House of the Devil Movie Review
House of the Devil Movie Review
Door's open, come on in
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[Note: this review contains some minor spoilers]
Devil-worshippers. Bad babysitting gigs. Isolated houses. Full-moon madness. Any and all of those topics could be the subject of a bad horror movie from the late 70s/early 80s… yet these bugaboos are all incorporated into The House of the Devil, a good horror movie from right now.
If you'd never heard of it and someone handed you an unmarked DVD of The House of the Devil and told you they'd just found this "lost" movie, you'd watch it and never even imagine the flick was just made. You'd be thinking anywhere from '79 to '81. Even the opening titles sequence (complete with the groovy modernistic font style) is letter-perfect, and the long-legged, coltish star of the film, Jocelyn Donahue, embodies the innocence and grace of a young woman from a bygone era. She plays Sam, a gawky, gorgeous college sophomore who's just scraping by on a wing and a prayer and trying to do her best to get along in spite of a rotten roommate and a shriveling bank balance.
Sam's so desperate to change dorms, she'll take any old menial job to make the down payment — even babysitting… even when there's no actual infant. You see, when Sam shows up at the derelict, lone Victorian jutting out the dark woods to begin her evening shift, Mr. and Mrs. Ulman (Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov), admit that the sitting gig is actually for elderly Grandma. Sam won't even have to see Grandma, they tell her — she can just stay downstairs, order a pizza, and bide her time until they return.
The Ulmans simply cannot miss the lunar-eclipse party; it's the event of the season. Sam feels a stab of doubt, but she quells it. She needs the money. It sounds simple enough, but Sam's best friend Megan (Greta Gerwig) is also dubious and tries to talk her out of the too-tempting offer. Of course, it turns out the girls' misgivings should have been heeded, but then it is far too late… Sam is the goodie bag at this lunar-eclipse party, and her hosts are disciples of Satan!
The small cast in this old-school tensile twister is beyond stellar. Cult icons Noonan and Woronov already own the roles as the creepy couple; Gerwig, who was perfect in Baghead last year, is spot-on as the wiseass bleached blonde buddy; and AJ Bowen, who was one of the few bright spots in the sci-fi indie The Signal, shines here as the shadowy stranger.
Deliriously eerie, the music, the pacing, the cinematography, even the acting, is total topnotch 70s/80s grindhouse horror. I thought it was absolutely magnificent, right down to the "gotcha!" ending (ala the first Friday the 13th), but I do throw out a word of caution for those not fond of brooding buildup: viewers whose tastes in dread don't concur with the likes of vintage Polanski or Roeg might be bedeviled with boredom. But in my view, 70s-savant writer/director Ti West (whose previous films I haven't seen, and who was born in 1980) has come up with a satanic-panic stroke of genius with The House of the Devil.
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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson