Devil's Due

Pregnancy is a wonderful, beautiful, natural thing… but is also the basis for a lot of basic human fears. It features more body horror, schizophrenic mood swings and insatiable appetites than most movie monsters, so it’s curious that there aren’t more scary movies dealing with the topic. It’s been 45 years since Rosemary’s Baby, and now all this time later we have Devil’s Due. Hollywood is really missing a trick here.

Zach (Gilford) and Samantha (Miller) are newlyweds, hopelessly in love with each other, with a penchant for recording their every waking second together. While on their honeymoon in Dominican Republic, they get drugged and a demonic ritual is performed on Samantha by some of the locals. They wake up in their hotel room with no memory of the night before, and when they get back to the States, Samantha discovers that she’s pregnant. Of course, this being the spawn of a devil, that only leads to some very bad things happening.

It’s actually kind of startling how much weird stuff people will explain away as a side-effect of pregnancy. The former vegetarian has taken to eating raw meat in the middle of the local store? She’s got the complexion of a leprosy sufferer dragged through a field of manure? She’s suddenly supernaturally strong and just generally creepy to be around? Yep, that’s pregnancy for you!

Knowing the found-footage format wouldn’t work on its own, the directors also shoe-horn in some hidden cameras and CCTV, but all they do is draw attention to themselves. It takes the annoyingly too nice Zach nearly 9 months to finally look back on his honeymoon video? Weren’t the store security watching the cameras when Samantha took to her narcoleptic, carnivorous behaviour? Where do devil-worshippers get their hi-res equipment from?

Thankfully, for the last twenty minutes or so, the films stops trying to coy and eventually just chucks everything and the kitchen sink up on the screen, and there’s a solid couple of jumps to be had, and you stop caring that none of the movie actually makes much sense. But most likely, the only thing you’ll take away from this movie is that horror movies still don’t know what to do with pregnant ladies, and that the “mark of the devil” looks an awful lot like the Euro sign.