Welcome to Hell — Population: Four Annoying Tourists
Every year, a horror movie comes along that reminds you hell isn’t a place you go when you die — it’s a movie you accidentally rent. Satanic (2016), directed by Jeffrey G. Hunt and written by Anthony Jaswinski, is one such unholy experience. It’s a movie about four teens dabbling in the occult, and somehow the scariest part is how painfully dull they are.
This film takes everything fun about devil worship — mystery, ritual, sacrilege — and replaces it with Yelp reviews and bad lighting. It’s basically Scooby-Doo for Hot Topic employees who forgot to bring the dog.
Plot: Satan’s Got Better Things to Do
We open on a terrified woman wandering through a maze of pentagrams, crying and screaming, which sounds promising — until you realize this is just the movie teasing you with a good time it has no intention of delivering.
Then, enter our heroes: four college students on a “Satanic sightseeing trip” to Los Angeles. There’s Chloe (Sarah Hyland), our nominal protagonist and walking CW advertisement; her boyfriend David (Steven Krueger), who could be replaced by a decorative lamp and no one would notice; Seth (Justin Chon), the goth who Googled “what is Satanism?” once; and Elise (Clara Mamet), his equally spooky girlfriend whose personality begins and ends with black eyeliner.
They visit occult landmarks like the Church of Satan, the site of the Manson murders, and an edgy store called “Black Door Shop,” which looks like it sells both cursed skulls and CBD oil. Shockingly, their little field trip goes wrong — though not in any way that might excite or engage you.
When Millennials Attack… Common Sense
Our group of geniuses makes every possible bad decision. They see a Satanic ritual in progress and think, “Let’s follow those guys!” Because nothing says “college education” like interrupting people in the middle of summoning the Dark Lord.
After witnessing what looks like an attempted sacrifice, they flee, lose a phone, and promptly get a call from the victim herself, Alice (Sophie Dalah). Do they contact the police? No. They pick her up and bring her to their hotel room. Because that’s what you do when a bleeding cult girl calls you out of nowhere: offer her a continental breakfast.
Alice repays their kindness by vomiting, drawing a pentagram, getting naked, and slashing her throat. At this point, most normal people would run screaming. But our gang of human beige tones decide to stick around and play with a Ouija board, because apparently none of them have ever seen a movie before.
The Cast: The Devil Works Hard, But These Actors Work Softer
Sarah Hyland, bless her Modern Family soul, tries her best. She screams, she pouts, she acts like she regrets signing the contract — and honestly, so do we. Her Chloe is meant to be the emotional anchor, but mostly she just looks like she’s waiting for her Uber.
Steven Krueger’s David is the “rational” one, meaning he frowns a lot and says things like “We should get out of here,” but never actually does. Justin Chon and Clara Mamet play the goth couple with all the intensity of two people waiting for their laundry to finish. Their dialogue sounds like it was written by someone who thinks reading The Satanic Bible is a personality.
The only remotely interesting character is Sophie Dalah’s Alice, the disturbed cult girl. She’s weird, unhinged, and vaguely threatening — which is more than you can say for the rest of the cast. Sadly, she dies twenty minutes in, and with her goes any hope the movie had of being interesting.
The Scares: Sponsored by Ambien
If you’re going to name your film Satanic, you’d better bring the scares. Unfortunately, this movie’s idea of terror is turning off the lights and hoping you fall asleep before it does.
There are jump scares that don’t jump, shadows that don’t move, and demonic whispers that sound like someone recorded a bad ASMR video. The “supernatural activity” includes such horrors as a messy kitchen, condensation on windows, and birds in the pool. It’s less “The Exorcist” and more “The Homeowners Association is going to be furious.”
By the time people start disappearing, you’re praying for the Devil to show up just to put everyone out of their misery.
The Direction: Horror by GPS
Jeffrey Hunt directs like he’s never met a camera angle he didn’t want to overuse. Everything is shot with the flat lighting of a mid-2000s TV pilot. The movie thinks fog machines and pentagrams are enough to create atmosphere, but it all feels more Spirit Halloween than satanic dread.
Even when the script tries to go surreal — with Chloe wandering through a maze of pentagram-covered walls — it’s too little, too late. It’s like watching a dream sequence from Goosebumps filmed in an abandoned IKEA.
The pacing doesn’t help either. The first hour is just these kids driving around, visiting “scary” landmarks, and getting kicked out of places. By the time anything supernatural actually happens, you’ve aged at least a decade.
The Writing: The Devil Made Me Skip the Dialogue
Anthony Jaswinski, who wrote The Shallows, apparently decided to test how long audiences could stare at four idiots without rooting for their deaths. The dialogue is stilted and painfully self-aware. Characters say things like, “I feel something evil here,” and “This is the room where she killed herself,” as if reciting lines from a haunted Airbnb listing.
The movie tries to mix teen banter with existential dread, but it lands somewhere between awkward and absurd. It’s the kind of writing that makes you nostalgic for the nuance of Paranormal Activity 4.
The Ending: Hell’s Most Confusing Check-Out Process
In the finale, Chloe ends up trapped in what we can only assume is Hell’s waiting room. She wanders through a maze of pentagrams and bloodied sheets while her friends vanish one by one. Finally, she sees a reflection of herself and her friends driving away — implying that maybe they’re all dead, or stuck in a time loop, or the writer stopped caring and went home.
Then Chloe wakes up in a dark room, missing her arms, her mouth stitched shut, and the Devil himself looming over her. It should be terrifying, but it’s hard to care after ninety minutes of nothing. By this point, you’re just happy something finally happened, even if it’s grotesquely stupid.
The Devil picks up her phone — because even Satan needs good reception — and the movie ends, presumably out of embarrassment.
The Real Horror: Wasting Sarah Hyland’s Time
*Satanic* is the kind of movie that makes you sympathize with actual demons. At least when Lucifer torments people, he’s doing it with flair. This film, on the other hand, feels like it was assembled by committee using discarded scenes from better horror movies.
It wants to be The Blair Witch Project, The Devil’s Rejects, and House of the Devil all at once, but ends up as a cursed episode of Ghost Hunters: Millennials Edition.
Even the Devil himself would reject this script with a polite “pass.”
Final Thoughts: Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Press Play
*Satanic* is a movie so uneventful it could be used in exorcisms — not to cast out demons, but to put them to sleep. It’s poorly written, lazily directed, and devoid of scares. The only thing truly hellish is the pacing.
It’s 83 minutes of watching unlikable people make bad decisions in dim lighting, culminating in an ending that feels like Satan himself ran out of budget.
Verdict:
⭐️ out of 5.
A demonic dud that proves not even the Prince of Darkness can save a film this soul-crushingly boring.
