Movies
Five Horror Movies About the Devil to Stream This Week
Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Mephistopheles, the Devil – whatever you call him, there are few recurring representations of evil as powerful or as fear-inducing as the ruler of hell in horror.
The Devil has been a fixture for as long as cinema has existed, offering no shortage of depictions in the genre to induce fights or deliver cautionary tales.
This week’s streaming picks highlight some of the best Devils in horror, from a fork-tongued, cloven-hooved beast to Faustian businessmen masking their inhuman side.
Here’s where you can watch them this week.
For more Stay Home, Watch Horror picks, click here.
Angel Heart – Hoopla, Kanopy
This twisted psychological horror noir follows Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke), a private investigator whom Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) hires to track down missing musician Johnny Favorite. Harry’s search leads him to New Orleans, where he finds voodoo, murder, love, and a deal with the devil. A slow, simmering, hard-boiled detective tale gives way to shocking, taboo-shattering secrets and reveals that will unsettle you as much as Harry. Speaking of hard-boiled, De Niro’s menacing performance ensures you’ll never look at hard boiled eggs quite the same way again.
The Devil’s Advocate – Tubi
Before he was pissing off the Devil as John Constantine in Constantine, Keanu Reeves found himself tempted by Satan as ambitious young lawyer Kevin Lomax in The Devil’s Advocate. He stars opposite Al Pacino as John Milton, aka Satan, the charismatic leader of a high-end law firm, working hard to tempt Lomax with money, power, and lust. As the moral lines blur with every new success, the young lawyer realizes his boss has sinister plans for him. With unadulterated smarm and charisma, Pacino’s version of the Devil is far more outgoing than many of his other onscreen iterations. Nightmarish visions bring a few notable scares, but it’s the scene-chewing performance by Pacino, featuring devilish monologues delivered with over-the-top gusto, that makes this one worthwhile.
The Devil’s Candy – AMC+, Kanopy, Shudder
The Loved Ones and Dangerous Animals director Sean Byrne’s sophomore effort offers an affecting spin on Satanic, heavy metal horror. It’s heavy metal and the deep bonds forged between father and daughter that anchor a tortured artist tale centered around Jesse (Ethan Embry) when he moves his family into a new rural home that previously hosted a grim tragedy. As the same dark forces that drove Ray Smilie (Pruitt Taylor Vince) to madness seek to seduce Jesse, a shared love of heavy metal dangles the possibility of salvation for a change. An earworm soundtrack that includes bands like Ghost, Slayer, and Machine Head, accompanied by metal references throughout, solidifies this Satanic chiller as a can’t-miss horror movie for metalheads.
Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil – Netflix
Errementari is a re-telling of an ancient fable about a Blacksmith who finds himself battling the Devil. In this story, the Blacksmith has captured a demon and lives a life of hermit-like seclusion away from the prying eyes of the townsfolk. All is going well until a desperate little girl, Usue, accidentally stumbles across the Devil and unknowingly releases him. A Basque folktale-inspired dark horror fantasy that features great atmosphere and practical effects, this pick is for those who prefer dark humor and fairy tale whimsy over scares.
Satan’s Slaves – AMC+, Shudder
A loose remake/prequel of the 1980 Indonesian horror film, writer/director Joko Anwar brings the unrelenting scares in Satan’s Slaves. A family in a rural home struggles to survive after mom Mawarni Suwono’s long battle with illness dried up all the royalties from her once-lucrative music career. Her death triggers a series of supernatural occurrences revealing that mom made a deal with Satan; and he’s come to collect. The isolated setting, the atmosphere, and the endless barrage of frights make this a perfect spooky watch for those seeking genuine chills. While the Devil doesn’t make an appearance in the flesh, his imprint looms large. Look for the sequel that’s also streaming on Shudder.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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