Atmospheric, tense, Diabolic has Conor Bryce saying his prayers.
Religious horror has been feasting well lately; demonic nuns, crusading exorcists and God-bothering fanatics have all graced our screens in the last few years. Daniel J. Phillips’ Diabolic enters that crowded chapel promising something fresher. Instead of Latin incantations and incense, we’re thrust into the relatively unknown world of Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), a community that in real life practises plural marriage, proxy baptisms and the consumption of hallucinogenic roots. It’s a welcome shift; the last thing we need right now is another priest vs devil movie. Hell, Russell Crowe has two to his name alone.
Diabolic opens with teenager Elise (Elizabeth Cullen) being dunked into a baptismal font, mysterious elders chanting names over her submerged body. When the name “Larue” is spoken, something answers. A creepy shadow moves under the water and Elise bursts back up, hacking black sludge.
A decade later, Elise has fled the compound and is living with her boyfriend Adam (John Kim), trying to build something resembling normality. Of course, that ain’t gonna happen. She frequently wakes to find holes dug in the garden, dirt under her nails and, in one shockingly effective scene, a neighbour’s dead dog. Trauma, her therapist insists. Go back to the source and confront it head-on. In reality, this sort of advice would get her struck off, but in horror films (see also: The Howling and Smile) it’s a prescription for a spooky good time. Elise returns to the forest compound with Adam and her best friend Gwen (Mia Challis) in tow. Hyrum, a chaste former classmate nursing old affections, and his formidable, overbearing mother Alma propose a ritual. This brings answers… and something else.
What makes Diabolic more interesting than the average possession yarn is how patiently it circles Elise’s history before letting the scares off the leash. Under the influence of a hallucinogenic drug, she revisits a forbidden teenage relationship with bishop’s daughter Clara (Luca Asta Sardelis). In the FLDS community, this carries the same weight as witchcraft. Desire is framed as corruption, and shame is a regular pastime. Communal secrecy, female obedience, queerness pushed into the dark: repression, Diabolic declares, is the real horror story. A woman raised inside a patriarchal cult doesn’t need a demon for her life to feel possessed, and the supernatural layer that comes later lands because the human one is ugly enough to validate it.
Despite Diabolic’s murky themes, director Daniel J. Phillips wisely avoids an overly gloomy screen, a recent common bugbear in horror that drives me crazy. No need to adjust your screen’s brightness here; the movie is shot beautifully. Hostile woods, creepy ruins and a gothic baptistery are lit to make corners feel dangerous without hiding the craft. And when the ‘something else’ is extracted from Elise in one particularly stomach-churning scene, it is done with practical effects. No glossy CGI smoke or blood; the horror is visceral and sticky, landing with a satisfyingly real squelch instead of a digital shrug.
Lead actor Cullen inhabits practically all of the movie’s runtime, and she’s more than up to the challenge. Her Elise is all exhausting positivity and restrained trauma; even before the horror kicks into gear, you can see the effort it takes for her to keep from unravelling. Her life has been shaped by other people (first the cult, then her increasingly controlling partner), something she’s been happy to endure until now. It’s both fascinating and uncomfortable to count down the minutes until her cheery veneer finally breaks. The rest of the performances are sadly shallow. John Kim gives Adam a decent amount of warmth in early scenes and menace in later ones, and Mia Challis has fun as Gwen, mostly there for some snarky comedic relief to balance the drama, but neither character escapes the feeling of being partly there to react on cue. Similarly, Robin Goldsworthy and Genevieve Mooy, as Hyrum and Alma, carry a lot of exposition on their backs (never a graceful job), but little else.
Diabolic falters elsewhere. It tries to wear too many hats: folk horror, psychological thriller, body horror, social commentary. There is also a subplot involving Hyrum and Alma’s culpability in the original baptism that doesn’t quite work. But when the final act arrives, all is (mostly) forgiven. What has been simmering suddenly tips into a blood-slicked frenzy. The entity known as Larue is fully unleashed, no wispy apparition or passive spirit. Characters meet swift, horrifyingly inventive deaths, but the violence never feels gratuitous. It complements the exploration of how rigid systems turn women into vessels, an earned release due to a slow, patient build-up. It also forgoes a neat resolution in favour of the unsettling notion that some horrors are generational, institutional… and impossible to escape.
If you’re looking for a horror movie that digs into religious trauma without going full sermon, Diabolic is a solid choice. It’s not flawless, but it has atmosphere, nerve and a terrific central performance. More importantly, this film understands that the horror in religion is all about control. About bodies policed and desires condemned. About what happens when a community decides who is pure, and who is damned. It knows the demon is only half the story. And in the overcrowded possession horror sub-genre, that’s worth celebrating.
Diabolic is available on Blu-ray, DVD and to stream online now.
