31 Nights of Horror: Night Thirty, "The Devil's Candy"

I told you we’d come back to Australia to visit Sean Byrne one last time, and here we are: seven long years after making a splash with The Loved Ones, Byrne is back in his element with The Devil’s Candy, the movie Deathgasm can only dream of being. Yeah, it’s not good form to praise one movie by trashing another, but give The Devil’s Candy a watch and see for yourself the level this movie is operating on compared to Deathgasm.

A deftly-wrought horror movie, The Devil’s Candy is built on the complicated dynamics of a family that isn’t just a main character and kill fodder: protagonist Jesse Hellman (Ethan Embry, Late Phases) is both a father and an artist, struggling to balance his creative passions with the need for financial security and his family’s well-being, which means he sometimes has to paint butterfly murals for local banks, and sometimes can’t be there for his wife and daughter, Astrid (Shiri Appleby) and Zooey (the wonderful Kiara Glasco), who love him almost as much as he loves them. The Devil’s Candy, like Deathgasm, is a movie by metalheads, ostensibly for metalheads; but it’s clear from the posters in Zooey’s room and the stickers on Jesse’s car that Byrne knows his stuff far better than Deathgasm’s creators. His love for the genre doesn’t go unappreciated at Metal Lifestyle, and neither do those Cult Leader and Young and in the Way stickers on the back windshield of Jesse’s car. Most importantly, his characters aren’t completely defined by their music choices--it’s the family’s relationships to one another that define the movie and give it its beating heart, one that will weather a lot before all the supernatural maliciousness of their suspiciously dirt-cheap new home is through.

    Sure, “new family moves into old house with a dark secret” is a familiar enough premise to warrant some skepticism, but The Devil’s Candy is one of those rare movies that truly upends old formulas in the spirit of his first feature The Loved Ones, blazing new trails in the pursuit of great modern horror. It movie carries absolutely no fat on its lean 79-minute body, cutting all the repetitive haunted-house and possession tropes to focus on its people, so that when the horror kicks into high-gear in the third act, the danger hits like an axe to the chest. Effortlessly balancing its dramatic weight on a tightrope of hardcore horror and light goofball comedy, The Devil’s Candy is unlike any horror movie this year, and is therefore unquestionably one of the year’s best.

-Brian L.

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