Night of the Devil (2021) - Short Horror Film Review

Night of the Devil is a ten minute long short horror film which was directed by Anthony Calvitti in his directorial debut. This is set in the 1970's and carries with it an authentic feeling vibe of that era with some of the effects it uses to simulate super-8 recordings. The film covers a lot of ground in its short time frame, as a result it does feel a little abrupt in its scene changes.

On the Halloween of 1971 a young teenage boy wearing a devil costume is captured by some crazed cultists and used as part of their ritual to summon a demon. Fast forward to the Halloween of 1978 and the story of what happened that night has passed into legend, with a teenager retelling the story to his friends around a campfire. He states that the demonically possessed boy now roams the area, forced to kill on Halloween in order to stay alive. Unfortunately for him and his friends, this urban legend has some truth to it...

There are a variety of time skips as well as two different credit sequences stuffed into the ten minutes, making for a horror film that was quite ambitious. To me, it did feel like it struggled to be able to fit everything in to the time allotted, with the story flowing ever onwards meaning certain parts were light on detail. I thought the prologue sequence was great, and the initial campfire section also was decent. The later half of the short again jumped ahead in time for an interesting conclusion to the tale.

There are special effects used which are designed to evoke horror, but I didn't think it was that well presented to the viewer. What happens to the protagonists didn't appear on screen as nightmarishly harrowing as I think it was meant to, led to a slightly damp finish. I often think less is more, but this might have benefitted with a slightly longer run time to really add in some details, especially where the end of the campfire scene is concerned. On the huge plus side, this  looked great, nice editing, a good soundtrack and a decent cast of characters (who include among them Lauren LaVera and Rachel Keefe - Terrifier 2, as well as Veronica Carlson, Alexander Jameson and Richard Lyntton). Night of the Devil can currently be viewed on the BritFlicks YouTube channel.

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