DEVIL STORY

“Do you ever want to watch a camera evaporate the notion of logic and expound itself upon its own horror in the silence of its explanation? Ok. Watch DEVIL STORY.” - N3V3RW00RLD

The French countryside becomes a place of profound spiritual malfunction in Bernard Launois’ DEVIL STORY, a “horror” film whose every attempt to explain itself opens another hole in the universe. A couple’s broken-down car delivers them to an isolated castle, where a local legend about a shipwreck offers the comforting suggestion that what follows might have something to do with what came before. Outside, a grunting mutant in a Nazi uniform murders passing motorists. His mother has instructions for him. There is also a mummy.

Somewhere between Jean Rollin’s cemetery dreamscapes and the private obsessions of backyard monster movies, DEVIL STORY discovers a completely outsider rhythm entirely its own. A woman wanders through the darkness while an old man devotes an extraordinary portion of his evening to shooting unsuccessfully at a sometimes-invisible horse. The horse keeps neighing. Scenes persist long past the point when another filmmaker would have intervened, until helpless astonishment gives way to the peculiar sensation that you, too, may never leave this stretch of countryside. Then a pirate ship emerges from a cliff.

There’s something precious about a movie this completely surrendered to its own imagination, with no apparent ability to distinguish a startling vision from a man spending half the night losing a battle with livestock. See it with other people. You’ll want witnesses when the mummy starts drooling and the horse resumes its work.