falling, we see the after-effects. We see it from an almost narrative standpoint. It’s understandable as this was from Chloe’s perspective, but had the group as a whole witnessed this event it would have given the audience the ability to see it as well. It may have been budgetary issues, but with the advances in CGI technology, I can’t imagine having silverware believably fly into a ceiling would be difficult.
The gore was actually better than expected. When Alice slits her throat, nothing is held back. It’s a solid hardcore scene.
One of the largest issues with the film is that it felt almost like a paint-by-numbers. When they come across the Satanic ritual, I felt like, “well, someone saw RACE WITH THE DEVIL (1975).” As the saying goes, you never want to remind your viewers of a better movie while they’re watching yours, and RACE WITH THE DEVIL is a perfect film. From POLTERGEIST (1982) to THE EXORCIST III (1990), there just seemed to be a lot of retreading.
There is a very cool scene at the end, which I won’t spoil. It’s actually the one time in the film that interesting questions can be entertained by the audience pertaining to the universe the movie takes place in. It takes a long time to get to that point, but it’s done well.
Fans of Sarah Hyland will enjoy her performance and acting ability as she puts her best foot forward. Younger fans that are not accustomed to the horror films of the 70s, 80s, and 90s may find more enjoyment in it. Even for hardcore fans of the genre, it’s not the worst horror movie to watch. Not by a long shot!
This is certainly better than Michael Bay’s THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (2003) or MISCHIEF NIGHT (2013). The major struggle for SATANIC is that so many other superior horror productions are being released. This can’t even come close to competing with THE CONJURING 2 (2016) or 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE (2016).
Had this film been released 15 years ago, it would have been looked at in a more lenient way. This definitely had more of a VALENTINE (2001) or HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION (2002) feel to it.
Overall, I found this to be an unoffensive, less than average, movie with a fun premise, but distractedly poor execution. It may make any 12-year-old slumber party more pumped up, but for older audiences, just expect a tame ride with a few cool moments thrown in.
SCARED STIFF RATING: 4.5/10
