Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!
There’s an old Eddie Murphy bit about horror movies and why the families that are in horror movies are always (at the time) white. The bit is essentially that horror movies have to be about white people because if there was a ghost in the house, the Black people would leave. White people stayed for The Amityville Horror, and a Black family would have walked out. That’s relevant in The Devil’s Candy, because, based on that, this movie would have been 25 minutes long if it starred Eddie Murphy.
This is a very short movie, and it’s one that could stand to be quite a bit longer. The supernatural elements that drive the film feel ignored in large parts of the movie. It’s a driving force for a great deal of the plot, but in large stretches where it feels like there should be a great deal of demonic activity, it all seems to go away.
We’re going to be introduced to our villain first. This is Ray Smilie (Pruitt Taylor Vince), who we see playing the guitar very loudly. What we learn is that this suppresses the whispers that he hears in his head, and the whispers tell him to do some pretty terrible things. In this case, the voice (which Ray refers to as “Him”) tells him to kill his mother, which he does.
We doodley-doodley-doop to the present, where we meet Jesse Hellman (Ethan Embry), a struggling painter; his wife Astrid (Shiri Appleby); and their daughter Zooey (Kiara Glasco). The Hellmans are purchasing the house where Ray lived and where he murdered his mother, naturally for a vastly discounted price. They are not informed of the actual history of the house, of course (that would spoil the sale). There’s also the fact that Ray was evidently never picked up for the murder of his mother, and he’s still nearby. Additionally, while the guitar helps him not hear the bad voice, he’s not allowed to play it at the necessary volume in the motel he is staying at.
Where this is going should be pretty obvious. We’re going to have a couple of parallel stories that are going to eventually cross. The first is going to concern Jesse, who starts hearing the same voices that Ray did. This causes him to create some art that he has no memory of. More disturbingly, it causes him to change some art he is doing on commission—the new art features the tortured faces of children, one of which is Zooey surrounded by flames.
Simultaneously, we see more of what is going on in Ray’s tortured head. It involves abducting children, killing and dismembering them, and then burying them in a suitcase. We’re (thankfully) only going to see this implied, because what is implied here is genuinely and truly horrifying. And, of course, Ray wants back into the house where the Hellmans live, and it certainly looks like he wants Zooey to be one of his victims—something he tells her, saying that he would be sacrificing her to the devil because she is (his words) “his sweetest candy.”
At the end of the film, when we’re going to get the final confrontation and everything comes to a head…most of the supernatural elements of the film are essentially ignored until the very end when they seem to come back. I was disappointed in this. The Devil’s Candy is an extremely disturbing film in a lot of respects, and while the last 10-15 minutes continue to be disturbing, it genuinely feels scaled back from what it could be. This might honestly be a good thing—a lot of the implications here are unsettling, and maybe going too far would have ultimately been a larger problem.
Still, this is a hell of a film in a lot of respects. I would have loved to have seen this dig deeper into the voices that both Ray and Jesse hear, especially in terms of how that impacts the end and what it might actually mean for Jesse.
If I have a complaint, aside from the fact that the supernatural elements vanish for a time, it’s that I honestly don’t get a great deal of chemistry between Jesse and Astrid. A lot of what happens through the middle of the film is Jesse being sort of possessed by the presence in the house and the effect that it has on his relationship with Zooey. They start out very close, and drift apart because he becomes much more neglectful of her. Astrid’s place in the family seems to be one of being the breadwinner and otherwise not really as much there. The dynamic is odd, and giving us 10-15 more minutes of the family and Jesse’s slide into whatever is happening would be a lot more impactful.
Still, for what it is, The Devil’s Candy is a solid 80 minutes of upsetting cinema.
Why to watch The Devil’s Candy: There are some implications here that are truly horrifying.
Why not to watch: The supernatural elements seem dropped off.
I have heard of a film with the same name though it is not likely this one. I was thinking of the one in the 1970s with a young John Travolta.
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