The House of the Devil

2009 *****

Boogie Nights and It's Alive. Those are the two movies I think of when pondering the difference between a movie that takes place in a particular time period (the 70s in this example) and a movie that was actually made in that same time period. Boogie Nights has the fashions and furniture and music, but it's seen through a glam 90s filter. I was around in the 70s, and I remember that visually they were pretty obnoxious. Obnoxious like pretty much everything the camera pointed at filming It's Alive. It's got headache-inducing wallpaper, it's got unattractive, awkward people, it's got interiors that somehow convey the stale tobacco stench they carry. It's freakin' ugly. Boogie Nights can't touch it.

You have to see House of the Devil to fully understand the almost supernatural clarity with which this 2009 movie recreated the early eighties. Somehow this movie gets It's Alive credit even though it's only Boogie Nights.

JPX pointed out the freeze-frame opening in his review, but it's worth looking at again.


Check out the copyright info at the bottom. Look at that car and those buildings and her coat and then look at what the little yellow year actually is. What a riot.

Samantha is totally the pretty girl with problems that you have a crush on. Your crush will develop as you watch her find her dream apartment and then return to her dorm and her terrible roommate. You want to solve her problems for her. Then she gets offered a babysitting job that, considering her roommate and money troubles, is just too good to be true. It will turn out the job is neither good nor true, but despite the obvious threat you, like her, just really want that money.

This is a tactfully small story, and it takes proper care of its setup. Tom Noonan delivers a pretty masterful performance as the guy who must convince a young girl to walk into a scary situation in which she's already been lied to. But he crafts things carefully and offers her a steadily larger wad of cash, and she eventually agrees.

I don't want to discuss any more plot details, as there aren't that many. Suffice to say it's a perfect exercise in suspense. Very soon after she takes the job, the audience gets to see that things are overwhelmingly not as they seem, and really, really not okay. Yet Samantha knows none of this. As she walks around the house she does become steadily less calm, but she actually sees almost nothing to justify this feeling. I've heard this part of the movie pointed to as a sag in the story, but I loved it. Because honestly nothing happens, and we can still take Samantha's fear as our own.

And here's why: just as the movie's external image is rebuilt at the quantum level, so too is the scary story stripped down to its core. The sparse dialogue, the small scope of the story, the fake-but-real period production values -- by consenting to be another Lone Girl In A Dark House movie, The House of the Devil dares to become the Lone Girl In A Dark House movie.

Were this actually made in the early 80s, I doubt I'd rate it so highly. It takes the deliberate illusion to bring the primal beat of the scary tale to the surface, and make you love it. I initially thought to give it four and a half stars, just because its scope is the opposite of epic. But then I realized that The House of the Devil does everything it sets out to do, and does it perfectly. I think all 'thonners will love this neo-classic.

And thus ends my Horrorthon 2010. My god.