So, consider this scenario and ask yourself, “What would I do here?”
You’re living in a rundown apartment building in Los Angeles, one that’s scheduled for demolition soon, in fact. And when an earthquake shakes things up, you and your siblings—just back from getting pizza for your world-weary single mom and her sister (who just showed up at the door)—find a hole in the parking garage under the building.
Huh. Wonder what’s down there? you think. So you climb down to discover a bank vault and a … crypt, for lack of better word. One with crosses—a lot of crosses—hanging over it.
That’s weird, you think. Hey, what’s in here?
Rummaging through disgorged safe deposit boxes you find a very creepy-looking book and four records, as in, vinyl records.
You take the book up to your room, and even when your smarter-than-you sister suggests maybe you shouldn’t try to open it, you do it anyway.
But the book—hint: it’s called The Book of the Dead—is sealed shut with … fangs. Yup, real interlocking teeth. Long ones.
Huh. That’s weird, you think, as your sister again implores you to stop, more desperately now. And even when the book then bites you, drawing huge drops of blood from your wounded hand and weirdly absorbing it instantly into ghoulish looking drawings, you don’t stop.
Because, you know, curiosity.
Well, curiosity, as the saying goes, killed the cat. And it’s likely to kill a few people here too.
Should’ve listened to your sister.
I’ll unpack the film’s spiritual elements in more detail below. Suffice it to say here that a demon is inadvertently unleashed, and it intends to kill everyone it encounters. Most of the victims we meet and care about belong to one dysfunctional-but-likable family.
Ellie is a single mother whose husband recently abandoned her for another woman. She’s struggling to raise three kids—young Kassie, and teens Danny and Bridget—even though she can barely pay the rent on their decrepit apartment. Ellie’s younger sister, Beth, shows up near the beginning, too. She’s a guitar tech who’s unexpectedly pregnant, and she’s looking for her sister’s advice.
Once the plot really gets rolling, the demon commences its ghoulish plot to wipe out this struggling family—and everyone else trapped on the same floor of their apartment building, thanks to damage from that earthquake I mentioned.
None of that’s positive, obviously. But here’s what is: As the casualties climb, Beth, especially, mounts a sacrificial and heroic defense as she seeks to protect the children from the devilish and violent proceedings that follow. And while there are plenty of those, we see a family trying its best to come together, to help one another and to resist as best they can the malevolent entity that’s stalking them one by one.
Along the way, a few plucky-but-unlucky neighbors do their best to help, too.
The whole spiritual mess here is unleashed, as I hinted at in the introduction, by Danny’s irrepressibly unwise curiosity. When the earthquake opens a hole beneath the apartment building, he quickly scrambles in and comes back with The Book of the Dead and those four records—the combination of which unleashes the demon.
The records play back the voice and the warning of a priest who last encountered this spiritual entity in 1923. The last of the vinyl warns that his own insatiable spiritual curiosity led to utter ruin, and that the demon he unleashed cannot be stopped—though perhaps the myriad crosses hanging above the crypt below the apartment were at least partially effective in keeping the nasty spirit at bay for 100 years. (That scene also involves a spooky jump-scare involving a life-size crucifix with Jesus on it, complete with a crown of thorns.)
Once the demon is out, well, it’s pretty much not a good thing for anyone. It first possesses Ellie, the family’s mom, often using her voice to entice people into thinking that maybe everything’s going to be OK after all.
Well, it’s not. And Ellie’s hardly the first victim. In fact, even after it inhabits her body (and then other people’s), it tells the family, “Mommy’s with the maggots now.” Lines like those throughout the film aim at dark laughs as much as spiritual terror–which has been true of this franchise since its inception in 1981 in Sam Raimi’s film The Evil Dead.
The film posits that the evil that’s been unleashed can’t be contained, and that the only response is to run away from it, which is exactly what an ever-dwindling group of people try to do here. Someone says a very nice prayer, in fact. But it doesn’t accomplish anything.
One odd positive note here: When the demon senses that Beth is pregnant, it hears her preborn child’s heartbeat and says that it relishes the chance to devour not just one soul, but two. Obviously, the devouring part is disgusting, but it recognizes the fetus’s personhood even though it is unborn.
Early in the film, Beth is at a concert and takes a pregnancy test in a bathroom. We see the test in her hand, which then dips below the screen as she urinates on it. Her stressed and disappointed face tells us that the result is positive.
As the film progresses, it’s suggested that perhaps this has happened before (though that’s not absolutely clear). The demon, once it possesses Ellie, hurls seriously filthy accusations at Beth about her promiscuity.
Oh boy.
The story commences at a remote cabin in the woods near a lake (a familiar setting for this franchise), where a young woman has been possessed by the story’s demon. She rips her cousin’s scalp off and drops it on a dock, then decapitates her boyfriend underwater and offscreen. We know what happened, though, because she tosses his head (lips still moving) onto the dock next to the bloody scalp.
From there, the story jumps backwards one fateful day to explain how the demon got to said cabin. As mentioned, Danny’s discovery of the Book of the Dead—complete with all manner of creep-out images of devils and demons and such—is what sets things in motion here. Once the demon gets loose, it torments and ravages Ellie, her family and everyone unfortunate enough to be trapped on that floor of the apartment building.
After a surprisingly slow set-up to the entire story, the demon gets bloodily to work, possessing Ellie and then others.
Really, really bad things happen. A partial litany: Someone’s eyeball is bitten out, then spat into the throat of another character, who chokes on it and dies. Various limbs are stabbed with shards of a mirror and a large steak knife. One character’s skull is impaled with a stake. Someone has scissors rammed down her throat and into her face.
Shotgun blasts gorily obliterate a person’s limbs, one by one. Bones get snapped. Inhabited bodies move in grotesque, unnatural ways, popping like popcorn as they do. Someone eats glass, complete with bloody crunching. A cheese grater is used to devastatingly squeamish effect on one character’s exposed forearm.
Blood—tankerloads of blood—flows ever more frequently. Two people nearly drown in it, in fact. A skull and a chainsaw have an altercation: the chainsaw wins. Even more grotesque things happen with random body parts that have been removed.
And … there’s a woodchipper.
There’s more, but you get the picture.
Three f-words, seven s-words, one use of the c-word. Other profanity includes four uses of “a–,” two of “b–ch” and one of “b–tard.”
A boyfriend brags about giving his girlfriend the drug Klonopin to calm her down. (It fails to sedate the demon she’s been possessed by.)
As is often the case in movies about supernatural infestations, we get some of the insectoid variety, too. After someone vomits up maggots, she says eerily, “I gotta kill the creepy crawlies that I got inside my tummy,” before eating glass. Multiple scenes involve vomit of varying viscosity and color. A fly crawls on a dead person’s eyeball. Etc.
You might think that demons would eventually just get bored possessing people, killing them, then finding more victims to inhabit and dismember. You know, that maybe they’d one day wake up and decide that it would be a great day for something like, I don’t know, Parcheesi or shuffleboard.
Yeah, not really. They never seem to get tired tormenting poor, unsuspecting humans in the most disgusting ways you can imagine (and, probably, a few that you haven’t imagined).
And so it is here.
The latest iteration in this long-running franchise delivers yet another jolting dose of blood-drenched demonic assault. The best that we can say of it is that most of the characters are actually people you’re rooting for. And, spoiler warning, not all of them die.
Just most of them. And they die really, really badly, all courtesy of a maniacally wicked demon whose appetite for flesh, blood and souls cannot be sated.
After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.
