Every Single One Of Us, The Devil Inside

All genres, even newer sub-genres must have a scale of good and bad within them which must include shining examples of how it must be done and, at the other end of the spectrum, stark warnings to film-makers everywhere that you don’t do it this way. New horror movie The Devil Inside resides slap bang in the middle of the quality spectrum of the found footage genre being neither great nor complete pants either.

This has a documentary film crew follow a young American woman to Italy where her mother, convicted of killing several people when an alleged exorcism went wrong, is being treated by Vatican doctors for ‘mental’ issues. The film scores an edge immediately simply by utilising the found footage, documentary style which gives the drama a realness and immediacy. The problem is there are very few opportunities to build scares or tension (like the Paranormal Activity movies have done so well) and when these moments do arrive, they’re not that scary.

The script is also lacking with the characters being thinly written (not helped by merely adequate casting) and plot threads or characters arcs being non existent or discarded during the duration. The notorious ending is definitely a let down (a link to a website with no relevant information is clearly only there to advertise a sequel) but it at least goes full circle to explain what happened to the American woman’s mother all those years ago. Average.