Writer-director Sean Byrne’s THE DEVIL’S CANDY, the film he made in between THE LOVED ONES (2009) and DANGEROUS ANIMALS (2025), is getting the special treatment from Second Sight with another of their limited edition 4K UHD / Blu-ray combo releases complete with art cards, 120 page book and slipcase, as well as getting standard separate 4K UHD and Blu-ray releases.
Extremely metal artist Jesse (Ethan Embry) moves with his equally heavy metal-loving teenaged daughter Zooey (Kiara Glasco) and his not quite as heavy metal-loving wife Astrid (Shiri Appleby from TV’s Roswell) to a big old farmhouse in the country. They get it cheap because two people died there, but who they really need to be concerned about is the still-living son of the family, Ray (Pruitt Taylor Vince), now holed up in a motel but still affected by a voice in his head that keeps telling him to abduct Zooey.
Meanwhile Ethan’s wall-sized art is progressing well, even if it isn’t the butterflies a bank has commissioned him for and is instead a hellscape filled with the heads of screaming children. Ethan frequently loses track of time, failing to pick his daughter up from school in the process, and it’s on one of those occasions that Ray is able to grab her.
THE DEVIL’S CANDY runs a sweet 79 minutes and leaves you with enough to think about as to what is actually going on, how much it has to do with the house itself that Ethan has moved into, and whether or not it will continue after the film is over. Byrne cleverly manages a fine, claustrophobic atmosphere even with the frequent use of wide shots, and Ethan’s artwork is a delicious confection of horrors in itself.
Second Sight’s 4K release comes with a Sean Byrne commentary and there are new interviews with Byrne (33 minutes), Embry (20 minutes), cinematographer Simon Chapman (25 minutes), editor Andy Canny (23 minutes) and production designer Thomas S Hammock (16 minutes), giving us nearly two hours’ worth of interviews in all. There’s also a short piece on the VFX work (3 minutes) and two Sean Byrne short films. Of most interest to horror fans will be Advantage Satan (11 minutes) about a couple trapped in a tennis court at night, and you also get Work? (11 minutes) which is about a sex worker.
Sean Byrne’s THE DEVIL’S CANDY is out from Second Sight in a limited edition 4K UHD / Blu-ray set as well as standard edition separate UHD and Blu-ray releases on Monday 25th May 2026
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