2012 horror movie The Devil Inside has one of the most hated movie endings of all time, but why exactly was it so controversial? Directed by William Brent Bell, The Devil Inside is a found footage movie styled as a documentary about a young woman called Isabella Rossi (Fernanda Andrade) investigating the circumstances under which her mother, Maria Rossi (Suzan Crowley) came to murder two priests and a nun in the basement of her home.

After being told by her father that Maria committed the murders during an attempted exorcism, Isabella travels to Rome, where her mother is being held in a psychiatric facility. With the help of rogue exorcists Father Ben Rawlings (Simon Quartermain) and Father David Keane (Evan Helmuth), Isabella tries to free her mother from the demon possessing her, but instead accidentally causes demonic forces to latch on to David and herself. David attempts to drown a baby during a baptism before wrestling a gun from a police officer and shooting himself in the head, and Isabella is taken to the hospital as she succumbs to her own demonic possession.

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The Devil Inside is a short movie, with a runtime of merely 83 minutes including the credits, and one of the biggest complaints about the ending is how abrupt and unsatisfying it feels. After attacking a nurse at the hospital, Isabella is dragged away by Ben and documentary director Michael (Ionut Grama). They get her into the car with plans to take her to the teacher at the exorcism school in Vatican City, but along the way Isabella transfers her demon into Michael, who is driving, and the car crashes, implicitly killing everyone inside. That’s where the movie ends – on the way to a final showdown that never actually happens.

That ending alone, while disappointing, wouldn’t have earned the notoriety that it did if The Devil Inside hadn’t immediately followed it up by showing a link to the movie’s website, encouraging the audience to look for more answers there. The movie might have survived an anticlimactic car crash where all the characters die or an ending card telling people to go and visit a website to find out more, but the two in combination made the story feel unfinished.

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Responding to the backlash over The Devil Inside‘s ending, Bell was unapologetic about the creative decision of ending with the car crash. “We knew that doing the film in a non-Hollywood, non-traditional way people would have a really harsh response to it,” he said. “But it felt authentic to us.” Co-writer Matthew Peterman added:

“We were going for a level of realism. Sometimes real life doesn’t follow a perfect structure. Things aren’t always wrapped up and resolved when or how you’d like them to be. All of us enjoyed leaving things open ended. We thought it was visceral, we thought it was unique.”

But while both Bell and Peterman were committed to how the story ends, they also acknowledged that the website might have been what pushed people too far. “The website was a very late idea and it didn’t seem to be quite as big a deal when Paramount presented it to us,” Bell explained. “The website seemed to feel a little bit manipulative. That wasn’t the intention, we were just trying something a bit different.” An obvious flaw in having a link to the website at the end of The Devil Inside was that Paramount Pictures only maintained the website for a limited amount of time. The original link at the end of the movie is now dead and only archived versions of the website are now available.

Whether The Devil Inside is an admirable example of a movie ending breaking the mold or proof that the Hollywood trend of wrapping up loose story ends in a satisfying conclusion exists for a reason, it certainly got a reaction out of audiences – and may actually be the most memorable thing about the film.

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