THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (2009)

This film belongs to a peculiar and diverse sub-genre of films that adopt the cinematic limitations/conventions of the period in which they are set which includes the likes of The Aviator and recent Oscar darling The Artist.  This film is set during the eighties, so you can expect grainy 16mm film stock, simple zooms in place of complex dolly shots, and of course no modern impurities to the form like shaky camera editing or bogus CGI.  Writer-Director Ti West also goes one bonus step further, and has its subject matter deeply rooted in the past, fashioning a tale of devil worship that would have felt right at home during the height of the satanic panic of the 1980’s.  Devil’s gonna getcha!

Jocelin Donahue plays a college student who agrees to a somewhat creepy babysitting job in order to scrounge up quick dough to ditch her feral roommate.  Her best friend Great Gerwig drops her off at the isolated country mansion, the man and woman of the house, Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov, chat briefly and awkwardly with her and then set off.  To say anything more would be destroying well developed surprises.

This is a horror film but for much of its running time it has more in common with an old school suspense movie.  Events pile up slowly, with a mounting sense of dread, and a proper sense of how to save the best stuff for last. Compared to modern fast paced gorefests this film is positively restrained and dignified, preferring to risk losing audience members with no patience than to bombarding the patient ones with cheap shocks and random ugliness.  An ideal synthesis of old and new, this film will scare you.

~ Further keeping with the 80’s theme, special promotional copies of the film were made on VHS in a traditional clamshell box.

~ Tom Noonan has been creepy for years.  Ralph Fiennes was much more aggressively weird in his portrayal of Francis Dolarhyde in Red Dragon, but there’s something even creepier about Noonan’s somewhat subdued Dolarhyde in Manhunter.

~ Dee Wallace, most popularly known as the mother from E.T. but also a veteran of numerous horror films, has a short cameo.

~ The Ullman family name might be a tribute to The Shining.  Ti West’s next film, The Innkeepers, certainly indicates his fondness for The Shining.

~ The film uses the song One Thing Leads to Another which is certainly true of horror films, usually lacking subplots as they are.