We announced its release in August 2017 on Netflix, and its trailer began our meeting with the child Antichrist himself. The director of Little Evil, Eli Craig, had decided to tackle an area already covered in many cinematographic works. After watching the film, can we say that it managed to stand out?
A demonic comedy
Little Evil enters the register of satanic cults that we have known (Ouija, 666 The curse …). However, what makes it resolutely different from the others is its parody asset. Indeed, the genres of the film accumulate to finally constitute a family comedy – horror. Admittedly, the humor is not twisting, but it does its job of family comedy by occasionally entertaining its viewer. The beginning of the story presents a banal family recently reconstituted, where the relationship between father-in-law and son-in-law is inglorious. It is these somewhat failed attempts at communication that tend to make us smile. Once again, this detail is déjà vu… Then, little by little, we expose ourselves to a downright mysterious child (we hardly even see his face), which adds a hint of anguish to the story. Slowly but unsurely, the story becomes a complete bric-a-brac. Cults? OK. An Antichrist child? OK. An end of the world ready to burst? Ok… Why not. It will be said that this totally offbeat comedy still has a well-chained scenario which makes the story somewhat plausible and not very kitsch.
Stereotypical anxiety
Lucas is 6 years old and terrorizes Gary (played by Adam Scott), the new husband of his mother Samantha (played by Evangeline Lilly, known for her role in The Hobbit). Surprisingly, his previous stepfathers have all died and witnesses advising Gary to flee multiply. Some even go so far as to confess to him that his son-in-law is the Antichrist… And as paranormal events follow one another, passages speak to our minds. Binoculars dressed and styled in the same way stare at Gary, Lucas swings alone in the dark, his eyes turn red and his voice guttural, his drawings on the walls are far from banal but do not alarm, and finally, he has the habit of expressing himself through his goat puppet (ventriloquism). Have we forgotten nothing on the horror cliché board? Obviously this is a parody where everyone sees only fire, except poor Gary… We are far away and at the same time close to The Shining, The Exorcist or Insidious. And that's what makes the film almost unpredictable. We think we know what is behind the door at the end of this gloomy corridor but it is not.
Modernity takes precedence
Beyond the mixed genres as well as the accumulated clichés, the film falls into the category of modern works. Even " post-modern" even. Indeed, Gary is not the only one to have participated in the "recomposition" of a family. He is even part of a group of lyrics of "stepfathers having difficulties with their beautiful children". Clearly, they hate each other and find solutions together. In other words, the subject is totally trivialized and uninhibited in the film. In addition, Gary's close colleague happens to be a thirty-year-old "tomboy", gay and married. Do films that normalize these significant developments in our society come to mind? Not much for us, and we are delighted that Little Evil is!
To conclude, we can not tell you that Little Evil is a masterpiece and that it surpasses the Scary Movie through its style of "scary com'". It's not twisting, but among all these ridiculous clichés, we get caught up in the enigmatic game of: "Is Lucas really the Antichrist?"
