The Devil's Candy

Jesse, his wife Astrid, and their teenage daughter Zooey buy a rural Texas farmhouse at a price that should have raised questions. They don't ask why it's cheap. The previous occupant, Ray Smilie, is a large, childlike man who hears demonic voices he has been obeying for years — voices that tell him to bring children as offerings. He's been displaced to a group home but keeps gravitating back toward the house. The voices won't let him stay away.

Jesse starts hearing the voices almost immediately — low, insistent murmurs he reads as creative fuel. He begins painting with a ferocity he's never had: enormous canvases of children in flames, children suffering, children lost. The paintings are extraordinary. He doesn't fully register what they depict. He can't stop.

Ray takes Zooey. Jesse, surfacing from a trance, looks at his latest canvas and sees his daughter's face at the center of it.

What follows is brutal and desperate — Jesse tracking Ray, the confrontation between a father running on terror and a man who has no concept of stopping. Jesse kills Ray with his guitar and gets Zooey out.

The family survives. But the film ends with Jesse still painting — still hearing, still compelled. Whatever the house put into Ray has found a new host. Jesse is home, and it is home in him.