Sideshow performers Maggie (Toby Poser), Eve (Zelda Adams) and Seven (John Adams) travel around Depression-era America with a carnival which has lost most of its sparkle. As the crowds dwindle, there’s one particular attraction which continues to hold a grim fascination for those gathered – Mr. Tibbs, who cuts off his fingers with scissors. As Eve discovers, this isn’t sleight of hand. Tibbs has made a pact with the devil and a specific artefact is used to facilitate his regenerative powers.
Moving around the country, Eve, Maggie and Seven become entangled in the satanic world which has claimed Tibbs as its own and find there’s no going back as they leave a trail of bodies in their wake, committing heinous acts of violence in order to stay together as a family unit. Their ultimate goal? The Buffalo Horror Show, where they intend to wow the judges with something memorably gruesome…
After The Deeper You Dig and Hellbender, The Adams Family return for more confrontational carnage in a gory period piece which benefits, as those previous movies did, from careful, skilful world building, laying the bedrock of vital details but leaving more than enough space for the audience to extrapolate. The carnival scenes, in particular, are wonderfully scuzzy, depicting a hand to mouth existence which is so vivid you can feel the grime oozing from the screen.
From a filmmaking team who clearly cares about telling the stories that matter to them, regardless of their commercial potential, their usual micro-budgeted adventures would seem more at odds with this latest tale than ever, given the historical nature of the piece. However, the trappings of the decade are all present and correct, the ragged rural settings looking rather beautiful when they’re not being sprayed red as a result of Maggie’s penchant for hitting folks repeatedly with a hammer.
Yes, it’s violent, often shockingly so, but the sequences of marrow-freezing murder are often underscored with a sly, dark sense of humour, which allows the viewer to take an initial breath of relief but then hits even harder as another unfortunate falls victim to the family’s ever-growing, ever more desperate blood lust. This series of episodic side quests, serving their mission to reach the carny version of the America’s Got Talent final, sets up a final act in which our trio of travellers are changed – in all ways – beyond measure.
Gore hounds will lap up the grisly mayhem, of course, but character development and the atmosphere of the time is more the order of the day. The screenplay takes the time to give solid backstories to its protagonists, specifically the wartime flashbacks involving Seven, how the genesis of his PTSD continues to echo through the years and how Maggie’s protective instincts lurch into their most extreme manifestation. Poser switches between tender and terrifying and her queasily amusing, paradoxically sympathetic performance is backed up by sterling work from the Adams duo.
Fans of the Hellbender soundtrack (yes, I’m one) will be delighted to learn that the score here is another cracker, breaking out an incongruous, fuzzy, stoner rock kick to the 1930s odyssey depicted here. It shouldn’t work but it does, and beautifully so. As matters turn ever bleaker, a wall of distorted guitar noise is the perfect accompaniment to the accelerated degeneration of our antiheroes, matched by the literal degradation of the visuals themselves before bursting into vibrant colour as…well, you’ll have to see for yourselves.
A thoroughly satisfying, memorably twisted collision of arthouse sensibility and crowd pleasing horror havoc, Where The Devil Roams sees The Adams Family smashing the boundaries of the genre like few others out there. It’s often nihilistic and brutal, but it also has much to say about unconditional love and the unbreakable bonds of family. We see the quieter moments as Maggie, Eve and Seven go about their daily chores, sit down to eat or curl up together to sleep, all of which imbue those eruptions of savage violence with a greater resonance.
Never pandering to its audience, the innate strangeness of Where The Devil Roams makes it all the more rewarding to those who can tap into that and the bizarre, macabre final shot is one that will be difficult to shift from the minds of many. This is a beguiling, bloody quilt of tattered Americana from a ridiculously talented film family whose work just gets better and better.
Where The Devil Roams (2023) featured at this year’s Celluloid Screams Horror Festival.