So I Just Watched The Sudbury Devil…
…and it’s good, but be forewarned; this movie makes Robert Eggers’ The VVitch look like Kiki’s Delivery Service.
This future horror cult classic stands at the crossroads between the folk, psychological, and splatter horror subgenres. It comes to us from the mind of writer/director Andrew Rakich, the creator behind the YouTube channel Atun-Shei Films, where he uses his filmmaking abilities to tell history in a fun and entertaining way. For instance, his most popular series, Checkmate, Lincolnites!, debunks common pro-Confederacy Civil War myths in the form of a humorous Socratic dialogue between Johnny Reb and Billy Yank (a boisterous yet naive Confederate solider and a sober and rational Union soldier, respectively).
The Sudbury Devil couldn’t be further from that if it tried. True, it still holds to Rakich’s mission statement of demythologizing history and telling it like it is without the kitschy romanticism, but it does it in the most fucked up way possible.
The story centers on the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the immediate aftermath of King Phillips’ War in the late 1670s. Two Bostonite witch hunters, John Fletcher and Josiah Cutting (played respectively by Benton Guinness and Josh Popa), are summoned to the small town of Sudbury by the local reverend Thomas Russell (Carl Sailor) to investigate rumors of devil worship in the woods outside the town. They take as their guide Isaac Goodenow (Matthew van Gessel), whose sighting of a strange light in the woods was what started the rumors in the first place. What they find there drives them to the depths of despair and insanity and serves as a stark illustration of America’s original sins.
It’s hard for me to think of a single thing this movie does wrong, which is impressive for a directorial debut. The acting is top-notch across the board. Aside from Guinness and Popa, who are wonderfully convincing as the war-weary Fletcher that the by-the-book Cutting, van Gessel is painfully convincing as the tormented Goodenow, Linnea Gregg is delightfully wicked as the coven leader Patience Gavett and Kendra Unique Willis is outstanding at lending the insane formerly enslaved person Flora a heartbreaking level of humanity even in her most chaotic moments. Finally, Andrew Rakich himself manages to convincingly diverge from his more comedic acting style to play Patience’s bastard misogynist of a former husband. It’s all the more impressive when you consider the actors had to do all this while putting on period-accurate accents (one that fans of Rakich’s Witchfinder General character will be very familiar with).
Also impressive is the cinematography, which captures the beauty of the Massachusetts woodland while preserving the dread the witch hunters feel as they trek further and further away from civilization.
The gore and sexual situations are certainly over the top, especially compared to how relatively restrained such content was in The VVitch, a similar film about Puritans going up against a witch coven. It makes sense for it to be so potent, though, given how well it represents everything the Puritans resented (sex, alternate religious practices, women being women, etc.). It also plays into the film’s social commentary, which in many ways makes it a successor to the 1999 film Ravenous, which Rakich has named his favorite film of all time. The aftermath of King Phillip’s War hangs over the main characters like a burial shroud. Fletcher, Cutting, and Goodenow are all veterans of the war who have been physically maimed (a missing eye, a permanent limp, and a missing arm, respectively). It is also noted several times that the land where the coven stalks is former Nipmuc territory (“The savages are gone. The devil remains.”) Much like Ravenous before it, The Sudbury Devil lifts the veil on history to show the mountains of bodies that our “shining city on a hill” was built on.
If my review has piqued your interest, then you’ll be happy to know that Rakich has decided to self-distribute the film on his own website. You can buy the movie directly off the site for $19.99 or rent it for $9.99 (I chose to rent it myself). Indeed, that’s the main reason I wrote this article in the first place. I want to do my part to help these people reap the financial rewards they so richly deserve.
For a film that only had a budget of $4,500 (aside from donations that rolled in after Checkmate, Lincolnites! blew up during the pandemic), it definitely doesn’t feel like a low-budget indie flick. The acting is excellent, the cinematography is beautiful, the attention to historical detail is impeccable, and the soundtrack by Dillon DeRosa is suitably nightmarish. And I’m giving this one a 9/10.
Stay tuned for my next “Cryptids of North America” episode on Maine, which should be coming out sometime next weekend. Thank you! Buh-bye!
