by Joel Harley

They’re creepy and they’re kooky, mysterious and spooky; they’re altogether ooky… they’re the Adams family, and they’re back with this macabre story of roaming circus performers carving a bloody path through depression-era America.

As they did with 2021’s Hellbender, family unit John Adams, Toby Poser, and their daughter Zelda direct, write and star in this quietly weird horror film. Maggie (Poser) and Seven (John Adams) travel among a collective of carnival performers with daughter Eve (Zelda Adams). Between grotesque performances, they conduct their bloody side hustle – murdering the lost and disreputable souls they happen to meet on the road. Mum Maggie’s murderous temper sits ill-at-ease with dad Seven’s more reasonable nature… and his habit of passing out at the sight of blood. Between them, they rage against the dying of the industry and their own increasing irrelevance.

The film’s chilly distance from its unsettling (if decidedly low-budget) gore-making puts this arthouse horrorshow more in the leagues of Yorgos Lanthimov than Rob Zombie. It’s cheap but borrows a sense of scale and majesty from the grand American countryside – feeling more epic than some of the performances and grungy cinematography might suggest. In the same breath, black blood and rubbery disembodied limbs pack a surprising heft, thanks to the drained colours and canny use of shadows.

The arthouse of it all allows the Adams family to get away with a lack of structure and a generally unmoored narrative, giving very little sense that this is building towards anything besides more weirdness. But then, why should conformity be the ultimate destination? Where The Devil Roams certainly won’t be to all tastes, but to those with a taste for the bleak and the bizarre, it makes for haunting, uniquely unsettling viewing. A meandering journey, but not by any means an uninteresting one.

Where The Devil Roams had its European premier at Pigeon Shrine FrightFest on August 25th, 2023