“We come to the place where we joke about the idea of the devil.” With that line, the trailer for Sean Byrne’s The Devil’s Candy begins, a film that looks to combine the grimy real-world fears of killers and crazies with the mythology and supernatural leanings of cinema about Satan. The movie concerns the story of an ambitious painter (Ethan Embry) who gets targeted by satanic forces—and is forced to paint spoooooky images!—after he moves to rural Texas with his family. The imagery in this clip features a large man in a track suit who may or may not be the earthly embodiment of Beelzebub, and mid-trailer blurbs tout the film as a serious and thoughtful horror-film examination of the devil.
Which is a little different from what The A.V. Club’s Katie Rife said about it when she caught the film at Fantastic Fest last year, saying that, “in trying to make a film that blends the Satanic, home invasion, serial killer, and haunted house subgenres—with some alterna-family drama on top of that—he ends up making something suitably loud, but insufficiently hefty.” She also calls out the film for pandering to the metalhead demographic, which isn’t really in evidence here, unless you count the fleeting appearance of Track Suit Bad Guy unleashing some sick riffs on guitar. The Devil’s Candy takes possession of theaters March 17.