A full Free Movie of the Day is posted on the JoBlo Horror Movies YouTube channel every other day during the week – but on Fridays things get even freakier and a little more fun. Get your weekend started the right way by indulging in Friday Fright Nights! Every Friday, we’ll be taking a look at another genre movie you can watch in its entirety, free of charge, either on the YouTube channel linked above or in the video embed here.
The Friday Fright Night feature we have for you this week is the 2008 horror film The Devil’s Mercy, a film that shares its inciting incident with many other horror films: it begins with a family moving into a new home. A lot has been written and said about horror movies functioning as morality tales, warning about the evils that will befall you if you do drugs or have premarital sex. But few have addressed the most common cautionary aspect of the horror genre. Horror movies have warned us again and again: Do Not Move! Moving rarely brings about good things in a horror story. Instead, our protagonists usually find that they have moved into some sort of awful, terrifying situation. So if there’s anything we should learn from the horror genre, it’s that we should never leave a comfortable living situation in search of something else.
The Devil’s Mercy stars Stephen Rea, an actor who has over 130 screen credits to his name, stretching back to the 1960s. The first time I ever remember seeing Rea in a movie was in 1994’s Interview with the Vampire, where he played a villainous vampire… and his performance was so unnerving to me, I have always found it difficult to trust a Stephen Rea character in any other movie I’ve seen him in. As The Devil’s Mercy begins, it seems to back up my feeling that people played by Stephen Rea shouldn’t be trusted.
Directed by Melanie Orr from a screenplay by James A. McLean, The Devil’s Mercy has the following synopsis: The Winters move to Connecticut where they meet their new downstairs neighbours Tyler Grant and his niece Kayla. When their 6 year old son Calvin becomes increasingly anxious around the Grants his mother dismisses it as just her son’s active imagination but soon has to face the fact that there may be something sinister going on within their perfect house.
Rea is joined in the cast by Deborah Valente, Michael Cram, Dylan Everett, Hannah Lochner, Siobhan Murphy, Briony Glassco, and Ursula Campbell.
Orr got her start in the entertainment industry by working as a script supervisor (in fact, she was the script supervisor on a previous Friday Fright Night movie, Dead Mary). 2008 was a busy year for her, as that year saw the release of her first three directorial efforts: the horror thriller Grindstone Road, the thriller Harm’s Way, and The Devil’s Mercy. Since then she has racked up directing credits on over twenty more titles, all of them TV shows: Forbidden Science, Scare Tactics, Dino Dana, Utopia Falls, Odd Squad, Ghostwriter, The Barbarian and the Troll, Run the Burbs, Children Ruin Everything, The Hardy Boys, etc.
So take a look at The Devil’s Mercy – it’s free! – and let us know what you thought of it by leaving a comment below or on the YouTube page.
The post Friday Fright Nights: Watch the horror movie The Devil’s Mercy, starring Stephen Rea, right here! appeared first on JoBlo.
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