Australian
Screen

an NFSA website

BeDevil (1993)

play May contain names, images or voices of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people
clip The flip side

This clip chosen to be PG

Clip description

A young boy is suddenly awoken from his sleep. Before him stand two spirits, a man and a woman. They clasp hands, and disappear through the wall of the boy’s bedroom. The boy follows them. They are the spirit of the couple who died in the warehouse when it caught fire. The boy enters the condemned warehouse where, bathed in red, the spirits of the dead couple dance. The boy, wearing rollerskates, begins to dance with them. He turns and flips, circling the spirit couple who dance as though oblivious to his presence.

Curator’s notes

BeDevil deals with the co-existence of narratives, of stories that run alongside, below and atop each other. They are the stories of present and past, and the ghost stories in BeDevil represent the presence of those who have passed, and how they haunt those who exist in the now. The boy in the final third of BeDevil seems to join the story, to become part of the 'spirit narrative’ so to speak. He becomes part of it by no longer ignoring it, but affirming its existence, and we get a sense that in doing so, he affirms his own place, his own existence.