YMMV / The Sudbury Devil

• Awesome Music: Dillon DeRosa yet again delivers another classic Atun-Shei Films score which sounds like a hellish, unholy combination of Arrival and Jacob's Ladder's scores, with a Drone of Dread aplenty complimented by cacophonic Native American-sounding percussion and chanting. If the movie itself doesn't give you nightmares, the soundtrack will.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Did Goodenow request the Witchfinders to lead the prayer at the beginning of the film because he, in that moment, genuinely was in awe of their prestige? Or did he do it to disguise the fact that as a pagan and a witch, he is incapable of reciting prayers?
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Goodenow's "possession" appears to just be a particularly noticable type of Tourettes, which some commentators have noted would make him seem to represent the neurodivergent in how the Sudbury coven is a trio of various persecuted minorities.
• Fan Nickname: Isaac Goodenow is sometimes called "Isaac Goonenow" due to how frequently he violently masturbates throughout the film, leading fans to accuse him of being a "gooner" and the nickname being a play on "Goon Now".
• Faux Symbolism: It's difficult to tell where the actual symbolism stops and where Rakich's Author Appeal of inserting stuff which looks like symbolism begins, and everyone who watches the film will probably have a different interpretation.
• Genius Bonus: The film is awash in historical references, many of which are broken down in this video.
  • The film's portrayal of the titular Devil as a ball of radiant light is sourced from Christian theology, as 17th-century Christians believed that Satan could appear in an angelic form to trick mortals. It's also taken by Rakich as a sort of Psychological Projection; he sees the old-tyme witch finders as basically telling on themselves with this passage, much like the protagonists of the film who are less virtuous than they like to appear.
  • All the male character other than Rev. Russell are stated to be veterans of King Phillip's War, a bloody conflict which saw European settlers engaged in bloody massacres against the local native tribes. Fletcher specifically is noted to have fought in Samuel Moseley's company, a motley crew of mostly Boxed Crooks and other social undesirables, who were notorious for their brutality against Native American civilians during the war.
  • The scene wherein Cutting and Fletcher opine about the racial differences between white, black and indigenous peoples is taken almost word for word from contemporary writings from colonial figures. Similarly, Flora's cries of "No lob-lob," although taken as gibberish by the protagonists, are hints to her history as a slave on Barbados, where slaves were fed with boiled cornmeal porridge called "loblolly," which they detested.
  • Goodenow, seemingly under the influence of unholy forces, sings a Christmas song with an overt royalist slant to taunt the witch-hunters, who, as Puritans, would be religiously opposed to the celebration and have pretty mixed feelings about a king whose father their fathers (or at least their fathers' fellow travelers in England) fought a whole civil war and revolution to depose.
  • Mr Gavett's failure to properly recite the Grace Prayer is based on a colonial-era superstition that witches and pagans could never recite a prayer correctly.
• He Really Can Act: Andrew Rakich considers himself an "OK actor", and most of the acting roles he's done for both his films and his YouTube channel have a more lighthearted comedic bent to them. However, his performance as Mr. Gavett is dramatically convincing in a way unlike any role he's ever taken; the way that he portrays Patience reveling in pretending to be her dead husband and taunting the helpless Fletcher by forcing him to relive his past trauma is simultaneously bone-chillingly terrifying and deliciously hateful to watch.
• Narm: Patience saying "Hail Satan!" as the Day Star whisks her away and births her child. Sure, it makes perfect sense in context, but such a jarring departure from the film's Antiquated Linguistics just comes across as silly rather than climactically dramatic.
• Signature Scene: Due to being the unquestionably largest source of Squick in the entire film, the scene where Goodenow ferociously masturbates and we actually see him blow his load all over the witching stone in a shocking aversion of "Sexy" Discretion Shot is the film's most famous and notorious moment.
• Spiritual Successor: As if Andrew Rakich's unyielding love and high praise for it didn't tip you off, this is his 17th-century New England answer to Ravenous (1999), being a Splatter Horror film with tons of Gorn which also has a lot of stuff going on under the hood that the average person may not pick up on the first time watching.

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