Name The Demon (2024)
Name The Demon
Written by Noah Dietz: 3/29/2026
I’ve found myself on a bit of a found footage kick recently, and to celebrate I decided to pick some films off a list with posters that caught my attention. Unfortunately, much like in times past when I’ve followed this same method, I did not care for Name the Demon.
An independent production, Name the Demon suffers greatly from primarily being the creative project of a single person. There are times when you can point at a creative project and clearly see there were too many hands in it. The direction is confused, characters don’t make sense, and entire plotlines can be dropped with no conclusion. Conversely, in this case you can see that there wasn’t a second voice present to ask the question of “is this going well.” Written, produced, and directed by Carmelo Chimera, the story we set forth to tell is a simple one. Anna (Jessie Nerud) and her husband David (Danny Bohnen) are expecting, but allude to something bad that happened back in Salem. After making the confusing claim to have traveled as far away as possible (Chicago area), we jump a few years into the future. This is where we get into the real meat and potatoes of the movie, with the film placed on a hard countdown measured by a battery indicator in the top right corner. The priests have arrived, and it’s time for them to document what’s happening for the legal protection of the Vatican.
This is the primary cast for the film, and unfortunately the people that I found to be the most frustrating to deal with. Frankly, while I thought Jessie Nerud did a fine job throughout, at best I felt frustration with the three representatives from the Church. Lead priest and exorcist Father Matthews is played by Scott Moore in what appears to be his screen debut, and it does show as he flips between giving reasonably strong moments of delivery hamstrung by others where he seems to be forgetting his lines. This is coupled with Father Lucas (Scotty Bohnen) sneering his way through the film and Deacon John (Jason Potter) having our requisite moment of lost faith. Adding this up, we’ve got most of the elements needed for a middling film. This is where many aspects of the film’s poor writing strike, alongside the choice to make the entire movie appear to be done in a single take. By my reckoning, trying to pass this off as a one-take film is where most of our issues arise. When you’re 10 minutes into a single take and someone spikes the camera it’s bad, but it can be forgiven to a point since this is a found footage film. David is actively hostile to the priests being there, and making eye contact with the camera feels more like him being angry at the man operating it rather than making an amateur actor mistake. That said, Father Lucas incessantly smirking through his lines during the entire film is something that should have been fixed with reshoots. It’s hard to get into the headspace to enjoy something where you hate every single actor on screen.
If the writing had landed better I could have given a pass to some of the performances, but as previously mentioned, the writing wasn’t a high point of this experience either. The story being told seems to be a grab bag of stereotypes about the Catholic Church, but done without any sense of nuance or understanding. We’ve got a pedophile priest who just happens to be the one who abused Anna back in Salem. We’ve got a confusing moment where Father Lucas gets a little gay with it, making an unrequited move on Deacon John. We’ve got the aforementioned moment where Deacon John has a crisis of faith that David comments on, making a weird remark about how he knows what would happen if John had to choose between his own wife or God. Speaking of David, we even have the atheist husband who only called in a priest to help because his deeply religious wife wanted him to. None of this manages to come together in a meaningful way, with the most paint by numbers exorcism tale being told at the end of the day.
I was frustrated watching this. Moments where I was willing to forgive poor acting were punished by full screen splashes of demonic sigils to sloppily hide cuts. Scenes that I found to have actually inspired shots—seeing Anna’s possessed and unnoticed form in a small side mirror in the bathroom while John washes his face for example—were washed away by an extended scene where everyone but the camera man vanishes for dramatic effect. I’m not ignorant to the struggles of artistic collaboration, and I understand the difficulties of creating a film. However, tackling the fine line of found footage can be a difficult thing for a beginner filmmaker. You need to balance the footage looking good, but not so good that it looks too professional. For this film we stay in the range of cheap and inexperienced, and it’s the cherry on top that leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. Perhaps the director’s other works are better, but after this I’ll likely pass on any other releases of his.
Film: Name The Demon
Director: Carmelo Chimera
Writers: Carmelo Chimera, Nicholas Chimera
Release Year: 2024
Rating: 1/5
Name The Demon never manages to rise above the barest level of quality required of an independent production, suffering heavily from both subpar acting and poor, cliche riddled writing.