At the Devil’s Door (2014)
I think that in the course of my many years of watching horror films, I’d be willing to attest that there are very few things that can send a chill down my spine – The Exorcist, The Omen and John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness are just a few of the cinematic equivalents that have acted as an effective laxative at one time or another for me in my life, if you catch what I’m flingin’ at you.
More importantly, did you pick up on the theme of the three movies that I’ve laid out for you? If you guessed Satanic overtones, then you’ve snagged a prize for “most attentive reader.”
Seriously, though, while director Nicholas McCarthy’s second feature, At the Devil’s Door, doesn’t completely fill in all the scary spaces, it more than adequately serves as a prime weapon in the scare arsenal of a filmmaker who’s hitting his stride with fear-dispensing techniques.
McCarthy, whose 2012 film The Pact both shocked and scared audiences equally, returns to the genre that has welcomed him with open arms, firing off a shot that echoes loudly and provides a fair amount of jump scares to the unsuspecting. The story is told in a sort of three-pronged fashion, with the main focus upon a teen girl (Ashley Rickards) who is offered the chance to play a modified version of the old sleight of hand shell game with her boyfriend’s uncle. Turns out that if you win, you get to sell your soul for a fairly large chunk of rolled dough (and I’m not talkin about Pillsbury either). Once she wins the game, she is allowed to walk to a nearby desolate intersection, where she is to utter her name so that “he” may know exactly who she is. A short while afterwards, she is terrorized and eventually possessed by a demon from Hell. Upon her subsequent unexplained “disappearance” years later, a proficient real estate agent named Leigh (Catalina Sandino Moreno) is offered the chance to sell off the very home where the teen girl was attacked.
Leigh and her younger sister, Vera (Naya Rivera), unknowingly find themselves in serious jeopardy once it’s discovered that the missing girl is still “residing” in the home Leigh is attempting to sell, whom Leigh thinks is the daughter of the sellers. She walks around in a daze, clad in a red hooded raincoat and her favorite red sneakers (these scenes alone were enough to give me more white hairs than I already have).
The frights do come in bunches, and while some are passable, others are enough to give you noticeable vertical allowance while sitting in your favorite chair – the one thing that McCarthy has down pat is the ability to pace and smack a good scare directly off of your melon. The mood throughout the film is dour and gray; feelings of dread hang heavy over every character at one stage or another, which only adds to the sinister issue at hand. The tension within is palpable, especially during the darkened house scenes, and the performances mirror the mood, with Rickards providing standout imagery of the possessed. Her scene in the film, when she tracks down the couple for whom she is supposed to be babysitting, is of the Arctic variety when it comes to chills.
While At the Devil’s Door won’t provide high-level heebies to all who partake in its baneful premises, it surely does offer quite the caveat: No matter what today’s going rate is offered at, selling your soul just isn’t what it used to be. Recommended (with the lights off).
Starring Ava Acres, Naya Rivera, Catalina Sandino Moreno
Directed by Nicholas McCarthy
Distributed by IFC Midnight
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At the Devil's Door
Categorized: Reviews
