Religious trauma is the main driving force behind Daniel J. Phillips' latest horror flick, Diabolic, as a former fundamentalist Mormon woman grapples with gaps in her memories, blackouts, and struggles with intimacy that stem from her childhood inside the church.
Diabolic follows Elise (Elizabeth Cullen), a former member of the controversial Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints who left her childhood community following some unremembered trauma. Elise now lives in the city with her boyfriend, Adam (John Kim), and focuses on her art as an outlet. However, she's struggling with mental health issues, and her doctors don't think there's much that can be done to help her. Instead, they offer what sounds like a pretty ethically dubious approach; return to the place of her childhood trauma where members of her old religion will give her hallucinogens in the hopes that it'll help her to figure out and solve her trauma.
With that frankly terrible plan decided upon, Elise and Adam decide to head out into the forest, accompanied by their friend Gwen (Mia Challis), where they will meet church member Hyrum (Robin Goldsworthy) at a remote old church. Elise and Adam allow themselves to be drugged, and during the night Hyrum's mother, Alma (Genevieve Mooy) pulls a strange clump of black hair, or something similar, from Elise's throat. This apparently cures her of her trauma, and Elise immediately feels transformed, and begins to remember parts of her past. However, it seems that the process also unlocked something powerful and evil that has its sights set on Elise.
I saw Diabolic described as 'Mormon Evil Dead' and 'lesbian witch horror', which along with a fairly decent looking trailer made me want to check the film out. Sadly, when I finally watched Diabolic I found the comparison to Evil Dead fairly thin, and whilst the film does deal with lesbians and witches, these aspects failed to really make Diabolic stand out from other religious horror films.
One of my biggest criticisms with the film is that not a whole lot happens for much of the film's runtime. A lot of the film is given over to focusing on Elise and her confronting her past trauma. And whilst this wouldn't normally be a bad thing, the lack of any real horror moments during these long sections. The tension just isn't there, there's no creep factor, and it feels like the film relies on the idea that horror is to come and religious trauma to keep the viewer uncomfortable whilst we wait for the plot to really start moving. Sadly, by the time things do really start it's so close to the end of the film that things wrap up very quickly.
When the horror does start to happen it's also fairly tame and somewhat predictable. Sadly, Diabolic doesn't do anything I've not already seen before. The answers to the mystery of what happened to Elise and the young woman she begins to remember is easy to see coming long before the film gives them, the jump scares are few and far between and don't really elicit much of a reaction, and the look of the film's monster is definitely trying to elicit Deadite vibes, but ends up looking both tame and a little bit sad at the same time.
There's so much about Diabolic that I really wanted to like. We need more horror stories with queer characters and representation, and whilst the film uses a queer story as one of it's driving factors it falls into some traps as far as queer punishment and trauma being the only story told here instead of queer joy and acceptance. I think that the Mormon community is a brilliant backdrop for horror, due in large parts to how frightening the organisation is in real life, and would love to see more of a focus on them in films; yet Diabolic could have been about almost any religious community. The remote woodland church had some great vibes to it, yet the film didn't really do much with it. The trailer impressed me and got me wanting to watch the film, but come the end I was honestly just quite bored of it.
Diabolic had a lot of promise, and for me it failed to really deliver on them. I'm sure that there'll be some people who really enjoy the film, and if you've not seen many religious horror films before then it could be a decent gateway into the sub-genre; but for someone who's seen a fair few films that tackle the same subjects better it ended up falling a little flat.
Diabolic is available on DVD, Blu-ray, and digital streaming from Monday 25th May 2026.
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