When a group of young seekers sets up camp outside a derelict ‘baptism house’ deep in the Utah woods, you already feel the chill. Diabolic isn’t a baptism of fire. With slow early stages, it soon becomes a hallucinatory descent where faith, trauma, and possession blur until they are indistinguishable.
Writer-director Daniel J. Phillips splices the DNA of The Exorcist and The Blair Witch Project, filtering it through the modern obsessions of psychedelic healing and religious extremism. What happens when you drink ayahuasca not to meet your demons but to expel the witch living inside you? The answer, it seems, depends on whether that witch was protecting you all along.
At the film’s centre is Elise, played with fragile conviction by Elizabeth Cullen, a woman piecing together memories fractured by years of Mormon excommunication and repression.
Her blackouts and lapses in recall make her both protagonist and unreliable witness. As Elise’s mind clears, the audience regains fragments beside her. It’s an elegant structure: each recovered memory feels like light breaking through a forest canopy.
Phillips’ direction leans on sensory disorientation rather than jump scares. Will Spartalis’ spooky choral score rattles like distant chains. The palette of browns and bruised blues evokes a baptismal murk, the water never quite clean.
All four leads – Cullen, John Kim (as Elise’s boyfriend Adam), Mia Challis (as a new age friend Gwen), and Luca Asta Sardelis (as Clara, a cloudy memory in Elise’s mind) could anchor their own films. Each face catches firelight the way Polanski once caught candle-glow: innocence meeting corruption mid-frame.
Veterans Dennis Coard and Genevieve Mooy bring a deliciously deranged energy as a mother-son duo out of Psycho by way of Salt Lake City. Their scenes give the film its pulpy heartbeat, grounding the metaphysical horror in a recognisable family madness.
The final quarter finally lets the real horror off its chain. Practical effects: compound fractures, a spray of cranial matter, land with satisfying weight, proof that low-budget filmmaking still thrives on craftsmanship over CGI. Yes, the film takes its time getting there, and yes, a higher budget might have delivered more bodies on the floor, but when violence arrives, it means something.
Like many modern horror debuts, Diabolic hints at a franchise. The story stops a breath before catharsis, as if saving revelations for Diabolic 2 (or 20). Yet what’s here already earns its place: a meditation on belief, repression, and the dangerous wish to purify oneself completely.
Phillips reminds us that horror works best when it’s about what people do to themselves in the name of light. Diabolic leaves you uneasy, not because of its demons, but because it understands faith’s craving for them.
Diabolic will play at Special Event screenings from 20 November 2025.
Website: https://www.monsterfest.com.au/events/diabolic/
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/rialtodistributionau/
Watch the trailer here:
Film details:
Title: Diabolic
Director: Daniel J. Phillips
Cast: Elisabeth Cullen, John Kim, Mia Challis, Luca Asta Sardelis
Country of Origin: Australia
Rating: MA 15+
Duration: 95 mins
Participating Cinemas:
NSW
NT
Alice Springs Cinema
Birch, Carroll & Coyle Casuarina
Katherine Cinema
QLD
SA
Oatmill Cinema Mt Gambier
Wallis Cinemas Mitcham
Wallis Cinemas Mt Barker
Wallis Cinemas Noarlunga
VIC
WA
