3. The Devil Inside
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 7%
Razzie Awards: 0
Box-Office Gross: $101,087,479
If proof were ever needed that when it comes to box-office all you need is marketing then this is it. The seeds for The Devil Inside’s success were sown in 2009 with Paranormal Activity. The grungy low-budget found-footage shocker dragged the Blair Witch Project vibe into the 21st Century just as the ‘torture-porn’ of Saw and Hostel was dying a death. Filling a gap in the market that famously hits home on the first weekend, The Devil Inside saw the success of its successors and just as Paranormal Activity 3 eroded away the goodwill of cinemagoers (and dented their wallets) The Devil Inside slipped in to cinemas. Under the guise of a creepy poster and marketing campaign it ran away with most of its money in the first 3 days.
Which is all well and good because it was terrible. With one of the worst endings in living memory and as amateurish and nonsensical as they come The Devil Inside arrived to horrendous reviews and an even harsher audience reaction. Soon after it passed the $100,000,000 mark and everyone involved was very rich, everyone who’d seen it was very unimpressed and pretty much everyone was scratching their heads wondering how the hell this had happened. Even more so how this had happened on a budget of $1,000,000, making it one of the most profitable films of all time.
Never has there been such a powerful testament to the power of depriving the world of the opinions of critics. Not press screened, the film played to its strengths (a quickly edited 2:31 of them if the trailer is to be believed) and by the time the reviews hit the press on Friday night/Saturday morning punters had already been fleeced for millions.
As a piece of marketing The Devil Inside is a now somewhat overlooked landmark in cinematic history. As a film it may just well be a sorry footnote of the found-footage genre revival of the late Noughties.
