Where the Devil Roams (2023)

A family consisting of Maggie (Toby Poser), Seven (John Adams) and Eve (Zelda Adams) work as a very minor sideshow act on the carny circuit during a stylized version of the depression. For Maggie and Seven, their act isn’t really the point of their lives, but only an official reason to travel. In truth, they are serial killers, roaming the backroads, murdering mostly pretty nasty customers (and their families, squeamish, they are not). Maggie takes on the active part during the murders, because Seven, traumatized during the Great War, crumbles at the sight of blood. Eve just makes photos of the corpses.

Maggie believes there might be a future for Eve in stage acts instead of acts of murder, for while the young woman can’t speak, she sings in a very post-Depression era manner. In their way, the family appear to live an at least satisfying and loving life, if you overlook the murders.

That is, until one of their little murder sprees goes wrong. Seeing her family ripped, well, hacked, apart by victims fighting back, Eve turns to the Devil’s magic to save them.

By now, the Adams Family – mother Toby Poser, father John Adams, and daughter Zelda Adams – have really found their stride as filmmakers. There’s a very independent kind of individuality to their filmmaking that’s carried by high technical chops, and a love for the gothic and macabre as filtered through the last few decades of US alternative culture.

In truth, this should look and feel like a Rob Zombie movie – the filmmakers certainly appear to share some of the same aesthetic fascinations – but where Zombie’s movies always feel like products of a man who doesn’t have the talent or vision to turn the things he loves into worthwhile art (or entertainment), this family really manages to create a world of their own imagining on far less money.

There’s a growing sense of ambition to the family’s films, and Where the Devil Roams with its period setting, a larger canvas of locations and even some flashbacks to the Great War continues that trend. This is never an attempt to actually recreate the period, or a real carnival of the era – which would be doomed to failure on the budget - but instead turns the idea of the Depression and what a carny of the time might have felt like into an aesthetic that can then be combined with the other visual hallmarks of Adams/Poser movies.

In pacing, this is a calm and quiet film that knows when to increase its tempo and never overstays any idea’s welcome. The filmmaking is excellent, some of it clearly influenced by still photography and perhaps painting, but while the film does love tableaux and strictly composed shots, it isn’t static. Instead, everything on screen seems beholden to the very conscious creation of very specifically thought through moods and atmospheres of the macabre, the sad, and the grotesque.

Despite all of the film being deeply American, this doesn’t just remind me of some of the best regional filmmaking of the 70s from the US, where sometimes strong aesthetic ideas won out over narrative or budgetary constraints much more than is usual in North American art, but also of the great visual stylists of European fantastic cinema. This never actually looks like Rollin or Franco, but the film’s commitment to a personal aesthetic does suggest kindred spirits.

Of course, if you’re looking for a straightforward movie about serial killing carnies, this won’t make you happy at all. Butt then, I don’t think Where the Devil Roams wants to be that movie.