Playing as part of the midnight movies program at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, “House of the Devil” was a fun if somewhat forgettable riff on the spat of late-1970’s/early-1980’s devil worship movies. Its director, Ti West, is being heralded as a bold new visionary for the contemporary horror genre. After seeing “House of the Devil,” we can understand where people are coming from in saying it but are also left skeptical of this tag.
(West is also responsible for directing the follow-up to Eli Roth’s “Cabin Fever.” We know a couple of the producers on the sequel, and they have a copy of the long-shelved project, so we’ll work extra hard at seeing it and letting you guys know how it is.)
“House of the Devil” is a canny combination of two horror genre staples: the babysitter-alone-in-a-spooky house and the evil-devil worshippers-search-for-human-sacrifice. And, as a sort of post-modern mash-up, it works fairly well. What’s really striking is how little happens for about the first hour of the movie. The female protagonist (Jocelin Donahue) gets a job babysitting, she goes to a spooky house, and after being told that the job isn’t what it seems (by a superb Tom Noonan) she stays anyway and wanders around the house. That is it. (Mumblecore “star” Greta Gerwig and Mary Woronov also appear).
And while it’s this kind of plot-free spook-fest, it works. There’s an almost obscene amount of atmosphere, and all the bit players really bring the thing to life. The movie not only looks like a 1980s horror movie (the opening credits are particularly effective) but it feels like a ’80s horror movie, in a way that is more genuine than, say, the trailers that held the two halves of “Grindhouse” together.
Donahue is somewhat wooden, but her weird angular face more than makes up for it. And when she’s given her moment (a dance sequence set to the tune of “One Thing Leads to Another” by The Fixx), she really shines. But the movie devolves in the last fifteen minutes into a fumbling car crash of devil movie clichés which aren’t delivered with the same wholeheartedness as what we saw before. Instead, there’s some chanting, some blood, and some dark robes. We’re of course meant to think of “The Exorcist,” “The Omen,” and Hammer’s “To the Devil a Daughter.” Instead you’re left thinking about something that premieres on the Sci-Fi Channel.
It doesn’t reach the kind of operatic highs of, say, Rob Zombie’s vastly underrated “Devil’s Rejects,” a movie that truly committed not only to its time period, but to pushing even the outré boundaries of its ilk. Instead, we get something that, while stylish and funny and clever, ultimately plays it safe and falls back on the clichés that it had previously had so much fun skewering.
Still, overall it was a lot of fun, and if we had actually seen it at midnight, with a packed crowd who didn’t know a thing about the movie, then it probably would have been an enjoyable blast. [B-]- Drew Taylor