'The Devil Inside' Trailer: "You Need A Better Understanding Of Exorcism"

After the success of Paranormal Activity, Paramount created a small division called Insurge. The purpose of that company offshoot was to make or buy several 'micro-budget' films each year — essentially movies made for about a million dollars that could (hopefully) replicate some of the success of Paranormal Activity.

The first Insurge effort is this: The Devil Inside, in which a young woman named Isabella visits her mother, who has been held in what seems to be a Vatican-run institution after killing three people during an exorcism. The trailer has just hit, and it shows the film to be some combination of the now-familiar approach of the 'found footage' horror genre and more traditional film narrative. It also has some reasonably creepy scenes of demonic possession. (Or of great Satanic yoga poses, though I guess to some extreme fundamentalists, possession and yoga are basically the same thing.)

Check out the trailer below.

There's not much of an official synopsis at this point, but it's a pretty simple story: woman is accused of killing people as priest tries to remove demon from her body; daughter later visits mom, and the problems with possession start all over again. As a micro-budget effort this doesn't look too bad in the effects department, but there's not much in the trailer to convince me that this moves beyond the stock scares of other 'found footage' films and recent exorcism tales.

William Brent Bell co-wrote with Matthew Peterman (Stay Alive) and directed. Paramount will open the film on January 6, 2012. (Paramount didn't produce the film; Insurge bought it in February of this year.)Apple has the trailer in HD.

In Italy, a woman becomes involved in a series of unauthorized exorcisms during her mission to discover what happened to her mother, who allegedly murdered three people during her own exorcism.