Reviewed by Phil Wheat
Stars Jocelin Donahue, Tom Noonan, Mary Woronov, Greta Gerwig, AJ Bowen, Dee Wallace, Mary McCann, John Speredakos, Heather Robb, Kamen Velkovsky
Written by Ti West
Certification UK xx | US xx
Runtime xx minutes
Directed by Ti West
Ti West, director of the audience dividing The Roost is back with an homage to the 80’s and exploitation cinema of old, The House of the Devil. Taking place in the 1980’s, college student Samantha Hughes (Donahue) takes a strange babysitting job that coincides with a full lunar eclipse. She slowly realizes her clients harbor a terrifying secret – they plan to use her in a satanic ritual. Based on the scaremongering satanist stories that proliferated America in the 1980’s The House of the Devil is a slow burning satan-worship movie in the style of Rosemary’s Baby and Race with the Devil. And by slow burning I really mean slow… like many of the films of the era it homages, The House of the Devil takes it time developing it’s characters and their motivations before unleashing the true horrors of the story.
Of course character development would mean nothing without interesting characters and actors, and the film has both in droves. You have to wonder where Jocelin Donahue has been hiding – her portrayal recalls Margot Kidder in the seminal Black Christmas and Ti West obviously knew the actress was something special, revealing at FrightFest that she was the only actress he considered for the role. Donahue’s Samantha is a determined college student – determined to move out of the room she shares at college and determined to do everything by her own rules. It’s this determination that leads her answer a “babysitter wanted” ad posted on the college campus noticeboard rather than accept financial help from the parents of her best friend Megan (a show stealing performance by Greta Gerwig), eventually leading her to the home of the Ulmans, played with aplomb by Mary Wornov and Tom Noonan. Noonan is especially creepy as father of the Ulman clan and anyone other than the determined Samantha would run a mile from his oh-so-persuasive patriarch after he warns her that the babysitting duties will not be entirely the norm.
Obviously when a film is called The House of the Devil and there’s only one house in the movie, we know that Samantha is in for a hellish time at the Ulman’s (literally) but the film is not about the journey but the destination. Ti West builds the suspense by keeping us on tenterhooks as to what will happen to Samantha – as an audience we know where the film is headed but not exactly will happen when the film gets there. West even toys with the audience, dragging the tension out further by having Samantha dance round the Ulman house to the strains of “One Thing Leads to Another” on her walkman in a scene guaranteed to have you sat on the edge of your seat waiting for something to happen. That’s not to say West doesn’t provide plenty of scares before the films conclusion, but he keeps them few and far between, allowing for plenty of time to rebuild the suspense between events and by the time the film reaches it’s inevitable conclusion you’re almost thankful that it has arrived.
The House of the Devil is a note-perfect recreation of 80’s cinema, without any of the self-referentialism or self-awareness that plagues many “retro” movies; it’s almost as if the film was lost to time before being unearthed and unleashed on an unsuspecting public. It’s easily the best satanic-themed movie since Race With the Devil in the 70’s and can already be considered a classic of the genre.
• The House of the Devil at IMDb