Rosemary's Baby (1968). In The Devil's Candy, a demonic presence ultimately wants Jesse's daughter as a human sacrifice. Similarly, in Rosemary's Baby, housewife Rosemary (Mia Farrow) is manipulated by a coven of witches that resides in her new apartment building. The coven ultimately wants to raise Rosemary's baby as their own—the son of Satan. This similarity has led critics to offer reasons as to why The Devil's Candy is Rosemary's Baby from a male point of view.
The parental struggle with evil shared by these two films is definitely not a coincidence: director Sean Byrne (The Loved Ones, 2009) has said in many interviews that his film The Devil's Candy was inspired in part by supernatural horror films like Rosemary's Baby, The Amityville Horror (1979), each of which features families in conflict with an evil force. Byrne has also said that his own fears about becoming a parent were a heavy influence on the film.
However, The Devil's Candy is far from being a repackaged version of Rosemary's Baby—in fact, there are probably more differences between the two films than there are similarities. For instance, Rosemary is manipulated, coerced, and raped by the coven, making her almost exclusively a victim of an external evil, and she loses her baby to Satan at the film's end. Jesse, on the other hand, is possessed by a demonic force that takes advantage of his ambition, making him more a victim of his own internal evil, and he ultimately saves his daughter, Zooey (Kiara Glasco), from the Devil's grasp. Therefore, the question remains, what is it that makes The Devil's Candy a Rosemary's Baby from a male point of view?
Jesse Gives Life To His Daughter Through Metal Music
In direct contrast to male Jesse, female Rosemary is pregnant. It is precisely within this difference between the two characters where The Devil's Candy can be seen as Rosemary's Baby from a male point of view. Although Jesse is not pregnant in the film, in some sense, he is also with child: he metaphorically carries his daughter in his body, even claiming that she and the other children targeted by serial killer Ray (Pruitt Taylor Vince, Metallica's rendition of the Diamond Head song Am I Evil?
The process of gestating life in the womb is widely understood as giving mothers a unique bond with their children, but this does not mean that men without a womb cannot develop a similarly unique bond with their own children. In The Devil's Candy, Jesse has been developing such a bond with Zooey—and in some sense, is giving life to her (it is no accident that Zooey, or Zoe, means life in Greek)—by instilling in her a love of music, specifically metal music. Furthermore, their shared love of metal and the unique bond between them that goes with it is one that Zooey specifically does not share with her mother.
There are many differences between The Devil's Candy and Rosemary's Baby. The context, the themes, and the characters' genders are different. The former features demonic possession, a haunted house, a serial killer, and is told from a male point of view. The latter features satanic ritual abuse, a witches' coven, the Antichrist, and is told from a female point of view. In the end, however, the parental fears that Jesse and Rosemary experience are one and the same: the fear of not being able to protect their children from the evils—both natural and supernatural—of the world.
