One minute your daughter is all party dresses and popcorn, the next she’s a bloody monster. Many stories have been told about mothers helping their child through their first period and into young adulthood, and the animated comedy Little Demon (Disney+) begins by following the usual script. Single mother Laura drops 13-year-old Chrissy off for her first day at Middletown junior high, Delaware. While nervously making friends with a boy in the corridor, Chrissy feels an unfamiliar sensation, runs in embarrassment to the toilet and finds blood.
Then, however, Chrissy descends into a trance-like rage and murders two school bullies, ripping off their heads and plastering the walls with their viscera. Having hastily picked Chrissy up in the car, her mum explains: “Your vagina just became a homing device for the Prince of Darkness.”
There is more explaining to do. Chrissy is the result of a hook-up that Laura really, really regrets: she had sex with Satan and has, ever since Chrissy’s birth, been dreading the onset of her daughter’s puberty because it heralds the advent of Chrissy as the antichrist. Before long, her absent father has come out of the woodwork – or rather, emerged from a metaphysical realm where he keeps harvested souls, since he is Satan – to try to reconnect with his daughter and recruit her for evil. That new weekend-access arrangement is going to be messy.
Most obviously akin to Rick and Morty but with flashes of the absurdity and canny humanity that powered The Simpsons at its peak, Little Demon wantonly slathers guts and profanity over tales about motherhood, divorce and coming of age. Its first season checks off a list of situations that are extremely relatable even after they have been through the horror mincer. Laura (Aubrey Plaza) is a feckless, reckless young woman turned into a fierce, resourceful warrior – a demon-hunting witch, in fact – by a decade of solo parenting. Satan (Danny DeVito) is the man who left her and the baby to it and has now swanned back into their lives, tempting his newly independent daughter with an escape from the domestic discipline her mother has enforced. “I know what you’re thinking,” he tells Chrissy. “Is he your dad, or just a cool friend?”
As it expands, Little Demon casually nails more of the family’s dynamics. The spiky, friendless Laura reluctantly bonding with her wacky, rosé-swilling neighbour Darlene (a cracking supporting turn by Lennon Parham) is wisely observed, as is the episode where Satan hooks up with his old ghoul buddies but discovers, now he is trying to be a parent, that their killing sprees seem immature. Chrissy, meanwhile, is fighting her way through the age-old problems of friendship, love, popularity at school and how to harness the new energy she feels as an adult in waiting.
This storytelling is all the more impressive for being so offhand that you could enjoy Little Demon without realising it’s there. At heart the show is simply here to have a good time, fully exploiting the possibilities of being a cartoon for adults. Extreme gore is everywhere, as is swearing up to and including the c-word – which is, be warned, directed at a group of PTA mums who are just trying to do their best for the school community, actually, and perhaps you’d understand that if you ever found the time to volunteer. It contains explicit full-frontal nudity. Yes, OK, it’s animated nudity, but somehow pubic hair is just as shocking when it’s a drawing, if not more so.
Like all the best animated sitcoms, Little Demon is full of thoughtful, welcome-to-our-club details, from the mysterious but decipherable Hebrew and Greek tattoos that cover Laura’s body, to a montage soundtracked, gloriously, by Van McCoy’s 1976 northern soul gem Help Is on the Way. And the quotable lines! Michael Shannon grabs a lot of them as a pathetic Catholic avenger billed only as the Unshaven Man, two of his finest being: “I don’t know if you’ve ever had your dick shot off, but it really narrows your scope” and, “Do not leave your trash in this van! It is a rental. Now let’s kill this kid and use her entrails as a scarf.”
Little Demon isn’t perfect yet. It has the common mature-cartoon problem of occasionally filling gaps in the dialogue with cultural references that are too niche, especially for viewers seeing it from across the Atlantic, and the relationship between Chrissy and Satan doesn’t click as convincingly as the one between her and Laura – which is ironic given that Chrissy is voiced by Lucy DeVito, Danny DeVito’s real-life daughter. But the potential is there. When it fully grows up, Little Demon will unleash hell.
