One glance at its Rotten Tomatoes page and you’ll see that Ti West’s The House of the Devil is one of the most critically acclaimed horror films of the year. A critically acclaimed American horror film flying under the radar? Isn’t that what most Americans have been wanting/waiting for? You’d certainly think so. But I talked with a few people who had seen this movie and the overwhelming response was “It’s boring”. There was a definite push back against the accolades this film was receiving. I was still interested to see this, though, and in the interest of preparing for the Splatcademy Awards, I’d be totally negligent in my duties as a horror fan if I just blew off a film that is getting such high marks from the critical community. Plus, slow burn movies are right in my wheelhouse. I’m a firm believer that horror does not need to shock and does not need to bludgeon a viewer with fx every three seconds to be good. HotD seemed to be aimed directly at horror fans like myself, a minority nowadays. With an open mind, I dove into (FYI: this is playing On Demand right now for $7) some 80′s satanism…

The film, to its detriment, opens with the text “During the 1980′s over 70% of American adults believed in the existence of abusive Satanic Cults….another 30% rationalized the lack of evidence due to government cover-ups…The following is based on true unexplained events.” This opening text has nothing to do with the film whatsoever. First, it immediately gives away that the film is going to have a Satanic cult as its antagonist. The film might be called The House of the Devil, but since much of the film is a build up to figuring out just what the hell is going on, having such a major plot point told to you before the movie even starts is disappointing. It’s also unclear as to what Ti West is trying to say by giving those stats. Already unbelievable on the face of it, the film never again mentions satanic cults as a topic of conversation by any of the characters and there is no sort of government entity or cover up that is even implied even passingly. It has absolutely nothing to do with anything in the film. Because of those first two sentences, the following, standard “based on…” blurb that comes with too many horror movies these days feels immediately tacked on and serves only to harm the film it is supposed to be enhancing. West would do well to just excise the text from the beginning of the movie entirely. Ok, so the opening text is retarded, but what about the actual movie?

If you are unfamiliar with the story of The House of the Devil, the movie opens with a girl named Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) getting a new apartment from Dee Wallace. As we will soon see, Samantha’s roommate is a whore who lives in complete filth, so Samantha is itching to move out on her own. Unfortunately, even with a little help from Wallace, who waives the deposit, Sam still needs to come up with a few hundred dollars to pay the first months rent. Getting desperate, she inquires about a babysitting flyer she finds on a help wanted board. The man on the other end of the telephone says he needs her for a few hours that night. Sam and her friend drive out to a large house in the middle of nowhere and immediately are creeped out by the tenant (Tom Noonan) who admits that he doesn’t actually have a kid, but rather needs Sam to watch his mother for a few hours. Sam and her friend are obviously disturbed because Noonan is, literally, one creepy dude. But Sam decides to stay because he offers her $400 for a few hours work while her friend takes off, planning to pick Sam up around 12:30. In the meantime, the framing device is that there is a lunar eclipse occurring that night and slowly but surely, Sam begins wondering what exactly is going on inside this large house and what exactly the “mother” is doing upstairs…

I was completely and totally on board for most of The House of the Devil. The film has been criticized for being “too slow” and that  “nothing happens”, and in this day and age of instant horror gratification, those are not surprising criticisms. One of the most negative aspects of the fetishisization and worshipping of FX artists that began in the 70′s was a slow destruction of audiences accepting suspense driven horror. Most people generally label it the “MTVification” of film, but I firmly believe the root cause of an entire generation of horror fans seeming inability to tolerate a “slow” horror movie is directly correlated to what Savini, Bottin, Baker, et al. did in the 1980′s. I’m not saying that there is anything inherently wrong with those guys. Their work is the work of genius and the horror genre benefited immeasurably because of their creativity and uniqueness. All I’m saying is that a negative consequence of that “Let’s smack the audience over the head with FX!” mentality is that audiences gradually were weaned off of story driven, suspense horror. So much so that today, any filmmaker attempting that sort of film, is going to start off with two strikes against them. It’s hard to pull off something like The House of the Devil, and even ballsier to put it out into an environment that is inherently biased against it, either consciously or unconsciously. And because of that, there has been some bickering between West and the producers over cutting out “boring” scenes in order to make it more sell-able to a horror public that has ADD. For what it’s worth,  the version that is available on Time Warner On Demand seems to be West’s preferred vision. It includes all the scenes West mentions in the aforementioned link.

As I mentioned before, I was totally on board with HotD. I thought the performances were great, the atmosphere thick, and the suspense top notch.  I’ve seen a lot of criticism of the lead actress, but I thought she turned in one of the best performances I’d seen in a horror film this year. She feels very real in the role and, initially at least, is very believable in why she decides to ultimately stay and do the job. West does a stellar job, directorially, in crafting a film that is always amazing to look at. The shadow filled house is genuinely creepy and West wisely does not overdo the whole “grindhouse-aesthetic shtick”, instead picking his spots when using techniques such as zoom shots. In other words, this movie looks great and the performances are great. It has atmosphere to spare and really relishes in its slow burn build up.

There is one glaring aspect where The House of the Devil fails, for me, and that is in its lack of internal logic. Characters constantly do the most idiotic things possible. Whether it is stopping along the side of the road and accepting small talk from random creepy dudes or putting on a set of headphones and dancing around a house (very 80′s) when you’ve already established that A. It’s supposed to be scary as hell and B. The character has already been shown to be scared. I am totally on board with following the somewhat mundane actions of the lead character, up until they get to be so stupid that it makes the movie feel as if it’s just padding the running time. In the interview I linked above, West laments that the producers wanted to cut out a four minute sequence of Sam wandering around the house, exploring, complaining that it adds much needed character development. I’d certainly agree that it adds character development, but not in the way he wants. In one scene, Sam, bored, wanders upstairs, goes into somebody’s den, then sits down and starts going through the desk drawers. My girlfriend and I both sat there and were like “Yeah, ok. Nobody would do something like this.” That’s incorrect. I’m sure somebody would do something like that. Just not the character of Samantha as she has been established throughout the rest of the film. Anybody who has seen The Grand Horror and Outpost Doom knows that I am more than just a fan of characters wandering down dark corridors, I relish that stuff. I wasn’t put off by that at all in West’s film, but I was put off with what seemed to be stupid actions by Sam.  I really wanted Sam to be a smart strong willed woman, but too often she comes across as a dumb, naive girl. And that is a bit disappointing. I was taken out of the film and the character when I should have been sucked into the atmosphere of the house and fully invested in Sam’s character to the point where I wasn’t wondering whether or not she was smart enough to deal with the evil tenants within.

Which brings me to the much lauded final twenty minutes of the movie. I’m trying to think of the closest, recent parallel in terms of structure for The House of the Devil. Though they are very different films in terms of aesthetics and tone, Paranormal Activity is probably the most recent thing I can use to compare this movie against, but only in very general terms. PA was criticized by many as being very boring until the last ten minutes or so. Both of these films have been labeled slow-burns (and in some cases, “no-burns”) and both attempt to contrast the previous slowness of the film with dramatic and frenzied finales (though in the the case of PA, it is much less steep of a contrast owing to the films gradually increasing bedroom scenes). The finale of HotD is no different. Once it kicks into high gear, the film suddenly goes batshit crazy and becomes, tonally, a much different film. Samantha is attacked by the family of Satanists and must fight for her life before the lunar eclipse completes. This change of pace really works. Though again, they are very different films in terms of what they are trying to do, it’s sort of analogous with our recent discussion of From Dusk Till Dawn on the Splattercast in the sense that the film spends most of its time establishing one type of tone only to suddenly switch, almost out of the blue, to a totally different, sharper edged tone. West successfully pulls it off, though I must say that the villains of the film are much less interesting in attack mode than they are in creepy people mode. Still, it’s an exciting conclusion that hearkens back to the archetypal “Final Girl” theme. And of course, there is a final beat to the movie that sort of wraps up just what exactly the Satanists were trying to do in the event you couldn’t figure it out. Really, it’s the most obvious thing you could think of. What else would a Satanist be doing with a virginal girl on a rare lunar eclipse?

Do I think The House of the Devil is an instant classic worthy of its incredibly high critical ranking? No. Much like Drag Me to Hell, which had ungodly high critical praise, The House of the Devil is a good movie sustained by a great abundance of suspense and atmosphere, great performances, and a unique style that is too rarely attempted in today’s horror climate. Personally, I really dug this film. It is easy to complain about the dumb logic the characters use to keep the movie going forward, and certainly West could have made some more clever uses of his narrative than the choices he ultimately made, but I don’t want to see a girl sitting on a couch for 90 minutes while clutching a pillow while she’s frightened by noises and shadows. You have to suspend your disbelief as much as you can in a film like this. Yeah, we wouldn’t go wandering around a spooky house that we already have reservations about, but the alternative would be even more complaints about how “boring” this film is if the girl did the “logical” thing. For the most part, I enjoyed the ride and it was refreshing to see a film like this. Even with its flaws, it’s definitely one of my favorite horror films of the year and should be required viewing for horror fans like myself that revel in atmosphere, tension, ambiguity, and suspense.

7.75 / 10

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