The House of the Devil

Whoa.  Have you seen every horror film made in the 80s and wish you could get just one more?  If so, this is the movie for you.  I found myself checking wikipedia just 10 minutes into the film to make sure it was really from 2009, 'cause it feels like it was made in it's period.  

Honest to goddess, that's the title screen.  I love that the creators decided to go full-force with this as a period piece.  It's not just set in the 80s, it oozes the 80s.  They even took care to use special effects available at the time.  That's right, this is a CGI-free horror film.  We can all breathe a sigh of relief.

In spite of it's cheesy 80s premise, this is a very solid film.  The main character manages to be interesting even while being naive.  Everyone in the film acts oddly creepy to her (with the exception of her friend) so it's difficult at first to see where the horror will be coming from.  She's trying to afford a crappy, run-down apartment to escape her messy, constantly-boning roommate.  This pushes her into a realistic desperation that gives cause for her questionable decisions.

Much of the first half of the film centers around the main character and her best friend, a loud-mouthed rich girl who's utterly loveable as she licks admittedly disgusting pepperoni grease off her fingers.  She is the voice of reason in the film, but ultimately also the voice of privilege.  She can always call her father for money, which means she doesn't have the same financial pressures as the lead.  I enjoy the interplay between them a lot, and this film passes the Bechtel test immediately and over and over again, which is nice to see.  There's also no romantic plotline, just the interplay between the lead and a friend, which is once again refreshing.

The lead, desperate for money, takes a babysitting job from an odd old man after she finds his fliers around campus.  His phone voice and general demeanor are obvious red flags, but our lead is desperate and just plows through.  While she, like all horror victims/heroes, ignores these signs, she is no airhead.  Just desperate and about to make enough money to pay her rent for the apartment in a single night.

In her defense, SHE doesn't know this is a horror film and that walking into a house that looks like that with a strange man is going to lead to trouble.  It's a babysitting gig, right?  Right?  Someone has to live out in those creepy old buildings?

Once she takes the job, we are treated to some hilarious scenes of her in the house.  It makes you feel connected to her, awkwardly wandering around a strange old house in the middle of the night.  She's dorky and clumsy and funny, ordering pizza and dancing around with her headphones on (during which the audience is pounded with an all-80s-party soundtrack).

Slowly, of course, our heroine starts hearing strange noises and getting paranoid.  She almost calls the police, but decides she's being silly.  Classic scared-babysitter stuff.  The tension builds slow and smooth, relying on fear of the unknown rather than lots of big scares.  The soundtrack, however, is typical for the 80s, a screeching orchestral mess, if you're into that sort of thing.

By the time the crux of the film comes around, the part alluded to in the intro's statistics on "Satanic Panic", our heroine proves far more resilient and intelligent than most heroines of the time.  Which is in the end what I loved about the film.  It's not about a hot girl with no clothes acting stupid and dying.  It's about a smart young woman in hard circumstances fighting for her life. 

It did, of course, have it's issues.  A complete and total lack of people of color being the big one.  It's "true to the era" of film of course, but that's not an excuse, even given the small cast of characters.  In spite of that, it's one of the cleanest horror films I've seen in a while, which is very impressive given it's insane 80s premise.