I don’t know what happened to M. Night Shyamalan the director, but I’ve always enjoyed M. Night Shyamalan the writer. So, even though I’m not a fan of horror films, I was interested to see what story M. Night would tell about the devil in a film written by him and directed by John Eric Dowdle.
Devil (2010) is not very profound or very scary (although my 12-year old might not sleep for a week if she saw it). But what it is is entertaining and decidedly moral. Sure, there’s a good amount of folk religion here (a suicide paves the way for the devil to become incarnate), but the story hinges on the reality of 1 Peter 5:8, “Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour,” which the movie quotes at its opening.
I won’t go into the plot much, it’s basically a story about 5 people trapped on an elevator, and one of them might be the devil. We learn that all 5 of these people have a past, and we meet some other characters on the outside, one of whom, the main detective, has lots of skeletons in his closet. The story starts out as a story of justice, with the devil bemoaning, “Whores, liars, cheaters, and deserters, they’re all the same,” but it ends as a story of confession and forgiveness. The moral of the story is beautiful and decidedly Christian (although we don’t get the whole Christian story; saving faith in Christ is the indispensable foundation of true redemption): real evil is within ourselves, and it’s only through confession and forgiveness that you can be truly free.
A couple of things that bugged me (spoiler alert): I thought it would have been more effective if the narrator had given his whole spiel at the beginning, rather than narrating it as it went along, essentially telegraphing what was about to happen. For instance, when the fire department comes to cut open a wall to the elevator, the narrator says something to the effect of, “Men always try to physically stop him, but the devil is too smart for that.” Also, I’m no detective, but when the cop assumes that there must be broken glass on the sidewalk for it to be a suicide, don’t people usually jump out of open windows or from ledges? (But maybe he had seen glass on the body of the suicide victim?) And someone could also complain about the fact that the devil changes his MO when he comes to his last victim- up until then he’s been killing them with no warning, but suddenly he wants to talk it out with the last guy. But, you wouldn’t have a story if you didn’t have that scene, so you have to give them that one.
Now, some people reading this may be shocked that a pastor would watch a horror movie. And I used to think such movies were fairly useless until I read an interview with Scott Derrickson, a Christian and the director of the movies The Exorcism of Emily Rose and The Day the Earth Stood Still. He said, “To me, the horror genre is the genre of non-denial. It’s about admitting that there is evil in the world, and recognizing that there is evil within us, and that we’re not in control, and that the things that we are afraid of must be confronted in order for us to relinquish that fear… [M]y feeling is that a lot of Christians are wary of this genre simply because it’s unpleasant. The genre is not about making you feel good, it is about making you face your fears. And in my experience, that’s something that a lot of Christians don’t want to do.”
The tagline of Devil is “Bad things happen for a reason.” Yes, in horror they always do. And from a Christian worldview, they always do as well. And if there is a devil, there must be a God, who not only inhabited a body, but actually became a man fully in order to fully sacrifice Himself for all the “whores, liars, cheaters and deserters.”
While the movie works on a lot of levels, it also misses the mark a bit (again, folk religion playing here) by saying that the Devil is justice’s henchman to punish unrepentant sinners. The gospel tells us, though, that God punishes His own sinners. The Devil tends to leave unrepentant sinners alone; he’s already got them, and the last thing he wants to do is to make them aware of their sin, best to leave them in their ignorance and denial (as C.S. Lewis discusses so well in Screwtape Letters). It’s believers that Peter is talking about when he says the devil seeks someone to devour- 1 Peter 5:9 says, “Resist him [the devil], firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world.”
All in all, though, it isn’t bad to be reminded that there’s more going on in this world than what we can see and feel.
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