So why horror? As a viewer, you could—and this is certainly true of most movies in the genre— take horror movies as only cheap thrills, and the Final Destinations of the world wouldn’t hold it against you. The opposite side of the same notion is watching horror for gore-by-numbers, the torture porn of a Hostel or a Saw that, for all their violence, end up being an oddly sterile chore. You might also call watching horror a cathartic experience, embracing and ultimately expunging fear. The prevalence of the “last girl standing” trope, best represented by The Descent, shows that at its heart, great horror thrives on trying to tap into its audience’s basic survival instincts.
As a director, horror makes sense largely from a financial point of view; while creature effects (and, certainly, CGI) can get very expensive, the majority of the horror canon—Romero’s Dead movies, Alien, Psycho, et al.—was assembled on a shoestring budget. For very little input, a horror movie, even one of very limited quality, can enjoy a highly successful second life on DVD. Moreover, the deluge of utter shit that’s oversaturated the genre, combined with a general critical abstention from genre films, has rendered standards so low as to be nonexistent. With so little cost required and so little in the way of expectations, why wouldn’t the enterprising young hack dedicate himself to horror and a lifetime of Syfy Originals?
Ti West’s involvement in horror comes from a different, more genuine place. Last year’s The House of the Devil, which West directed, wrote, and edited, reveals an earnest affection for the tropes of the genre and the 80’s slasher films of his youth. The plot, set in the 80’s, centers on Sam (the awfully pretty Jocelin Donahue), a penniless college student who reluctantly takes on a babysitting job for obvious creep Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan, one of the movie’s many 80s throwbacks). The situation is weird from the get-go, and only gets weirder when Mr. Ulman reveals that Sam will be babysitting his invalid mother, not a child.
After bargaining with Ulman for four times the original amount of money, Sam is, reluctantly, left alone in the house. Though she tries to kill time by listening to her comically huge Walkman and meandering around, we know that it’s just a matter of time before she finds, as she wanders from room to room, the horrible secrets that the house has waiting for her. The tension, punctuated by a sudden (and thoroughly shocking) act of violence in the movie’s second act, is absolutely stifling, and might be my favorite example of the adage, “It’s what you don’t see that scares you.”
Along with the suspense, the movie’s most rewarding aspect is how fully it immerses itself in both horror movie standbys and in the 80s. Traditions like the false alarm, the “based on real events” disclaimer, the last girl standing, and the dark staircase are all embraced and riffed on with surprising affection. Moreover, holy shit is this movie 80s: there’s plenty of feathered hair, stonewashed jeans, and flannel to go around. There are countless signs in the direction (West is particularly enamored of slow zooms, a la Rosemary’s Baby), casting (Tom Noonan was a go-to sympathetic villain in the 80s, and plays a very similar role here), and editing choices that The House of the Devil is a labor of love for West.
And, in Hitchcockian fashion, West is more concerned with the slow boil of anticipation than he is with the movie’s big reveal, which is a little disappointing. The fun of the movie is following Sam as she discovers just how big a mistake she’s made, and watching the obvious joy West takes in filming it. While the end result is somewhat predictable (and prompted a lot of negative reactions to the movie), people looking for more than instant gratification or heaps of gore will have found something far better: a masterful and just plain fun homage to 80s horror, and a bona fide auteur working in genre film.
Grade: A
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