Beelzebub in the oven
In 2020, Spyglass Media announced that they were making a Scream 5 to be produced by Kevin Williamson and directed by Radio Silence in the wake of Wes Craven’s 2015 passing. If you were like me, you thought “Who the hell is Radio Silence? That doesn’t sound like a person.” And, indeed, it is not a person. It is a “filmmaking collective” of three (originally four) creators. The Directors Guild is apparently not in the habit of crediting films to collectives, so all of their films are officially credited to Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett. The third active member of the group, Chad Villella, gets “Producer” credits on the films they make, and Justin Martinez was with the group until sometime in the late 2010s, also frequently listed as a producer in that time.
I’m not quite sure how Radio Silence operates, and I can’t say I’m curious enough to do much digging. Calling yourselves a “collective” probably just a hip way of labeling a production company. Sure enough, they brand themselves as “Radio Silence Production” these days. The whole “collective” concept makes a bit more sense for microbudget operations where the foursome would make up the majority of the crew by themselves; and, indeed, their roots are in shoestring budget horror shorts. The group’s break into Hollywood occurred in 2012 when they produced one segment in the found footage anthology V/H/S. The film earned mediocre reviews, but it became a line of semi-regular horror anthology films, and the pool of directors from that original entry went onto significant Hollywood success, so it has endured as a curio. Adam Wingard (of the recent Godzilla-Kong movies), Ti West (of X and Pearl), David Bruckner (of The Night House), and Joe Swanberg (keeping the mumblecore spirit alive) all join Radio Silence in contributing segments to V/H/S.
Two years later, Radio Silence released their feature debut, Devil’s Due, one of only two features they’d make before landing the Scream gig, along with 2019’s Ready or Not. Devil’s Due is a found footage joint from the crest of the style’s trend. (The budget is weirdly big for the subgenre at $7 million.) It’s a lo-fi Rosemary’s Baby of sorts, the tale of a newlywed couple going through a Satanic pregnancy. The film opens with a man holding a camcorder, voyeuristically spying on some young woman getting dressed, evoking the opening scene of Halloween. Except… it turns out that we’re viewing from the perspective of the woman’s fiance, and the beautiful, barely-dressed young woman is excited to see him. Surprise!
I actually like this opening scene — misdirection turns out to be one of Radio Silence’s strengths. We see it in a few interesting scenes in the first half of Devil’s Due, but also in my favorite scene of either of the Screams that Radio Silence made: In Scream 5, an extended scene where the jump scare gets constantly postponed. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett manage to make these scare fake-outs and herky-jerks feel like a satisfying surprise rather than a cheap tease.
The opening act of Devil’s Due follows the wedding and honeymoon of Zach (Zach Gilford) and Samantha (Allison Miller). Zach has decided that he is going to be a camcorder guy (I know them well; my dad was one), pulling out the camera all the time, sticking it in people’s faces, capturing little moments of everyday life so he can remember them when he’s old and lonely. It’s a shtick that’s cute, slightly annoying, and very convenient for a found footage film. While on their honeymoon in the Dominican Republic, they get roped into attending a shady party with locals by a cab driver that ends with them blackout drunk. Some camera footage captures snippets of attendees of the party preparing some sort of ritual. How the “record” button was hit at that exact meaningful moment, and how the camera ended up back at the hotel with Zach instead of stolen and pawned, is left a mystery. That’s how these things go in movies like this.
When they get home, life is good for a bit, opening wedding presents and playing with their dog together; and then life is even better when Samantha learns that she is pregnant (the pregnancy test moment, again, helpfully caught on camera). And the start of their pregnancy is mostly good. They get baby clothes and assemble a crib and celebrate with their friends and family. There are some hints of creepiness on the fringes, but mostly it’s just two people in love, excited to bring more love into the world.
And so I started wondering what would happen if the movie never pivoted to the sinister? What if the suggestion of satanic happenings stayed mere suggestion, and this pregnancy ended with healthy and happy little family? I honestly wouldn’t have minded. I would have happily spent 90 minutes with this couple, watching them discover the joys and challenges of expectancy and early parenthood. I like Samantha and Zach. I hope the kale smoothies they made in the juicer they got at their wedding were tasty. I especially admire how Zach just dives in on being a dad, undertaking home projects and attending ultrasound appointments. You know he’d buy The Expectant Father at Barnes and Noble, and actually read it. After the baby was born, he’d take some of the middle-of-the-night shifts to lighten Samantha’s burden. I like good movie dads, and he’d be one in a happy version of this film. Maybe it would be titled Normal Baby’s Due. And no shade on Samantha, either; I’m sure she would be lovely as a mom.
My mind is wandering here, which is, I think, a reflection of how middling Devil’s Due really is. Of course, my proposed happy version is a myth; things do very much go wrong for the couple. Samantha is overcome with urges to act evil and violent. Her actions range from the silly sort of unsettling (she eats raw ground beef despite being a vegan) to actually quite creepy (a priest she crosses paths with has a stroke and starts spurting blood out of his nose in the middle of Mass). There are a few unsettling body horror moments, like when the fetus starts to violently protrude from Samantha’s round belly.
The best horror moments of the film are the ones where the cursed pregnancy serves as a metaphor for both the horrifying bodily metamorphosis of pregnancy and, more generally, the dark indignities and terror of exiting freewheeling young adulthood into chained down middle adulthood. There’s an undercurrent of realistic dread here, as if the optimism of the opening wedding and honeymoon simply can’t survive in this cruel grown-up world.
Significantly less effective — and, sadly, dominant in the final act — are the moments when Devil’s Due focuses on a satanic cult following Samantha and Zach around. Whether through a cursed insemination or some other off-screen mechanism, this cult has planted this devil baby in Samantha. They do provide good cover for how we’re able to observe Samantha and Zach as he becomes increasingly demoralized and turns on the camera less frequently: They install a bunch of hidden cameras in the house so they (and we) can see the ins and outs of this blighted gestation.
The entire ordeal is ultimately bleak and unpleasant to sit through much more than it is scary. Parts of it work, but the horror meat and potatoes content ranges from perfunctory to disappointing. It’s capped with a colossally stupid and angering penultimate scene set in a police station, followed by an unrelated, slightly less stupid final scene that’s the equivalent of that one-last-jump scare in most horror films.
This is not a dumpster fire of a film; found footage horror pretty much always works as immersive and tense when it’s executed at a baseline level, a bar which this film reaches. But it only barely reaches baseline bar, and I can’t say I feel any enthusiasm for it. It’s just replacement level in every way. Devil’s Due is certainly not a film I would expect to earn a recruitment to steward Wes Craven’s Scream franchise; but, lucky for Radio Silence, they had a film in the pipeline that would serve as such a calling card: a real buzzy horror-comedy hit much more in the Scream ethos, Ready or Not.
Is It Good?
Not Very Good (3/8)
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