Watch for director Ti West. I haven’t seen his other movies yet, which include Cabin Fever 2, and something interesting looking called The Roost, but his House of the Devil is a pitch-perfect throwback horror movie, almost never hitting a wrong note.
Even the posters look right on the money:
It’s set in the early or mid 1980s and manages to pay tribute to ’80s horror movies without parodying them, which had to be a tough line to walk, especially when you’re including a classic 1980s montage sequence set to a song by The Fixx. It’s maddeningly deliberate in its build-up, with the camera content to just sit there and watch, not get into everyone’s faces and zoom in on expressions and action.
In fact, a lot of the shots are right out of the Polanski playbook of Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant, with action frequently taking place down a hall or through a doorway of another room rather than right next to the actors. A lot of it also reminded me of Mario Bava’s slower moving horror movies of the 70s.
Another reason to dig this is the excellent casting of Tom Noonan. It’s a bit of a spoiler, but you hear his voice on the phone a few times before you see him and that soothing creepy voice is instantly familiar to me because of my love of Manhunter, and Noonan as The Tooth Fairy in particular.
At its heart, it’s just a “babysitter in a not quite empty house” movie, but it’s done so well. The payoff is a little short and the coda needlessly telegraphed, but those are small complaints. This movie has a fine suspenseful build-up that puts it way above most of the current horror out there. It also holds back on the gore for the most part, which is pretty unusual now.
Thirst, on the other hand, disappointed me. but frankly, I haven’t loved any of Chan-wook Park’s movies. I saw Lady Vengeance just a couple of months ago, and admired it at the time, but now, I can barely recall a single scene from it, let alone any of the story or characters.
In Thirst we have an earnest priest who submits to a dangerous drug trial, gets infected, dies, and is brought back to life by a vampire virus he must have picked up during his hospital stay. The Roman Catholic aspect of it isn’t treated in any particularly interesting way, which is a shame, since the Catholic notion of transubstantiation requires adherents to the faith to literally take part in blood drinking and flesh eating. I’ve always thought that would make a nice entree into a really sick, gory Catholic horror movie of zombies/ cannibals/ vampires and I was hoping this would run with that notion, but it doesn’t.
The priest works hard not to kill anyone to satiate his bloodlust, but when he does kill a man – and not even for his blood – the guilt that comes over his new lover and him manifests itself in increasingly bizarre ways, culminating in a hilarious sexual three-way between the ghost and his killers. I liked this well enough, but it’s not any great vampire movie. It’s much more in line with Park’s previously explored themes of revenge and its consequences. And frankly, he’s done that theme to death.
Totally agree — Michael and I talked a bit about House here, and I’ve posted on his earlier films here and here (just comment #4, briefly hitting on The Roost–more Tom Noonan goodness), too. West’s pretty amazing. Cabin Fever 2, not so much–a killer opening, and some great stuff for the first half, but the film got taken away from him, and it devolves into tedium as it gets more conventional.
Ahh, so you did. Good lord, is this the oldest active blog on the internet? Mike, did you ever see Jigoku? Well, I feel vindicated in liking House of the Devil now.
Did you also post on The Informant!? I liked it a lot. Matt Damon is easily one of my favorite A-listers going. And the score by Marvin Hamlisch is incredible; it was perfect for this film.
I never did see Jigoku–it is lost in my foolishly-extensive Netflix queue.
I did see, but didn’t post on, The Informant. Yeah, it was pretty great–Damon, in particular. As you can see, my thoughts are so bland that posting on them seemed sort of pointless….
No more bland than “I liked it a lot.”
House of the Devil is quite good, as I mentioned elsewhere. However, I don’t have the same enthusiasm for The Roost which, while as carefully made as the other film (the tense pauses, deliberate compositions, etc.), is too conventional–further, the characters are even more bland than they are in a typical teens-killed-one-at-a-time film and I just don’t find the bats particularly scary. Perhaps the ridiculous rubber bat that flies around far too often in the parlor in the original 1931 Dracula has put me off–this giant rubber bat elicits the really frightening statement from the rather useless Jonathan Harker “It’ll get in your hair!” ewwwwwwwwww.
Yeah, The Roost? Not so good. Even with the horror host framing. Speaking of which, Netflix has a doc on regional horror hosts called American Scary. It’s not bad if you’re interested in the subject matter, though the filmmaker is apparently from Ohio, so there’s WAY too much about that state’s local TV personalities.
Trigger Man, House of the Devil , and The Roost should be renamed “The Walking Trilogy.” I haven’t seen anyone since Antonioni so obsessed with characters walking through locations and being defined by the places they are in (woods, house and farm, respectively. I’d like to see West do a B-movie horror version of The Eclipse .
West has a new movie coming out, still available on demand (where I saw it). The Innkeepers may have broader appeal than House; there’s more humor, the dread is less central–it’s more of a crowd-pleaser, a character-driven ghost story that didn’t wow me (it’s less scary) but ought, in a fair world, to displace the cheaply- and poorly-made drivel that passes for mainstream horror.
I love what West does with sound; I think seeing this in a theater would have been more fun. And, Michael, there’s a lot of walking.