The new supernatural horror film Devilreaux would lie somewhere between B- and C-grade cinema, based on the conventional standards used to measure a film’s worth. Centered around the plot of an old legend coming back to reality in the form of a terrible monster who murders everyone in his way, the film is unintentionally comic in almost every facet. From a bad script to amateur acting performances to unconvincing special effects, it is quite evident that the film has been made on a shoestring budget and is expected to be watched as a TV film at best. It is best to avoid Devilreaux altogether, unless you are categorically interested in the aesthetics of low-budget cinema.
Spoilers Alert
Devilreaux Plot Summary: What Is The Film About?
Devilreaux entirely takes place in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, where we are first taken to a magic shop selling every odd trinket and item related to witchcraft and urban legends. The owner of the shop, Lola, and her husband, Damian, are seen preparing a new section about the local legend of Devilreaux, a monstrous man from the past who supposedly wakes up and murders people out of vengeance. With detailed graphic novels and accessories linked to the lore all up for sale, Lola intends to make money off the Devilreaux story from current teenagers, who are perhaps not as aware of it. However, things start to go extremely wrong inside the shop when the Devilreaux monster actually appears out of thin air and kills both Lola and Damian with a shovel that he carries around.
Around this same time, police lieutenant Bobbie Briggs has to visit the local hospital to investigate a rare and strange case in which a number of teenagers went missing from an abandoned historic farmhouse. Only one of the teenagers from the group had survived, and the girl, Lexy Allen, had been brought to the hospital where she was being treated. Lt. Briggs arrives to interrogate this very girl, Lexy, in order to find out what had happened to her friends and where they could be at present. While Briggs is wary of the fact that some of the friends’ DNA, possibly from their blood, had been found on Lexy’s body, indicating that she could have done something harmful to them, Lexy starts to tell a different and unbelievable tale altogether. She reports that after performing an oiuja séance with her friends, they had supposedly awakened the spirit of the Devilreaux, which used to once rage around in that very same farmhouse. Although Briggs does not believe any of this story, the lie detector test results clearly show that Lexy had been telling the truth, and Lt. Briggs starts to investigate more into the matter.
What Was The Origin Of The Horrific Monster?
Along with the terrifying, or as it is intended to be, monster that the film presents, it also gives an equally ugly backstory to the origin of its existence in the past. When Bobbie Briggs first tells her boyfriend, Peter Turner, about what Lexy had apparently experienced, the man immediately gets spooked by it. This is because, Peter explains, his whole family line was cursed by the voodoo monster Devilreaux, and he fears that if the monster were truly awake now, he would come looking for Peter as well and kill him. In his conversation with Bobbie at the restaurant, Peter reveals his ancestor was present during the night when the Devilreaux monster was first created. This resulted in the bloodlines of all the men present at the scene being cursed, thus adding to Peter’s fear. Although Bobbie does not believe in any of this, it is soon revealed that Peter’s worries are not baseless at all. While alone in his house, Peter gets stalked by Devilreaux and then mercilessly killed with the monster’s iconic shovel, with which he himself had been killed some centuries ago.
In the meantime, Bobbie returns to her home and starts searching for the Devilreaux story on the internet. Once she finds a detailed account and starts to read it, we are taken along to scenes from the past as we witness the sad and ugly story behind Devilreaux’s origin. Back in 1862, at the same place in Louisiana, was a rich family called the Michaels, who made wealth based on the inhumane hard work that their Black slaves were forced to do. In 1862, the particular time when the long flashback sequence begins, the patriarch Jim Michael had just lost his wife to some sickness. Another family, the Turners, had visited to offer their condolences, and their daughter Kelly got acquainted with Jim Michael’s son, who was also named Jim. This became significant because Kelly and Jim would later get married and start a bloodline whose members we see in the present timeline.
Back in the flashback sequence, the Michaels’ maid, a Black woman named Sallie, was pregnant with a child at the time, and the father of this child was another slave worker named Leonard Devilreaux. Leonard and Sallie were deeply in love with each other and were, therefore, extremely distraught with the situation they currently found themselves in. Their master, the pathetic Jim Michael, used to regularly force himself upon Sallie, even after she had gotten pregnant, and despite knowing about this, Leonard could not do much about it. They, and all the other slaves, were apparently kept much better when Jim’s wife had been alive, but now, after her death, the patriarch had grown into a fiendish man with no concern for them whatsoever. With the 4th of July festivities drawing near and also the imminent birth of Sallie’s child, Leonard wanted to escape the Michaels farmhouse with the woman and start their own life somewhere in Baton Rouge. Leonard had gathered information about this and made a plan as well, but Sallie was very scared to put that plan into motion. She believed that running away from the farm would only get them caught and killed, and she just could not imagine such a fate for her child. Instead, Sallie wanted to wait until the birth of their child, while Leonard wanted to escape right away. The father felt that childhood in slavery would be worse for their child, and he instead planned for a good life with a good education for his baby.
The 4th of July festivities came, and it seemed clear that Sallie would give birth on that very night. However, before any such good events took place, there was more horror waiting for the loving couple when Jim Michaels’ vile friends came to his house. In his usual cruel manner, Jim called upon Sallie and then dragged her to his bedroom, where he and all his white friends forced themselves upon her. Leonard, who was working in the yard at the time, could not control himself any longer, and he picked up an ax in retaliation. Angrily barging into the house and then to the bedroom, the man axed all the white men to death before approaching Jim Michael. Leonard was then about to kill the patriarch as well, but he was shot dead just then by the teenager son, Jim Michaels Jr., who had heard noises from his father’s room and had come to check what was wrong.
While Leonard lay dead, Sallie was still alive, but her body was possibly thrown away just like her lover’s, and the woman had lost consciousness. When she woke up next, Sallie found herself in the company of two strange-looking women who seemed to be practicing witchcraft on her and her baby. Sallie had given birth to a baby boy, and with help from the apparent witches, both she and her son were safe and out of harm’s way. Following this incident, the film takes us forward thirty-three years in the future, to 1895, when Sallie was an old woman and her son, named Baron, was a grown man. Seemingly because of whatever the witches had done to Sallie, the woman herself now had the powers of a voodoo witch. These powers were soon used, because of which the curse and the monster originated.
Although slavery had now been abolished by law, Baron had decided to stay in the Michaels farmhouse as a helper and worker. With the laws, the mentalities, at least of some people, had also changed, and unlike his father, the new patriarch, Jim Michaels Jr., was a far better man. While Baron seemed to live in the farmhouse and work there, mostly attending to the farm animals, he was never treated like his ancestors before, and Jim and his wife Kelly considered the man part of their family. On the 4th of July in 1895, amidst Independence Day celebrations at the Michaels farmhouse, Kelly also remembered Baron’s birthday and made him a special pie. Jim, too, supported this, but sadly, some of his neighbors and friends still believed that Blacks should be kept as slaves. Among them was the town’s sheriff, Tom Whitman, who was the most racist of them all, and according to him, Kelly’s friendly relationship with Baron was wrong. Instigating and convincing Jim that Baron definitely has other intentions with Kelly, Sheriff Tom gathered a crowd of racist white men and attacked Baron. The helpless and innocent man was mercilessly beaten and hacked to death with shovels by the group, which included Sheriff Tom, Jim Michaels, and another man, Willie Earl.
When the murderers then took Baron’s body to his mother Sallie’s house, Jim was already quite guilty of what he had just done. Sallie, who was now a voodoo witch, started to perform a ritual on her son’s dead body, and when she was finished, Baron’s body did indeed come back to life, but with an evil and monstrous sense of vengeance. Sallie named him Devilreaux, based on his father’s surname, and thus the Devilreaux monster was born. According to Sallie, the monster would help bring balance to the lopsided justice in society, and carrying the same shovel with which he had been killed, Devilreaux then hunted down Sheriff Tom and killed him. It is not exactly revealed whether he also killed Jim Michael and Willie Earl, but either way, Devilreaux remains vengeful against all the descendants of the two men even in the present timeline.
What Had Happened To Lexy’s Friends?
Devilreaux is built almost entirely on two long flashback sequences, one of which covers the origin of the monstrous supernatural man, and the other focuses on what happened to Lexy and her friends. After waking up and remembering things in the hospital, Lexy Allen tells everything to Lt. Briggs. She and four of her friends had sneaked into the now-empty house, which was once the historic Michaels farmhouse. The intention of the teenagers was just to smoke up at the place and have some harmless fun before returning home. Before heading to the farmhouse, though, they had all gone to Lola’s store, where they first came across the story of Devilreaux and the associated lore.
Lola told Lexy about the supposed method to awaken the monster, as none of them really believed in its existence, and the friends then sneaked into the farmhouse. Here, Lexy performed the exact steps of the ritual, and soon enough, the Devilreaux monster was indeed out there, following and killing each of the friends one after another. Interestingly, all of Lexy’s friends were connected to the families that Devilreaux was forever vengeful against, and this was why they had been killed. But Lexy somehow managed to escape the building and the monster’s grasp in time, and as she ran towards the nearest road, she got hit by a car and was then brought to the hospital.
‘Devilreaux’ Ending Explained: What Happens To The Monster?
After listening to Lexy’s account, Bobbie Briggs goes to her boyfriend’s house and finds him missing as well. The Devilreaux monster has the ability to take away the souls of people and sometimes make their bodies disappear as well. This is why none of the bodies of either Peter or Lexy’s friends are ever found. At Peter Turner’s house, Bobbie meets with his son Dylan, who seems to usually stay away and only visits New Orleans occasionally. After hearing of his father’s disappearance and immediately connecting it to the Devilreaux monster, Dylan decides to help Bobbie out.
The teenager takes the police lieutenant to the Michaels farmhouse and shows her exactly where he and his friends would often break in and spend time. Dylan was part of the same friend group as Lexy, and he and Lexy were romantically involved as well. While showing the entire place to Bobbie, the two also go over to the haunted house attraction spot that has been built right beside the farmhouse. It is inside this place that the Devilreaux monster finally attacks Dylan and kills him. However, Lieutenant Bobbie Briggs is left unhurt because she has no blood ties with the people who killed Baron Devilreaux. At the end of Devilreaux, the monstrous man returns to the hospital, where Lexy Allen is still recovering, and he murders the girl as well. Lexy’s mother was a descendant of the Michaels family, and therefore she too had been on Devilreaux’s list. But with potentially all of the descendants of his murderers now dead, Devilreaux seems to have served his life’s purpose and so would seemingly return to his resting grave, although the film does not make any specific mention of this.
