The age of the message movie is supposedly over, but the trailer for Jeffrey G. Hunt’s upcoming film Satanic seems to have a pretty straightforward moral: If you tell people you’re going to Coachella, just go to Coachella. Don’t detour to Los Angeles to tour murder sites, don’t check into a hotel room where a Satanist slit her own throat years ago, and for God’s sake don’t participate in any rituals!
Naturally, the characters in Satanic take none of these precautions, throwing caution to the wind and going on the worst tour of Los Angeles imaginable. After stopping by a few murder houses and taking a photo on the Walk of Fame (judging from the location, they’re photographing the star for “Ozark Nightingale” Judy Canova, whose occult significance is … obscure), the unlucky group checks into the Hollywood Tower and makes with the prayers to Satan. Unsurprisingly, things don’t go well.
On the one hand, this trailer makes Satanic look like a very low-rent creepshow. But on the other, it seems like it has a lot of good advice for young people: That house on Cielo Drive was torn down before you ever heard of it, they’re gutting the Cecil Hotel, and if you’re staying at a place that looks like the Tower of Terror, it probably is. So when somebody says, “Maybe we should just blow this whole thing off and go to Coachella,” take him or her up on it. It will be twice as terrifying as anything Anton LaVey ever dreamed of.
