Where the Devil Roams (2023)
Directed & Written by John Adams, Zelda Adams, & Toby Poser
Starring John Adams, Zelda Adams, & Toby Poser

Horror

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay
contains SPOILERS!
Turn away your eyes,
lest ye be SPOILED.

Rejoice! For a new film from the Adams Family has arrived at Fantasia 2023.
In the dying days of the travelling carnivals while the Great Depression had its grip on America, a family of carnival workers—Maggie (Toby Poser), Seven (John Adams), and Eve (Zelda Adams)—struggles to make ends meet on the road. They do more than put on a show, too. They do a little murdering on their travels. And who’s going to miss a few rich folks when the majority of America is all but literally starving to death? When Eve has to resort to magic and dark faith to keep her family from falling apart, in more ways than one, it begins to whittle their souls away.

Where the Devil Roams touches on so much of the real-life horror of the Great Depression in America, as the killer family take on the symbolic weight of all those people who had to do whatever they were able to in order to survive the worst, most oppressive conditions following the financial collapse of 1929’s Wall Street Crash. There’s also a subplot about PTSD when it was known as shell shock, after men were coming home from World War I in psychological decay. The Adams Family have even created yet another mythology for this film involving a fallen angel, its human lover, and a little sewing. Where the Devil Roams is about how the murderous carny family, like so much of America’s national body in the Great Depression (and even still today), are forgotten by America, by those in power who hold all the wealth. The film suggests that community/family is the only way to survive, but also makes clear that the vulnerable who wind up forgotten by society are ground up the same as any other meat being forced through a grinder.
One of the most prominent ways Where the Devil Roams uses its horror is to take on the dual monster of capitalism and religion. Religion is everywhere in the film, especially in the background through the radio. The 1920s and 1930s were an era during which preachers and priests of all sorts were using the radio’s reach to try indoctrinating more people. At one point in the background we hear a preacher on the radio talking about “the great dragon … that old serpent called the Devil” getting cast out from Heaven, a quote from Revelation 12:9; similar to the opening story about Abaddon that structures the film’s mythology, which already feels like an interesting reworking of the traditional tale about God banishing Satan from Heaven, or some really cool John Milton/Paradise Lost fan fiction.
Religion is significant in the film because radio preachers, and Christians in general at the time, were big on capitalism, insisting that hard work and faith would get poor people through the Great Depression, as if it weren’t a crisis due to the greed of the bourgeoisie. So, not only does the carnival seem to satirise religion in some of its acts, Maggie, Seven, and Eve take aim at the bourgeois people who are unwilling to help those in need, or just those rich folk who’ve made life worse for others. Before Maggie kills one of their victims, she tells him he didn’t only take their farm, he “took a little piece” of the family and “made the world a little more empty.” Later, the family kills a “crooked judge” and an “insider trader,” too.

Seven is revealed to have shell shock after fighting in WWI. He avoided bombings and getting caught by Germans, even if meant occasionally doing something absolutely horrific. We see a flashback of the generally hideous conditions the soldiers witnessed, as Seven passes a decaying body that’s nearly a part of the earth itself, a human corpse barely more than a puddle in the damp ground. In another flashback, we witness Seven having to saw a man’s arm off with a hacksaw. Even Maggie is traumatised in a way by WWI and the Germans, which emerges in a darkly comic way after the family run into a friendly Norwegian sick of the “blood” and “fear” he experienced during WWI. Her encounter with the Norwegian, though tragic, is an unsettling, albeit humorous depiction of how an entire nation is infected with the trauma of war.
There’s a moment at the end of the film when the gruesome bodily realities of the Great Depression come to hideous life in the carnival show Maggie, Seven, and Eve perform. There’s an uncanny image of Maggie and Seven coming together grotesquely, alongside Eve onstage beside them, that speaks to the need for family or community; if your family needs a shoulder to lean on, be a shoulder, if your family needs a head, then be the head; no matter what pieces are left, the family, or community, constitutes a body and everyone in it helps to hold the body up, especially when it’s rotting and falling apart.
Where the Devil Roams is a Gothic vision of a desperate America under capitalism’s grim thumb, and it ends with a shocking image of body horror, as we see the Great Depression’s consequences inscribed upon Maggie and Seven. The awful horrors of Maggie and Seven’s bodies are a result of how they have been torn apart by the forces of capitalist greed and the wars of men. They are held together by nothing else but the love and hard work of family. They are the horror equivalent of the countless families who did anything and everything possible to survive the Great Depression. Sometimes, to survive in a society that would rather watch you die, it means forgetting morality in favour of making it through another day with the people you love. It’s just a bit more bloody for people like Maggie, Seven, and Eve.