Review: The House of the Devil (2009)

 The House of the Devil (2009)

Rated R for some bloody violence

Score: 4 out of 5

The House of the Devil was "elevated horror" before that term even existed, back in the late 2000s when the horror genre was still dominated by sexy, hyper-stylized remakes on one hand and down-and-dirty torture porn on the other. Specifically, it was Ti West doing an early, smaller-scale version of his later trilogy of X, Pearl, and MaXXXine, only instead of the slashers and giallos of the '70s and '80s, here he's homaging the supernatural and religious horror of that era, in particular the "Satanic Panic" flicks in which devil-worshiping cults terrorized the good, God-fearing people of America. It's a film that's not only set in the '80s but feels like it could've been made in the '80s as well, between the use of period details and film grain to make it look like an older film, an opening card playing up a "based on a true story" conceit designed to get you to think that this sort of thing actually happens for real, and most importantly, a slow-burn feel rooted in an older period of horror when filmmakers could take it for granted that audiences had longer attention spans. There's not really much more to it than an affectionate pastiche of the movies that West grew up on as a kid, and it doesn't feel quite so revolutionary watching it in 2024 after we've had a whole generation of horror movies with similar influences on their minds, but it remains an effective "mumblecore" chiller anchored by both West's lo-fi flair and a great performance by Jocelin Donahue.

The plot is a simple one. Samantha Hughes is a college student who, in order to pay her rent (just $300 a month!), takes a job as a babysitter that sounds too good to be true: watch over a man's elderly mother for four hours. Her friend Megan tries to warn her that the job sounds sketchy as hell, but Samantha isn't gonna pass up such an easy paycheck. Much of the first hour is spent simply following Samantha's day-to-day life and, later, her time alone in the house, and West spends this time slowly ratcheting up the tension (especially with one moment of sudden, brutal violence) but always keeping it at a low-to-medium simmer where it's easy to buy how oblivious Samantha is to the growing danger she's in. Jocelin Donahue as Samantha made for a likable and convincing heroine, somebody who manages to quickly fight back once she realizes what's going on but also somebody who, even as she starts to suspect that Megan might have been right about this job, clearly doesn't have her guard up before then. Sure, the fact that they didn't tell her all the details of the job and who she was actually caring for until she got there is kinda weird, but $400 in '80s money to spend four hours sitting around someone's place while the person you've been hired to take care of is just sleeping upstairs? I wouldn't pass that up either. While the film is mostly a one-woman show for Donahue, she's surrounded by a great supporting cast too, with Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov playing the couple who own the home that Samantha is staying at and giving off the requisite creepy vibes, and Greta Gerwig (back when she was mostly an actress who had only just dipped her toes into working behind the camera) making for a likable, level-headed presence as Megan, the friend who tries to warn Samantha off from the job.

As for the story, it's a movie about a Satanic cult doing Satanic cult stuff to an innocent young woman, and if you know the first thing about what people believed about "Satanic ritual abuse" back in the day, then not much here is really gonna surprise you. If you squint, you could maybe read something into the ending and draw comparisons between how the cult views fertile women as little more than breeding stock and the views towards women that many fundamentalist Christians who promoted the Satanic Panic harbored, but I wouldn't really call that an intentional message on the film's part. All I can really say is that Ti West shot the hell out of this movie. He clearly loves '70s and '80s horror movies, and he not only does an excellent job replicating their aesthetics but, more importantly, recapturing what made the best of them so scary, letting us know early on that Samantha is in trouble but always keeping it in the background so we can only wait in anticipation for it. While it saves most of the big horror sequences for the third act, the film's brisk runtime otherwise flies by a lot faster than I would've expected for a "slow burn" like this that saves the best for last. It waits before it gets to "the goods," but once it gets there, it is intense.

The Bottom Line

Not much else to say, really. It's a simple movie that does what it sets out to do pretty damn well, and there's a reason why it was Ti West's big breakthrough. Check it out if you're in the mood for an old-school devil flick.