Even with Movie Night taking a hiatus and then back with a relaxed schedule for a while, I still watch a lot of movies in a year. I don’t mean that so much as a brag, but as a defense in this case. Devour is a psychological horror film starring Mr. Jensen “Dean Winchester” Ackles, and its poster caught my eye enough that I put it on for Movie Night. Simple enough, right? Well, turns out we had watched it back in 2018 and none of us remembered a single detail about it. Not the best look!
Coming out the same year as Hellraiser: Hellworld, Devour starts off being about a video game that seems to be pushing people towards violence. Once you put your information into the site, calls from someone sounding just like you start occurring where they point out your crippling flaws and how killing someone might make you feel better. Sure, why not. The mid-2000’s were rife with “technology is scary and Thomas Edison was a witch” kind of movies. But as Ackles’ character, Jake Gray, investigates further and all his friends die, he finds out he’s at the center of a demonic conspiracy. See, his real birth mother was an actual demon. Side note, they’re described by Jake when he first saw her as “half-man, half-woman,” which is a bit of a strange way to describe a hulking horned demon in all black. Like, sure, maybe they were hermaphroditic, but I feel like that’s not the focus, you know? Anyway, the people he thought were his real parents found him right after birth and snatched him away, which makes his dad played by Jensen’s real life father, Alan Ackles, a bit funny. Anyway, turns out the nice girl Jake has hooked up with is his actual mother demon thing who wants him to become the Antichrist or whatever. He refuses and stabs them, but is arrested for killing like… everyone around him.
Then things get interesting. Due to lack of evidence, Jake is let go and just kind of wanders, wondering what to do with his life. He meets a man named Dean Forester (Jared Padalecki), and the two enter a dysfunctional relationship. Both men haven’t worked out their issues, but are trying to find something good in this world together… I’m sure you’ve noticed something’s up with this part of the post. In addition to Padalecki not being in Devour, Dean was actually his character in Gilmore Girls. Devour was so dull that I started looking up stuff while watching it, and found out that it absolutely has fanfiction on AO3, AKA Archive of Our Own. There’s not a lot, but a handful of very dedicated people decided that more needed to be written about this middling horror movie where a man makes out with his demon mother. I found “The Willow Is Weeping” to be one of the better written ones, but there were also crossovers with Supernatural–so many of those–as well as one with Face/Off. The internet is a magical place, and the creativity of people who will never get their proper time in the spotlight can create stuff much better than this movie that I’m sure I’ll watch again in 2026 and still have no lasting memory of it.
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