One Of The Most Controversial Horror Movie Endings Relies On A Dead Website

There's a school of screenwriting thought that holds you should always know your ending. If you know where you're headed narratively, you should be spared a lot of guesswork and time spent wandering in the forest looking for a way out. That's the rationale, at least.

Many times, however, you discover over the course of your writing that your characters want different things than you expected, which throws your perfect ending into doubt. Suddenly, you realize your story would be way more interesting and dramatically satisfying if they either didn't succeed or succeeded in a completely different manner than you'd initially planned. And sometimes it just makes more sense to leave things unresolved.

The "New Hollywood" cinema of the 1970s was famous for ambiguous endings (because everyone was bummed out by the Vietnam War and Nixon's corruption), but the triumphal finales of blockbusters like "Jaws," "Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope" and "Superman: The Movie" began a trend toward tidy storytelling where mainstream audiences felt ripped off if filmmakers didn't tie everything up in a bow by the time the credits rolled. So, studio executives weren't terribly inclined to let their directors leave money on the table by subverting moviegoers' expectations.

The horror genre is a little different in that audiences are okay with leaving the theater feeling creeped out. With the advent of franchise filmmaking, these movies could get away with having satisfying conclusions that are tweaked in the closing seconds by, for example, the reveal that the slasher is inexplicably still alive. Horror fans will put up with a lot. But they evidently draw the line at paying to watch a movie that ends with a link to a website where the conclusion may or may not be waiting for them.

William Brent Bell's "The Devil Inside" hit theaters in 2012 at the peak of the found-footage horror craze. These movies were a boon for studios and independent filmmakers alike. They were incredibly cheap to make, and, if their hook was properly baited, profitable within their first weekend of release. "The Devil Inside" cost $1 million and made $102 million, so it's fair to say Paramount made it an absolute killing on the film. With that kind of success, you'd expect at least one sequel. But the conclusion so infuriated audiences that Paramount didn't bother.

At the end of Bell's found-footage exorcism fright fest, the demonically possessed main character, Isabella Rossi (Fernanda Andrade), instigates a car crash that kills her documentary filmmaker partner and a heroic priest. Isabella disappears, and the movie abruptly ends with a title card reading, "For more information about the ongoing investigation visit: www.TheRossiFiles.com." At the time, the website contained fictional media — videos and news clippings — about Isabella and her possessed mother Maria (Suzan Crowley). Moviegoers walked out of the film irate, and, thus, not inclined to explore the website.

Why in the world did Bell and Paramount think this was a good idea? It actually wasn't Bell's idea, and he regrets the decision to this day.

During an appearance on the "Movie Crypt" podcast hosted by Adam Green and Joe Lynch, Bell once revealed that there was initially supposed to be a traditional third act to "The Devil Inside." However, the then-president of production at Paramount, Brian Robbins, thought it would be cool if the film cut out after the car accident, at which point there would be a card directing audiences to visit the movie's website for more clues. The problem, according to Bell, was that he considered the story finished at the point of the wreck. "I remember another one of the execs there was like, 'We're going to break the internet with this,'" he noted. "None of us looked at it as if the movie's not over and you have to go watch this to understand the rest. This was just DVD extras, cut scenes, it was just in addition."

The only thing Robbins and his underlings broke was a viable horror franchise. If you were unfortunate enough to see "The Devil Inside" in a theater, you almost certainly heard the groans in response to the website. You might've heard a smattering of profanity, too. Unsurprisingly, the film earned an "F" Cinemascore, and suffered a 76% drop in its second weekend. If you wondering what happened to the website, well, it's good and dead, but you can at least see what it looked like via the Wayback Machine.

As far as Bell is concerned, this was a self-inflicted debacle. As he told Green and Lynch:

"It's one thing to end the movie abruptly but then to throw that up was like insult to injury. When it was a bold choice to end the movie like that but then to say that it gave the wrong impression and people took it the wrong way. Had we put it at the end of the credits it probably would have been a non-issue, that part of it, and it just would have been a bold ending."

Amazingly, Bell said in 2020 that he was still kicking around ideas for a "The Devil Inside" prequel. There's been nothing new reported on this project since then, but we'll keep you posted should there be movement on the least anticipated follow-up in film history.