Review of The House of the Devil (2009) by Jean-Francois V — 06 Jul 2012

"The House of the Devil" is a film with integrity. It sets out to be an homage to the horror films of the 1980's, and it does so with remarkable honesty, down to the crappy U.S. New Age music, the long shots of the female protagonist walking from one place to another or just doing nothing, the presence of genre stalwarts Dee Wallace and Mary Woronov, the freeze-frames in the main titles, a couple of zooms, etc. All these references are done in a rather low-key way and you never feel that some producer is ticking boxes of what should evoke nostalgia in the target audiences. The reference to the lunar eclipse reminded me of the solar flares in "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", the bopping scene of Sarah Connor's roommate in "The Terminator".

I really liked Jocelin Donahue as Samantha. She does not seem to be that big of an actress yet (her earlier roles include "hostess" and "cute girl") but she had just the right looks and attitude to be the film's Mia Farrow, Jamie Lee Curtis, Sissy Spacek or Jessica Harper. Since she is virtually in every frame, and alone in most of them, everything depended on her ability to flesh out a character who, being just some vacuous teenage babysitter, must have looked rather non-existent and nondescript on paper. (I wonder whether the characters in the film were patterned after the seven cardinal sins, which would be apt given the title. Samantha might be greed, Megan definitely gluttony, and the roommate lust and sloth.).

I mostly liked the slow, "boring" part of the film, which nicely recreated my childhood and teenage fear of old houses, and I was rather unnerved by it, to the point that I felt like watching the film over two evenings and switching to a documentary or something less stressful. When the real horror started, it felt almost like a relief. It was the not knowing and the not seeing that were creating all that anxiety. The brief mayhem I could handle.

The film is very straightfoward and uncomplicated, unlike some modern horror movies. But I wonder whether a case might not be made SPOILERS AHEAD for the whole last sequence to be some sort of hallucination in Samantha's mind. She's creeping out because of all the stress that has been adding up in her life, and the satanic scares of the eighties, and she simply loses her mind. I don't think the film supports such a reading (unless the three corpses and the murder of Megan are actually scenarios Samantha plays in her head, but there is no suggestion of that) but one does wonder how much of what actually takes place is delusional and how much is real.

I also recommend the film as a study in solitude, a theme I can always relate to.