Where The Devil Roams

They drink and brawl and curse each other in the carnie, pitching their tents and their stalls in the dirt, slathering on the make-up to cover the bruises, leveraging misfortune where they can. Caught between World Wars, in the empty belly of the Great Depression, they give a home to society’s cast-offs, to the deformed and the demented, to self-mutilators and murderers. Even the poorest in the towns they pass through will scrape up a penny or two if they can for the chance to see the legendary Mr Tipps cut off his own fingers. When Eve (Zelda Adams) takes to the stage dressed in white and exercises her angelic voice in song, it’s something different, and this dark world is brought to the brink of transcendence. Offstage, shorn of her wings, Eve cannot speak, but when she visits Mr Tipps late at night he knows what it is that she would say if she could. “Show me some real magic.”

Shot in period style with a flair which won it the Best Cinematography prize in the Cheval Noir awards at Fantasia 2023, Where The Devil Roams is the Adams family’s best film to date. It begins and ends on a stage as a carnie tale should, opening with a poem delivered by a handsomely dressed man whose humble status is nonetheless assured because he has no legs. Through the poem we learn the story of Abaddon, the angel fallen from Heaven who clawed his way back up to Earth and found love with a mortal. It’s a tragic tale, mortals being what they are, but one which has relevance to the feature presentation, telling as it does of an enchanted heart through which that devil, though cast back down into the pit, can still connect with the world.

Like the devil, his lost beloved and the man without legs, the carnie folk seem to consist primarily of those forsaken by a selective God – or those who have simply turned their backs on him. A brief introductory flashback shows us Maggie, Eve’s mother, as a girl, stabbing her family members to death as a dog (played by Cherry, who has sadly since died) looks on, bemused. As an adult, Maggie is played by Toby Poser, and so the real life family finds its counterpart in the story, with John Adams as her husband Seven, a former army medic so shattered by his experiences that she or Eve always takes care to cover his eyes before she kills someone. She’s a monster, but she’s also the best nurse he ever found, undaunted by blood, and she takes care of him and holds everything together until only stitches can do so.

We follow the family during a spell alone on the road before it is due to meet up with the carnie once more. Newspaper headlines follow it, papers spinning into focus on the screen. They talk of the deaths of a corrupt judge, an insider trader, and more. Is there a positive side to what Maggie’s doing? Another incident disproves it. She might mean well, in her skewed way, but she doesn’t have a very clear understanding of the world around her. In this regard, Seven tries to protect her. Eve, meanwhile, photographs the victims with her box brownie. She has a collection of damning, secret things.

Though this might sound like non-stop carnage, it isn’t filmed that way. There’s a sweet melancholy about it, and the dominant emotion is the love between the family members. Poser’s interpretation of the damaged Maggie is complex and deeply affecting. John Adams plays Seven as a man haunted by the brutality he has surrounded himself with yet unable to summon up the power to create change. In various places where they stop, he sees a bald eagle, traditionally a sign of the need to reevaluate one’s life and find a new spiritual direction. From the very start of the film, however, there is a sense that it is too late. Towards the end, there is a scene in which Eve walks down a long corridor, passing by rooms full of people she has known, as if she were about to pass out of the world that we know.

A beautifully crafted piece of period Gothic, this is one which horror fans won’t want to miss.