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| images courtesy IFC Midnight |
Director Neill Blomkamp quietly arrives back on the scene with the brand new technological horror flick, Demonic. Breaking away from the big budget fare that’s lined his film career so far, he sidesteps into a new genre that allows him to work in his own variable creative realm with limited funding and a much smaller scale that ultimately seems to fit his skill set perfectly.
After his cult hit District 9 and the maligned Matt Damon vehicle Elysium, Blomkamp hit a career bump with the science fiction movie, Chappie. The critical and box office flop ended his major studio run but did give us his Oats film short series, an ongoing set of sci-fi based projects which have found a massive following and streaming home on YouTube. Despite his cancelled Alien 5, the director is back in fine form giving his audience a terrifying look inside the mind of a coma patient that's experiencing something devilish.
Mixing terrifying elements of The Taking of Deborah Logan, Altered States and various themes from the demonic possession sub-genre, Blomkamp fiendishly proves he has a firm grasp on whatever medium he’s working in. With Demonic, he may be toiling on a smaller scale, but the grand scheme is still much larger than the canvas he’s working on. Curtailed from huge sets, massive action spectacles and computer generated battle scenes, the director seems to be filling out another path for his career with horror dead to rights within his sights.
The resulting movie is a unique one that abandons many of the conventional norms that consistently inhabit this brand of horror. Blomkamp's newest is a slow burn that would fit right at home with Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor or Bryan Bertino's 2020 horror jaunt, The Dark and the Wicked. With Demonic, Mr. Blomkamp switches gears but does so with his amazing creative eye and just enough narrative to carry a story that definitely won't appeal to the masses, but will to those that love off the beaten path genre pieces.
When the central character Carly is told that her wayward mother is in a coma, she’s made aware that she can use a new technology to enter the woman’s mind to interface with her and let her know her true feelings. The resulting story is both interesting and mysterious, never giving away too much but just enough to carry the film's dark message that captures the battle between good and evil. He also revisits some of the psychological elements we experienced in Tarsem Singh's 2000 horror film, The Cell, which could almost serve as a companion piece to this.
Although he's said to finally be working on District 10, this was a nice bypass for Blomkamp. It would be excellent to see him do much more with this style of film.
-CG
