What drew me to Devil Story (1986) was the poster art: a bald Gollum-like mutant wearing a SS uniform and toting a shotgun. As a low budget French horror flick, its first scenes grab you with a lone camping tent in an open forest field rustling with something happening inside. Then out pops the monster from the poster, though not really delivering on the poster’s promise; he looks like someone wearing a Peter Boyle mask, bald and grunting. The monster has killed a camper. Cut to a close up on a stabbing wound as blood dribbles out like a tap that hasn’t been twisted tight enough.
As other random travelers find themselves beset in broad daylight by this knife-wielding, shotgun-toting monster, a young couple pass through the countryside and wind up at a village hotel. This is some hotel because it’s actually a palatial mansion run by an elderly pair of kooks, who tell an ancient tale of a ship that was lured to destruction by thieves at the nearby shoreline. At night, the woman of this couple finds herself wandering around, glimpsing a black horse running loose in the streets that has some strange power over her.
Devil Story keeps cutting to that black horse galloping around and the continued use of a “neigh” sound effect, which I couldn’t help but laugh at, the more it went on and on and on. You can even hear, I swear, the “neigh” warp on the soundtrack in how often it is being used. The film’s high point for me is the horse kicking the bald monster until he vomits up blood, and the monster’s mother trying to close a coffin lid upon the frightened woman who fights to push the lid back open. And then from the buried ancient ship, a mummy emerges to wander and vomit slime.
Our bald monster receives a gaping head wound due to the horse’s kicks, part of his skull flapping around. And yet he persists! Though he’s not very threatening chasing the woman, nursing his head wound while groaning and stumbling around. Devil Story doesn’t really progress as a story, rather it continues to circle around key scenes to the point of surreal confusion. The old man from the hotel is in a field firing a shotgun at a black horse as it gallops around him. He does this at night. We cut back to him in the morning: he’s still shooting at the horse to no effect. “Neighhh” and repeat, etc.
Often put into the sub-category of “murderdrone,” particularly with its synth score, this is a distinctly French genre movie with the English overdubbing adding to what is a truly baffling and strange experience, which I was delighted to have endured. Where the incomprehensible and incompetent meet to create something dreamlike is why Devil Story is a unique experience. That and I felt like I was losing my mind watching it.
