Satan’s Little Helper
Satan’s Little Helper is one of the best films I’ve seen in a while, and that’s not bad for a film that cost me £1. It was one of those films I bought from a Poundshop last Halloween, expecting nothing more than some cheap laughs at the terrible scripting and atrocious special FX, but recently I saw it on an IGN feature on the ten most under-appreciated horror films of the noughties. That raised my expectations for the film somewhat, and it didn’t disappoint.
One of the reasons the film is so good, despite being obviously low-budget, is that it works with its budget-constraints rather than against them. Most budget horrors over-reach, trying to create scary, supernatural monsters, and falling into the traps of cliche. There were only a couple of times in Satan’s Little Helper where the effects let it down, but these were minor and brief. Mostly the film avoids gore, making its sudden appearances all the more shocking, not that the film relies on jump-scares.
Perhaps most surprising about the film was the quality of the characters. The casting was perfect, though I’m not sure whether that was down to the actor’s being great actor’s, or the roles suiting them so well, but they were all really believable. The kid for example, who is the titular Little Helper, was a much more accurate portrayal of a child than anything in, say, Spielberg. He’s obsessed with this violent videogame, strangely enough called ‘Satan’s Little Helper’, and it colours his perception, so that everything becomes an extension of the game. When he meets his sister’s new boyfriend, who he’s jealous of, he immediately threatens him with the wrath of Satan, when some other kids mock his costume, again he tells them they’ll be sorry when he finds Satan to go trick-or-treating with him. It would be easy to suggest SLH is a negative critique of violent videogames and their affect on children, but rather, it never moralises, never condemns the videogame, and instead seems to be about how any character, any hero-figure, even one as unlikely as Satan, can capture a child’s imagination.
This comes across in more subtle ways, like if you look closely in a few of the shots in the kid’s bedroom, there’s some crayon drawings of Satan’s Little Helper on his wall. It’s little things like this, as well as the way the characters interact with each other, that suggests a life beyond the plot-line of the movie for them. It all feels very natural, which is rare enough in any film, let alone a horror film. But, this being a horror film, of course scary stuff has to happen:
The kid storms off in his SLH costume after his sister invites her new boyfriend to come trick-or-treating with them. As he walks down the sunlit road he witnesses a man in a costume dumping a body on a bench outside a house. “Wow, that looks so real!” he exclaims, peering over the fence. He’s similarly impressed as the man goes into the next house down the road and, after a few moments, drags out a man with a knife stuck in his chest and makes him part of a graveyard display. The kid realises this must be Satan and so offers to become his helper. The masked man agrees without speaking and the kid asks why he does not speak. “Is it because you don’t need to?” The man nods his head.
Here the obvious comparison with John Carpenter’s Halloween surfaces: A silent, masked psychopath. Except this film is far more orignal and, even, far better than Halloween, if perhaps not quite as scary. Certainly it’s more believable than the essentially invincible Michael Myers ever was, though where Satan’s Little Helper really excels over Halloween is in its dark absurdist humour. Most of this comes from the kids utter obliviousness to the sinister nature of his ‘master’ and from the way Satan gets his meanings across without words. But the film never sacrifices believability for comedy, and what it does best of all is quickly turn from comedy to horror and back again. There’s a few times in the film where Satan interacts with the kid’s family, and both the kid’s sister and his mother believe that Satan is the sister’s boyfriend, an amatuer actor, ‘in character’ for Halloween. The kid keeps saying “that’s not Alex, that’s Satan” but they assume it’s all part of the game, indulging the kid as grown-ups do, and perhaps a little swept away with the Halloween spirit themselves. It’s funny in the way that cases of mistaken identity in fiction often are, but there’s several times when the sister or mother nearly figure out that something’s not right, until there’s a sudden interuption, usually by the kid, that throws them off. SLH’s handling of suspense is pretty masterful.
Then there’s a point where the sister does realise that the guy in the mask probably isn’t her boyfriend, and is simultaneously trying to convince her mother while trying to hide her knowledge from Satan, but her mother thinks the sister is now wrapped up in the game. There’s a really palpable feeling of the slow realisation that dawns in the sister as she moves from elation to annoyance to fear. But of course, knowing who Satan isn’t is not the same as knowing who he is when he’s wearing a mask. From the beginning it’s obvious that Satan is just a man in a mask, but rather than try to hide the fact it becomes a key feature of the story, for a mask can always be changed, put on someone else to throw people off. And what does Satan change into? A Jesus costume. One could read into that fairly deeply, but the film has no pretence of encouraging you to: it’s a nice little bit of irony that was well set-up earlier in the narrative.
So yeah, I quite like this film. I’d recommend it at whatever price you can find it for, but if you see it in a Poundshop, among Dead Man’s Hand and Skinned Deep and Zombie Chronicles and Doll Graveyard, you’ve found a diamond in the rough.
Tags: film, Halloween, horror, Jesus, John Carpenter, Satan, Satan's Little Helper
