Seeing Scary Things

When I headed for the drive-in on Saturday night I was wishing instead for more haunted attractions to visit, but no other local ones opened this weekend. Fortunately two horror movies were playing at Ye Ole Dependable.
Friends Sharon and MaryAnne joined me for the double feature.
The first was the new one from M. Night Shamalamadingdong, Devil. We didn't know it was one of his until the opening credits came up.
Sharon and I groaned. We had suffered through Lady in the Water and The Village and thought this one would be as bad as those, even though the trailer for Devil was quite good.
One of the first scenes featured M. Night himself, in his Hitchcocky way of putting himself in his films as the AA sponsor of a detective who turned to the bottle after his wife and son were killed in a hit and run accident six months prior.
The movie is narrated sparsely by a Latin American security employee in the building were most of the action takes place.
Our narrator tells us of the childhood stories he heard about the devil coming to earth and taking on human form to kill some of the damned and take them with him early.
In this movie the devil is hanging out in a trapped elevator car with five folks inside, trying to turn them against each other and, ultimately, kill them all and snatch up their souls.
There is a twist at the end that I accidentally figured out and shouted out halfway through, thus making my friends mad!
Devil redeemed M. Night, ironically. It is worth seeing for sure. But if you figure out the twist, don't shout it out, lest you be ostracized by your buddies like I was!
Next up was The Last Exorcism, which Sharon and I had seen a few weeks before with The Other Guys. Neither of us minded seeing this again, because, like the rest of the world, we were pretty confused by the ending!
TLE is the story of an evangelical preacher, Cotton Marcus (presumably named after Cotton Mather) who has lost his faith but not his ability to preach up a storm.
He is embarrassed by all his years of preaching something he never believed in and seeks to put things right by making a documentary about the fraud of exorcism. He allows a camera crew to go with him on his last exorcism
I won't go into a whole recap but I will say that I enjoyed the film. It brings up a lot of talking points about faith even though there are a lot of errors in it. For example, an evangelical Protestant preacher like Cotton wouldn't have a crucifix, nor would he have any interest in Latin. Glaring missteps like that were really annoying.
If you can force yourself to ignore that, I recommend this very well-acted, but not too scary film.