Review: Bedeviled – “Fun popcorn horror”

Using internet and social media as a new gateway for evil to stalk pretty, young teens in the American suburbs is hardly new – film (itself a technological art form) has always, since its earliest days, reflected our fascination with and fear of new technology, from the Lumiere’s steam train scaring audiences to the giant engine in Metropolis to recent films using the internet, like Pulse or Unfriended. We’ve seen quite a number in recent years, hardly surprising given our seemingly endless fascination with and increasing use of the online world and social media (especially now it goes everywhere with us on our ever-present smartphones), and horror has often been quicker than most forms to explore our love-hate, desire-fear relationship with technology and how it affects individuals and society.

In Bedeviled it takes the form of the eponymous App, which a group of high school friends are all sent… From their deceased chum. Most of us would be a little worried at receiving an invitation to download an App from the phone of a friend who had died a few days before, but our teens just install it right away (to be honest this doesn’t stretch credulity, I imagine a lot of people who practically live on their phones would just install new Apps without blinking too). Of course any horror flick fan knows that such an App is going to prove to be an open invite to bring evil to play right into the home – in some ways this is the 21st century version of the curious teens playing with an old Ouija Board they found in the loft, and in fact one character comments as much during Bedeviled.

There’s a pretty decent opening here, with the soon-to-be-deceased member of their group being menaced in her home, with a nicely creepy figure that unfolds itself in the darkness of the nocturnal home. After that though, I have to say it seemed to very much veer into an awful lot of teen horror cliché: of course the youngsters are all good-looking, they all live in large houses (where the parents are almost always absent so they can be alone when spooky noises scare them at night), there is a lot of those daft things people do in horror movies, like deciding to explore the dark house for a noise and not actually switch on the lights, the “this can’t be real” moments, the childhood scares that suddenly become manifest after they’ve discussed them, there are numerous dark scenes shot from low tracking angles and so on.

For the first half I was, I admit, thinking this is running through way more than its fair share of clichés. But then I started wondering if in fact this was deliberate, that the film-makers were actually taking all those many standard tropes of the teen horror and deciding to have fun with them, that they know fine well that horror fans know these are standard elements and we’re all in on the joke here. I really couldn’t quite decide which it was, just running through those clichés or being postmodern and having fun by deploying them. It does offer up some nice little scares though – the talking App invites one girl to pan the phone around her room, like an augmented reality app, and even though you know, you know well before it happens, that as she pans the screen around there will be something horrifying at some point, it still gives you a good jump when you see it (the digital App equivalent to the old seeing something scary standing behind you in the mirror, but when you turn around, it isn’t there trick), and that seemed to reinforce for me the idea that the use of those standard elements was deliberate.

Bedevilled may not be the most innovative horror, or even social media horror, but it does have some cool little moments, and I think it knows its audience. My recommendation is to treat this as fun popcorn horror – watch it on a Saturday night with a bunch of friends as part of a double-bill with some other teen horror, maybe, with the popcorn and booze and that’s just the way to take this.

Bedevilled is out on VoD from The Movie Partnership from 17th September.