Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
In 2009, Australian director Sean Byrne directed a movie called The Loved Ones, about an alienated high-school girl who works up the courage to ask the cute boy in school to prom, only when he accepts and goes to pick her up at her home, he discovers that she’s obsessed, and her father will stop at nothing to make sure his daughter’s prom is special. It’s a cult horror fave, one definitely worth watching, but it was the last time I watched a horror movie and thought, “This filmmaker wants to harm me.” Maybe not physically, but certainly psychologically. This filmmaker doesn’t just want to scare me, he wants to fuck me up.
Byrne’s follow-up film, The Devil’s Candy, hit the festival circuit in 2015, when it played the Toronto Film Festival. After a long and no doubt frustrating journey towards distribution, The Devil’s Candy makes its Netflix debut this month, and I can tell you that just like Byrne’s previous film, it is a dark and dangerous movie that wants to harm you. It’s one of the scariest movies you can stream.
Ethan Embry and Shiri Appleby play Jesse and Astrid, married parents of teenage Zooey (Kiara Glasco), who move into a house out in the country that, until recently, was the home of Ray Smile (Pruitt Taylor Vince). Ray was a mentally disturbed man who, as we see in the opening scenes, killed his family member in their home, after being plagued by strange voices that he tried to drown out with loud music.
Heavy metal is a recurring theme here, with Jesse and Zooey bonding over their shared love of metal, and Jesse listening to the music while he paints (he’s an artist) at the studio he’s set up in the barn. After Jesse and his family have been at the house for a while, Ray shows up on their doorstep one day, talking gibberish but being friendly to Zooey. Pruitt Taylor Vince has a great knack for playing monsters who don’t want to be monsters, and he’s perfect here, fruitlessly trying to drown out the voices and meekly insisting he doesn’t want to do what they tell him to. Meanwhile, whatever these voices are — demons; the movie makes it clear they’re demons — are also speaking to Jesse. Particularly while he paints. He begins a large canvass work that becomes more and more sinister as he adds to it. Screaming children and fires, none of which Jesse remembers painting. In one such fugue state, Jesse paints a screaming Zooey into the painting. The voices continue.
It’s not so much the devil stuff in The Devil’s Candy that gets you — although inhuman voices in an impossibly low register on the soundtrack certainly won’t do much to calm your nerves. But rather it’s the brutality that they bring up in the Ray character, whose murderous actions are both dispassionate and horrifying. The place setting around the margins with the Satanic artwork and voices provides a foreboding environment — embellishments that feel over-the-top at times, but sensory overload is part of the point here — but it’s the people here who are most frightening.
