Do You Want To Play? world première at FrightFest, 30th August 2026
It is 1970, and little Ward Weaver (Trent Longo) is playing a terrifying game of hide-and-seek with his hulking father John (Lorin McCraley). As John turns violent, Ward stabs his father with a kitchen knife, and then dying John is seen to exhale whatever dark force had taken possession of him into his son’s mouth – at which point little Ward, now himself possessed, cuts off John’s face and wear it himself as a mask. There are different ways that we can read this prologue to writer/director Nick Lyon’s Do You Want To Play?, and to the subsequent revelation that Ward, caught up in a scenario like William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) in the Seventies, would grow up to be the kind of masked serial killer (William Sibley) found in the slashers that dominated horror cinema from the late Seventies to the mid Eighties. On the one hand, Ward is a chip off the old block, driven to acts of violence and madness by the legacy of an abusive, aggressive father, while on the other he embodies a hybrid history of genre.
The world has moved on since then, and Do You Want to Play?, whose principal narrative is set some five decades after Ward’s outrages and subsequent arrest, rings the changes. Where Ward operated in an analogue age, high school student Emily (Quinn Aune) lives very much in the digital era. She is a good Christian girl, and her relationship with boyfriend Tommy (Leo Larson) is entirely chaste, but when, for a school project, her other friend Owen (Maxwell Mushallo) designs fan AI app called D3mon, variously described as a “digital evolution of the demon board”, “a ghost Snapchat”, “a digital spirit board” and “like a séance in the cloud”, and when he launches it at a party alongside the antique Demon Board that inspired it in the very “Westlake murder house” where the Wards once resided, Emily awakens something that follows her to her own address (also connected, via a victim, with Ward’s murders), and that cannot simply be dismissed as a symptom of her frontal lobe epilepsy or of more general teenaged teething troubles. History is about to replay itself across both old and new media, and no intervention by concerned adult authorities like Romanian teacher Mr Rotaru (Atlas Von Poncet), school doctor Velasquez (G. Anthony Joseph) or Jesuit priest turned online influencer ‘Scary’ Gary (Ricco Ross) will be of much help as an ancient demon exploits modern tech in an attempt to bring itself back into the world and into a young person’s body.
The title of Lyon’s film represents the exact words used by the D3mon app to entice users into its diabolical games, at the potential cost of their lives or their very souls – much as Emily is lured by Owen, rather reluctantly, to play with him on the older Demon Board at the party. Later Owen will tell Tommy, “It doesn’t matter if it’s digital or cardboard, it’s the intent. She called out. That’s what they wait for, they don’t care about the medium, they wait for the invitation.” Of course these words apply equally to the film itself, which asks us directly via its advertised title if we too want to play. Evidently we answered in the affirmative simply through our act of viewing, and so agreed to let the devil in and dance with us. What effect this agreement might ultimately have on us is dramatised precisely by the film’s events, which constantly remind us that dabbling in the occult need not be merely a harmless entertainment. And of course in this age, as opposed to the one into which little Ward was born, the devil has never had it easier to record and disseminate his image and ideology, and to spread virally in the digital realm. Who knows what effect exposure to apps like Owen’s or films like Lyon’s might be having on our vulnerable souls?
So Do You Want To Play?, though in many ways operating with familiar possession and exorcism tropes, also puts itself and its own forms forward as potentially dangerous, even a conduit for actual demons, from the moment its viewer has chosen to enter the theatre or press play. The idea that horror films themselves can be a literal medium for invoking and admitting the devil is familiar from metacinematic horrors like Lamberto Bava’s Demons (1985) or Bigas Luna’s Anguish (1987). Of course, your willingness or readiness to swallow this idea wholesale may well depend on your broader beliefs (or otherwise) in the efficacy of ouija boards, or indeed in the very existence of demons and god(s). For these are questions of faith, or at least of suspension of disbelief. Gary may be heard (twice) to say, “The devil does not need your belief to exist,” but even that is an article of faith, not magically made true by one’s belief in it. Alternatively, by the time the final credits have rolled, it is too late and we really are already doomed. Either way, thanks for playing.
strap: Killer app: Nick Lyon’s possession horror pits Christian high schoolers against a multimedia demon
© Anton Bitel
