Every Halloween gives audiences a new horror movie to watch in theaters to spice up the spooky season. This October gave us films like Halloween Ends and the Netflix original Wendell & Wild, but the weekend of Halloween gave us Prey for the Devil, a horror movie with a tumultuous production history. Originally set for a release under the title The Devil’s Light in January 2021, this movie has been pushed back a few times. Now that it’s finally here, the best thing to come from its release is that we no longer have to watch the same trailer before every horror movie in theaters.
Prey for the Devil is a familiar, poorly-crafted horror film that never takes advantage of its premise. This movie is set during a global rise in demonic possessions, where the Catholic Church has reopened exorcism schools to train priests in the Rite of Exorcism. The idea of a world where demonic possessions are a regular occurrence can be terrifying in the right hands and unintentionally hilarious in the wrong ones, but this movie goes down neither route. It leans more toward the latter, recycling horror ideas without executing them in an interesting way.
Every horror movie these days must tackle trauma somehow. The protagonist must have a traumatic past they are dealing with, which ties into the main story. We saw this most recently with Smile, a horror film that made up for its on-the-nose themes with genuinely frightening tension and scares. This movie tackles that theme similarly with our protagonist, Sister Ann (Jacqueline Byers), a nun who grew up with an abusive, mentally unstable mother. Her mother’s bursts of frightening, violent behavior are answered by the idea of a demon who possessed her to abuse her child. The demon in the film feels so vague that the fear factor is lost.
A movie like Smile is scary because, in that film, the demon could possess anyone at any given moment and we would not know until we saw their smile. This film has fragments of that, but it never pulls the tension the way that it should. The scare sequences feel pedestrian, using the age-old flickering lights and the occasional overreliance on CGI to create supernatural entities. A film that directly deals with exorcisms is a gold mine for horror, but Prey for the Devil‘s execution of these ideas is so over-the-top that it can almost reach comical territory.
One of Prey for the Devil‘s early scenes features Sister Ann tending to a patient, when the demon suddenly possesses the patient. A song plays over the speaker, the door slams shut, the lights flicker, and all of this sets the atmosphere well. However, the patient then grabs Ann, screams, “LET ME IN!” and begins waltzing with her while sticking out a tongue that looks like it belongs to Venom. Scenes like this are rampant throughout the film, where everything feels so excessive. It seems like director Daniel Stamm is always actively trying to scare the audience without knowing when to pull back, making it feel like he’s committing to a lack of subtlety.
The horror can almost become mundane as a result. There are a few scenes where your heart may race a little from the tension, but typically, every scene builds up to a jump scare. The characters are thin, with a relationship between Sister Ann and Father Dante (Christian Navarro) that feels very underwritten. Ann’s only character trait is her traumatizing past, and while the screenplay from Halloween H20 writer Robert Zappia effectively uses that past to deliver a plot twist, nothing about the movie builds to anything too unexpected or satisfying.
Ultimately, Prey for the Devil is a very hammy movie that almost feels like it was made in the 80s, back when audiences got these ridiculous horror films. The uninspired execution of the concept never allows the movie to take full form, leading to a film that takes itself very seriously while never fully exploring any of its themes of gender inequality in the Catholic Church. The groundwork was there for a thrilling horror picture, but the result is a bland, poorly-crafted film that you won’t remember long after the credits roll.
SCORE: 4/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 4 equates to “Poor.” The negatives overweigh the positive aspects making it a struggle to get through.
