What I’ve Been Watching: Here Comes the Devil

Finally managed to watch this, after it had haunted my Netflix queue for a year or more. Too bad I waited so long; it’s really pretty good.

In it, a family on vacation splits up when the parents want to take a nap in their car (which turns into a pretty sexy scene—in a truck stop parking lot, no less) and the kids want to explore a nearby hill. The kids are supposed to be back in 90 minutes, but they don’t show up until the next day. As you might imagine, when they return, something is very different, and very wrong with them. As someone who loves a good doppelganger/changed-loved-one story, this is right up my alley.

It reminded me of Picnic at Hanging Rock quite a bit, though with sex as a text, rather than subtext, and violence accompanying the mystery about the kids.

Here Comes the Devil is a very sexy movie, one of the more legitimately sexy horror movies of recent memory, but I can’t quite get a grip on its attitude towards sex. There’s some intimation that sex allows some of the horrible things to happen, but that rule breaks down at the end of the film. So, hard to read on that front.

There are some good scares and some creepy ideas that I won’t give away here, but if the set-up sounds interesting, I’d check it out. Anyone else see it?