Abysmal Filmmaking (Contains Spoilers)
Incomprehensible and rudderless yet simultaneously cliched and tediously predictable. There is no sense that the filmmakers had any sense of what they were doing or what kind of film they intended to make.
The set-up of the film feels like a generic teen horror film wherein the six or seven characters are knocked off one by one by the malevolent forces occupying the house. This never happens. We see in flash backs and found footage evidence that they were individually hacked to death after breaking their separate ways during the seance. On paper this doesn't sound terrible -no one really needs another And Then There Were None-styled horror film - but what the film gives the audience in place of cookie cutter popcorn film predictability is a great deal worse. What the film delivers in its place feels like prime time garbage Criminal Minds styled interrogation sequence which runs through the entire production. It does not help matters that the acting - particularly that by Dustin Milligan - is amateurish and at times cringe-inducing. To be fair to the actors, the muddled and incoherent script was certainly working against them.
Despite all the time afforded to watching the characters prepare for the trip and set up, none of them are developed beyond what you see in the first scene of the film. The audience is left with nothing to grab hold of: ill-defined, motivation-free and unlikeable characters, a meaningless back story, a total lack of atmosphere or tension, boring, generic haunted house, all randomly punctuated with this laughably unrealistic and poorly acted cop drama interrogation scene... the film is such a mess that i am finding it difficult to even write about. The dialogue is not only awful, but at times puzzling. Why does a character see what are clearly wind chimes and ask "What are those?" when it would have made more sense to show how many there were and have him say, "Why do they have so many wind-chimes?" Sounds like a nitpick, but in the film it comes across as stilted and phoney (not to mention lifted from Blair Witch).
The kids wander around the house alone and encounter/see evidence of spirits (demons? It doesn't even matter) in the form of cheap scares and visions... yet none of this culminates in anything. You see boots in a closet, you see a crucifix turn on the wall, hands reach out and grab the feet of someone standing next to a bed, you see a demon face that disappears when the light is taken away, the lousy paintings on the wall burst into flame, you see a ghostly figure at the top of the staircase, etc. It's as if they felt like they had to show spooky things in the haunted house, but abandoned this idea half way. Nothing comes of any this, they are simply horror film cliches pumped into the film to pad out its running time.
When the seance scene finally occurs it is anticlimactic and the audience realizes that none of what they have seen up until this point really had any purpose. At least a generic teen horror film would have the payoff of seeing them killed off one by one in presumably scary ways. No, the merciless makers of Demonic choses to deny the audience even this small reprieve from tedium and instead give us a brief glimpse of chaos, an implied off-screen hacking to death of the obnoxious characters for whom you feel nothing, and a return to the endless NCIS-styled interrogation scene.
The wind chimes mean nothing. The girl's drawing on the inside of the wall paper means nothing. The ceremony that happened in the house years earlier ultimately means nothing (why was the mother's spirit trapped there if she didn't die there?). The lamp outside means nothing. The hands under the bed mean nothing. The face in the room, those visions of people at the top of the staircase and down the hallways mean nothings. The paintings on the walls bursting into flames mean nothing, the girl yanked from the room by an unseen force (in the style of Paranormal Activity, unabashed trailer contrivance) means nothing. The boots mean nothing, the ghosts/demons mean nothing, the thermal shapes of people standing around the seance are meaningless (more trailer fodder)... it's all just a mishmash of borrowed ideas and images assembled by a group of hacks who rush through or abandon threads as quickly as they appropriate them. It all adds up to nothing but another predictable cliche/twist: it was all a set up to release a demon from the house...in a baby... ugh.
None of it really holds together at all. I can't be bothered to put much effort into structure here, but some questions and complaints:
Why did the possessed John hang himself to death if Bryan had escaped already? Was he counting on Bryan being shot to death by police in a convenience store while he was being interrogated?
Why did he rip out Bryan's tongue at all? All that was required of him to achieve his escape from his 'prison' was to kill Bryan, but he needlessly took time out to remove his tongue, leading to Bryan's escape?
Why would this imprisoned demon then kill himself only to turn into grackles briefly only to simply reconstitute himself in the form of John just so that he could be interrogated at length by local police?
Why, if the demon is being held in the home, is he able to be moved to the barn adjacent to the house? Why would the demon sit there and feign concern for Michelle and weep in front of police for hours?
Speaking of the police: they sure did a bang up job of searching the house if they weren't able to find two people (one alive) in giant section of the house right next to where they found the "injured John" (the grackle version of John, hahaha). Was that giant hidden industrial area (clearly not the same location) really only accessible from that hidden panel in that closet? What home (Victorian or otherwise) would have such an area on the second floor?
Why were they interrogating someone on the premises who is stated to be in a state of shock? What police officers would be so quick to begin screaming at a potential victim of a mass killing - again, in a state of shock - accusing him of the murders without the presence of a lawyer?
Even the setting is ludicrous. Having your cast repeatedly state that the house is "so creepy" doesn't make it so. The paintings on the wall look worse than inauthentic, they look like they were whipped up by members of craft services in an afternoon.
The entire bit with the ballerina music box was dumb. It's not that shocking that a music box would make a noise or begin to run when moved, but the characters in Demonic respond to it like someone would if an unplugged radio began to play. And why was it even in the film? It was 'pointing' at the rug? Okay, how exactly? Oh, and not the rug in that room, but somehow they guess that it means a rug in entirely different room? Jesus Christ. Not only is this contrived, but awkward and forced.
Also, if Bryan was not possessed and was actually a victim of the demon entity possessing John, what in the hell was with that bit with Bryan screaming into the walkie talkie and causing John to fly across the interrogation barn into the wall? Why does he go into convulsions? More importantly, why does the detective MURDER Bryan for shouting into a walkie-talkie? The entire sequence is typical of bottomlessly horrible films trying desperately to shoehorn a 'twist' into the final reel. Clever twists are great, but the misdirection needs to hold up. Demonic lies to the audience to misdirect it and then hopes that no one will remember what happened five minutes ago. So, Bryan inexplicably and momentarily has the ability (despite a ravaged mouth missing his tongue) to scream like a demon into the "walkie" just so that the audience believes he is the killer. However, once it is revealed that he was not the killer this sequence makes no sense whatsoever. That the police give him a walkie talkie in the first place is contrived. Still, not nearly as ridiculous that they pipe a direct feed from Bryan at the convenience store to the interrogation of John and allow for John to seize the walkie and yell at Bryan (how did he even know how to operate the walkie talkie so that it came out on Bryan's?). What was the purpose of John yelling at Bryan? He couldn't possibly have calculated that Bryan would be shot dead by police for screaming.
As for the big ludicrous ending: why would a demon spell out his entire plan to escape, telling the female detective that he was going to now possess the offspring of Michelle? Why the silly vanishing act? Multiple police officers were witness to John being interrogated in that barn, but he wasn't really there? Again, why the hour long interrogation, handcuffing, crying, etc. Why was he thrown across the room into the wall when Bryan screamed? Why? Because, like with most terrible horror films, they simply assemble a bunch of visuals and forget about story, character, purpose or intent.
the roman empire never died, it just turned into the catholic church