The '80s were a great time to be a
horror fan. All of the kids who spent their nights watching The Curse of
Frankenstein had grown up to direct horror films of their very own. Studios, emboldened by the box office success of films like Jaws
and Alien, were willing to sink real money into
films they wouldn't even have touched before, and special effects had
advanced to the point that a good team with no money could look
almost as good as a big budget film. And the 1980 release of Friday
the 13th would lay the blueprint for the the entire
slasher Genre. So, while I was counting down horror movies from the
'00s, I couldn't help but start missing the '80's. House of the
Devil saved the day.
House of the Devil is indistinguishable
from a film from the '80's. It takes the idea of the old school
throwback and commits to it fully. The people listen to The Fixx on
their Walkman's while driving around in old school Volvo's. The main character
is a babysitter who is preyed upon by a satanic cult. It uses camera
angles and zooms I never realized fell out of favor until I
recognized them in this film and noticed I hadn't seen them in a
while. The film was released on VHS, Seriously. It's actually hard to
believe it came out in 2009.
While the film's basic setup, a
babysitter whose sitting for a bunch of murdering satanists who wants
to sacrifice her, sounds like just another gory shlock-fest, the film
actually impressed me. For roughly the first hour, nothing really
happens. It's just a slow building of tension. You know what's
coming, but not how or when. Sure, there is some blood and murder
going on a little bit near the end, but the majority of the film time
is just waiting, knowing that somethings gotta give.
In a movie where the main antagonists
are satanists hungry for sacrifice, it is amazing that the thing the
film focuses most on is the creepiness of babysitting. The film tries
to milk the scares from the mundane angle as long as it can before
getting into the supernatural elements. She walks around an almost
empty house in the middle of nowhere. It's dark, and you have to look
around to try to find light switches when you enter a new room
because you don't know where any are. The whole place is unfamiliar, the
people are kind of weird. If you accidentally break their stuff you
have to pay for it, and if you screw up they are going to go look for
someone else instead. Babysitting is frankly terrifying, if you get
right down to it. The babysitter winds up scaring herself, and her
fear infects us.
It's easy to scare someone with a bang
and a loud nose, or with a knife-wielding maniac chasing after you.
This film scares you when nothing is happening. Jump scares and
mountains of gore are all you see in a lot of today's movies. You get
almost none of that here. The horror is in an odd bank of windows, or
a disconcerting camera angle, or the music suddenly stopping. The
director, Ti West, has to know some secret about making great films
that I don't. Those were the most compelling 55 minutes of someone
slowly walking through a house I've ever seen.
I guess the Devil is in the details.
(I swear never to make a pun that
terrible again.)
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