The Devil Inside (2012)
Directed by William Brent Bell
In Italy, a woman becomes involved in a series of unauthorized exorcisms during her mission to discover what happened to her mother, who allegedly murdered three people during her own exorcism.
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What critics compared The Devil Inside to
There's a lot of downtime in which to consider issues like this in The Devil Inside, a film co-written and directed by William Brent Bell (Stay Alive) that obviously aims for the same lower-budget found footage niche as the Paranormal Activity franchise.
Ripping off The Exorcist while adding the "found footage" scam from the Paranormal Activity franchise, The Devil Inside manages not only to scrape the barrel's bottom but to drill a hole in said bottom and funnel deeper into the scum.
Speaking with co-writer and director William Brent Bell about The Devil Inside, he explained they were less going for a found-footage film in the style of Paranormal Activity than a true-crime documentary about a homicidal exorcism and its aftermath.
Unstoppably, that is, until The Devil Inside, the latest on-the-cheap pick-up from Paramount Insurge, the studio’s indie genre label formed after the massive success of the Paranormal Activity films.
It’s a clearly a B-grade Paranormal Activity rip-off with extra holy water and genuflection.
The characters who manned the cameras in The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield weren't pros, providing an excuse for the shakiness and dizzy-making whip pans.
Nearly thirteen years after The Blair Witch Project introduced the concept of “found footage” films to mainstream audiences while simultaneously harnessing the power of the burgeoning Internet to launch a massively successful viral campaign that hinged on audiences buying into the “truth” behind the film, the found fauxtage horror genre continues to chug almost unstoppably along.
When director William Brent Bell and co-writer Matthew Peterman, the brains behind the equally turgid "Stay Alive," aren’t evoking every single exorcism movie this side of, well, "The Exorcist," they’re dutifully aping the decade-old wave of imitation spawned by the success of "The Blair Witch Project" and fueled more recently by the "Paranormal Activity" franchise.
The fact that “The Devil Inside” tries to fob itself off as some pseudo-scientific exploration of something that really happened in 2009 isn’t new; that’s what these types of movies have done since 1999’s “The Blair Witch Project” made people believe a pile of sticks was a thing to fear.
Arriving after just 73 minutes, it’s a finale dumber than all of the found-footage folderol since “The Blair Witch Project” and an argument for euthanizing this subset of the horror genre altogether.
Superficially, The Devil Inside is yet another "found footage" picture after the fashion of Cloverfield or The Blair Witch Project or [REC] or Paranormal Activity .
Some have even compared it to the infamous 2012 horror "The Devil Inside," which ended with an abrupt fade to black, and text onscreen telling audiences to visit a website to see the film's ending.
…the meat of the recordings that haunt the film’s protagonist is textbook possession movie fare (I kept thinking about The Devil Inside, goofy new media and all)…
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Since January tends to be quiet at the movies, “M3GAN” also became the first release in over a decade — since 2012’s “The Devil Inside” kicked off to $33.7 million — to open above $30 million in the first week of the new year.
…causing people like myself to do the unthinkable and reference the infamous ending to The Devil Inside in the same sentence as a film by Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow…
It only took two weeks into 2013 for a film to reserve a surefire place on my end-of-the-year bottom ten, and one supposes it's apropos that said movie is a partial parody of 2012's first worst-list entry, " The Devil Inside ."
What began in 2008 with One Missed Call , has carried forward with such “classics” as: The Unborn, Daybreakers, Season of the Witch, The Devil Inside, Texas Chainsaw 3-D, Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death, The Forest, Underworld: Blood Wars , and Insidious: The Last Key.
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Found footage, meanwhile, has been increasingly relegated to "gimmick" status, the occasional success like Paranormal Activity and V/H/S offset by a stream of instantly forgettable junk with such titles as The Devil Inside and Apollo 18.