Horror-101

Pitch-perfect 80’s homage will leave you shocked

written and directed by Ti West

The problem that so many modern horror flicks have is how unnecessarily flashy and convoluted they are. Layers of CGI effects can’t invoke a good scare when your script is flaccid. Plastic, vacuous, ‘hip’ stars can’t make you empathize when they can’t act. What’s fundamentally missing from many current films the simplicity of zen. The recent success of Paranormal Activity reminds us of it. Give us some well-defined characters that we can care for with a clearly stated premise and away we go. Ti West’s The House of the Devil works so well because of these conditions. It’s also a pitch-perfect homage to 80s horror that re-emphasizes that good, solid scares are still very much possible on a lower budget.

Samantha (Jocelyn Donahue) is a student on a New York college campus in the early 80s. She’s tired of being kicked out of her dorm room by her boorish, slutty roommate and decides to get her first off-campus apartment. The problem is that she’s broke and desperately needs that first month’s rent. When a stranger posts a flyer looking for a babysitter, she responds but gets stood up. With some encouragement from her best friend, Megan (Greta Gerwig), she eventually connects with a tall, creepy stranger, Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan). She takes the ‘babysitting’ gig after a substantial raise of her fees, but in the still, seemingly unshakable normalcy of this night, things are going horrendously wrong, as a cult of satanists have bloody plans for Samantha by the stroke of midnight.

Noonan, a veteran character actor, is magnificently charming, funny and creepy in his role as Ulman. Donahue totally convinces in her role as an innocent co-ed in need of a change in life. Also great is Mary Woronov as Mrs. Ulman. Watching The House of the Devil, I was reminded of the vibe of Dario Argento’s Suspiria. We know our sweet, delicate heroine is in danger and can only helplessly watch as horror unfolds. The house picked as the main location was palpably creepy and not overdone in a Hollywood-gothic style.

The plot is so straightforward that many will dismiss it as amateurish, but the movie works in a refreshingly retro way. The illusion of a quiet, mundane night, created by the linear, everyday events in the film, is there so it can be shattered by the shocking turn of events in the final third of the film. There are no inane twists in the film; nothing happens just to add novelty for novelty’s sake; there’s not a high body count; there’s not one CGI gore shot. The movie is so convincingly permeated in a 1980’s horror veneer that you will think it’s a long-lost gem found at a mom-n-pop video store. This is how well director Ti West worked his homage: even the end credits appear to be from some late-night TV horror flick of yore.

Some modern horror fans accustomed to the gritty, over-exaggerated style of mainstream, big budgeted films will not get the back-to-basics charms of The House of the Devil. But West has made a wonderfully creepy, shocking film that seems to have come out of a time portal and landed right in our laps.