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ON THIS DAY IN HORROR - September 17th

"DEVIL" released in 2010

Throughout history there has been a persistent legend where events were brought about by the Devil, who takes on a human form, in order to kill sinners and take them to Hell. For five strangers, they are about to learn that some legends are terrifyingly true, in M Night Shyamalan's Devil!

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Detective Bowden (Chris Messina), a recovering alcoholic after the hit-and-run death of his wife and son and which the perpetrator was never caught, is assigned a mysterious suicide case. Meanwhile, five strangers - the Mechanic (Logan Marshall-Green), the Young Woman (Bojana Novakovic), a Security Guard (Bokeem Woodbine), sleazy Salesman (Geoffrey Arend) and an Old Woman (Jenny O'Hara) - board an elevator, which later becomes stuck between floors. When security finds them, they notice that there is CCTV and a radio with which they can call into the elevator, but they have no way of hearing the passengers in return. One the security guards manning the CCTV monitor, Ramirez (Jacob Vargas) is spooked when he sees a flash of what looks like a screaming face frozen on the video monitor. His boss Lustig (Matt Craven) simply dismisses his "superstitious" claims and sends a technician, Dwight (Joe Cobden), to repair the elevator, but later falls to his death in the elevator shaft when the power mysteriously fails. During the power failure, the Young Woman is attacked in the darkness and when the power goes on discovers she is bleeding from a "bite" wound on her side. Instantly the people in the elevator start turning on each other, accusing the other of the being the attacker. Having earlier deduced that the suicide victim he is investigating jumped from the same building that has the trapped elevator, Bowden assumes control of the situation and begins by determining the identities of the strangers in the elevator. When Lustig is electrocuted trying to restore power, lights in the elevator simultaneously go out in elevator again - only this time when the lights go back on, the Salesman has had his jugular vein sliced and later bleeds to death. Ordering each of the survivors into their own corner of the elevator, Bowden learns the backstory of some of the passengers - including one who has a history of violence, while another is a thief - when Ramirez tells Bowden a story his mother told him about the Devil who sometimes actively seeks out individuals who have sinned while they are still alive on Earth. Initially not believing Ramirez's story (just as Lustig hadn't), Bowden is forced to consider that very possibility when power fails in the elevator again, and this time the Old Woman is suddenly hung by lamp cord from the elevator ceiling. Bowden is now faced with an impossible case - if it is true that none of the passengers in the stranded elevator were there by chance, but rather chosen and arranged to be in confined place by the Devil, then which one of the passengers is the Devil himself?

[first lines]
Ramirez: [voice-over] When I was a child, my mother would tell me a story about how the Devil roams the Earth. Sometimes, she said, he would take human form so he could punish the damned on Earth before claiming their souls. The ones he chose would be gathered together and tortured as he hid amongst them, pretending to be one of them. I always believed my mother was telling me an old wives' tale. My mother's story would always begin the same way, with a suicide paving the way for the Devil's arrival. And it would always end with the deaths of all those trapped.

Top:   A mysterious suicide sets off a demonic chain of events;

Above:   The damned passengers; the Mechanic (Logan Marshall-Green), the Young Woman (Bojana Novakovic), a Security Guard (Bokeem Woodbine), sleazy Salesman (Geoffrey Arend) and the Old Woman (Jenny O'Hara) 

In July 2008, it was announced that producer/director M Night Shyamalan had partnered with Media Rights Capital to form a production company called Night Chronicles, in which Shyamalan would produce, but not direct, one film a year for three years. Three months later, Shyamalan announced the first film, which  was intended to be the first of The Night Chronicles trilogy, would be Devil - to be directed by John Erick Dowdle (director of the found footage horror films The Poughkeepsie Tapes and Quarantine), with a screenplay written by Brian Nelson. The concept of Devil was taken from the popular legend of the "Devil's Meeting". According to the myth, the Devil's appearance would be preceded by a suicide, before taking on a human form in order to trap his intended victims in a confined location where a group of such individuals congregated, where the Devil killed them one at a time. During these events, images of the Devil would manifest a rough appearance on electronic equipment - with cynics claiming that it was simply a distortion - and any attempts by mortal beings to stop the Devil met with accidents and were killed as a result. Shyamalan was also influenced by Agatha Christie's 1939 novel And Then There Were None, where both share the same plot of a group of people with guilty pasts trapped in an isolated location and die off one by one, with the final plot twist also being the same.

Starring Chris Messina, Jacob Vargas, Matt Craven and Joshua Peace as Detective Bowden, Ramirez, Lustig and Detective Markowitz respectively, none of the other actors in the cast - Logan Marshall-Green, Bojana Novakovic, Bokeem Woodbine, Geoffrey Arend and Jenny O'Hara - were credited by their character's names, just by their occupation or what they were. Interestingly, all five characters who get on the elevator have the color red in common to give a visual connection between the characters: the Mechanic's satchel, the Old Woman's hair, the Young Woman's nails, the insignia on the Guard's uniform, and the Salesman's tie are all red.

[last lines]
Ramirez: [voice-over] After my mother would finish her story, she would always comfort us. "Don't worry," she'd say. "If the Devil is real, then God must be real, too."

Top:   Detective Bowden (Chris Messina) and security guards Ramirez (Jacob Vargas) and Lustig (Matt Craven) are helpless to save the passengers, as they begin to die one-by-one;

Above:   Legend says that images of the Devil would manifest a rough appearance on electronic equipment!

Although not screened in advance for critics, M. Night Shyamalan made a humorous parody video for the Internet to promote Devil. Taking the premise of the movie, but instead having it take place on an escalator, Shyamalan himself starred with MTV's Josh Horowitz and Penthouse Pet Ryan Keely. Devil was set to have a release date on February 11, 2011, but was bumped up to September 17, 2010, where it recouped it's entire budget in the first weekend at the box office, grossing over $12 million (ultimately earning over $60 million worldwide). Critics however where divided on Shyamalan's Devil, with most giving mixed reviews. Dennis Harvey of Variety gave Devil a lukewarm review, saying "Like the solid B-thrillers of yore that often outshone A-pics topping double bills, M. Night Shyamalan-produced Devil is nothing very special or original, but it gets the job done briskly and economically", while review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes' consensus being, "It's better than many of the other films M. Night Shyamalan has been associated with, but Devil never gets more than a few low-budget thrills out of its fiendishly promising premise."

Four months before the release of Devil, Shyamalan had announced the devleopment of the second film titled 12 Strangers, later changed to Reincarnate, about a jury discussing a case dealing with the supernatural. Chris Sparling was set to write the script, while Daniel Stamm (The Last Exorcism) would direct. Shyamalan would also confirm that the story for the currently untitled third installment was going to be taken from his abandoned sequel to Unbreakable. But while Devil was considered a financial success, the next two films in The Night Chronicles trilogy weren't made, for still unknown reasons.

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE:    52% 

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