The House of the Devil (2009)

Director: Ti West

Writer(s): West

Starring: Jocelin Donahue, Tom Noonan, Mary Woronov, and Greta Gerwig

Ti West’s House of the Devil is a slow-burn horror film that never even simmers, let alone burns.  It’s a short film, at best, blown up to about seventy minutes too long, a mind-numbing exercise in abject boredom.  In some films, like Takashi Miike’s excellent Audition, a gradual increase in tension can work wonders if the payoff is strong enough; between the film’s title, and its opening title card, we know exactly where this film is headed before it even starts, eliminating any chance of being caught off guard by any of it.

Samantha Hughes is your average college student: Broke, and with a lousy roommate.  She’s looking to get out of her stuffy dorm room, but that’s kind of hard to do with no money.  Of course, she finds a perfect apartment and agrees to take it; the only problem is, she only has five days to get a couple hundred more dollars together to pay the first month’s rent.

Looking for some financial assistance, she answers a “Help Wanted” ad for a babysitter.  Red flags are raised almost instantly; the man, Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan), admits that he doesn’t have a child.  It’s actually his ailing, private mother that needs help.  Samantha at first refuses, but when he quadruples his initial offer (giving her $400 instead of the initially agreed-upon $100), she reluctantly accepts, much to the chagrin of her friend Megan.  She reasons that $400 for just four hours of work is too good to pass up, while Megan counters that it’s probably too good to be true.  Either way, Megan agrees to pick her up in four hours, and then Samantha heads back into the house to start her shift.

That’s when the terror begins, assuming your idea of terror is watching a woman walk around a house for an hour.  In the beginning, it’s understandable; she’s getting acquainted with a place that is completely foreign to her.  Then she starts hearing noises upstairs, something that’s unsettling to her, even though she’s completely aware that there is a woman staying upstairs.  You know, the entire reason that she’s getting paid to be there in the first place.  So she grabs a weapon and walks through houses, opening every door, except for the ones that will actually reveal that something is up…those she leaves shut for some inexplicable reason.  Then she goes downstairs, listens to music really loud while dancing around the house, breaks something, hears more noises, and walks through the house again, looking for the cause.  There, just saved you an hour of your time.

That takes me to the main problem I have with House of the Devil, and that's that is that Samantha is stupid.  Actually, let me elaborate on that a little bit:  Everyone in this entire movie is pretty dumb.  There’s the obligatory “person with gun vs. person with knife” battle, in which the person with the gun somehow thinks guns only work if they are fired at point-blank range; characters believe that running upstairs and hiding is a much safer plan than running out the front door; and so on, so forth.  And if your only defense is that the characters are supposed to be stupid because this is an homage to ‘80s horror films, then why make a movie like that in the first place?  There were plenty actually made in the ‘80s.

The one thing this gets right is that it’s modeled to look exactly like an early ‘80s horror flick; on those grounds, the aesthetic is perfect, from the film itself appearing to take place in that period, to the look of the film, and even on down to its score.  This was clearly a labor of love for West, and he must be commended for his attention-to-detail.  This isn’t just some half-assed homage:  Even the opening credits look like something out of the Halloween- ra (which is technically late ‘70s—same difference), which is very impressive, especially given its modest budget, which was under $1 million (sad that anything under a million is considered “modest”, but so it is).

Unfortunately, it manages to get pretty much everything else wrong. 

RECAP: Looks exactly like a film from the early ‘80s, which is the visual style it was going for.  Aside from that, pretty much the rest of this film is a bust:  Poorly written, painfully slow, terribly boring, and with an ending so bad, it cancels out none of those things.  Go ahead and see it if you’re curious, but when you wake up just in time to see the end credits, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

RATING: 2.5/10

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