The House of the Devil

Welcome to the Inner Chamber here at the I Will Devour Your Content compound. I am your host, John Bem. As always, there's Schlitz in the mini-fridge and the snack shelves are well-stocked with Little Debbie cakes and Zagnut bars. Help yourself. Make yourself comfortable on the flower-print sofa or spare recliner (the one on the right, the other one is mine; it's the Naugahyde Recliner of Judgment) for today our cinematic sojurn takes us to The House of the Devil (2009).

Before we begin, however, an announcement:

The House of the Devil is the latest selection of the Final Girl Film Club, a super-cool club for super-cool kids, a club even better than Dawn Wiener's Special People's Club. Final Girl is one of the best blogs in the blogosphere and is written by one Stacie Ponder. I've been reading Final Girl for two or three years now and have found Stacie's writing to be consistently hilarious and insightful. Via her blog, she's introduced me to a number of excellent movies (and some that I didn't like nearly as much as she did). She writes at and for a bunch of other places too. And she's an artist and a director. She's pretty awesome, you should check her out. Now that I've created my own little blogspace, rather than casting envious glances across the lunchroom at the film-club kids, I can join in. Thank you for stopping by.

Let us begin.

For a long time in The House of the Devil, which is set in the 1980s, nothing happens. Well, not nothing, but simple everyday things. College sophomore Samantha rents an apartment (from Dee Wallace, yay!) and looks for a babysitting job. She eats pizza with her friend Megan. She listens to enormous cassette tapes in her bulky Walkman (technology was larger 30 years ago). But hey, I'm watching a movie called The House of the Devil, so I'm expecting something to happen. And because of this expectation, and the way the movie takes its sweet, well-paced time and focuses on small spaces and intimate details, fingers on a door handle, the pepperoni on a slice of pie, the red light of a turn signal, everything was fraught with tension and ominous potentiality. By the time Megan drives Samantha to her babysitting gig, I was on-edge, keyed-up, worriedly biting my nails. And yet nothing had happened. This isn't horror, this is suspense! Exqusitely wrought 'I'm-gonna-pee-my-pants-soon-if-the-tension-doesn't-break' suspense.

To get to the babysitting job, Megan drives Samantha down a long road, past a graveyard, to a big Victorian house. Ah, good, this must be the titular statanic domicile. Now, surely, something will happen. And it does. But not for a while. While Samantha talks with the husband and wife who posted the job (Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov), Megan sits and waits and eats gross old-people candy.

Mr. Ulman, the man in need of a babysitter, is creepy and older than you'd expect a man to be who needs a babysitter. Surely, he's up to something?

Probably, but then again maybe not. I mean, who hasn't done their share of after-school jobs for weird and creepy, yet ultimately benign, old folks? I know I did when I was a teenager back in the actual 1980s. And I've eaten my fair share of gross old-people candy. You know the kind, a nice hard candy with a raspberry flavor, but it's not hard all the way through and eventually the delicious raspberry shell gives way and from the center of the candy a hideous anise-flavored liquid oozes into your horrified mouth. But I digress.

Well it's when Megan drives away and the Ulmans leave that Samantha starts getting creeped out and, yes, things finally start happening.

The movie finally shifts from suspense mode into horror mode, and after all of the build-up, this switch is quite gratifying and very effective. Wonderful stuff. And the very last line of the movie is so perfect that I found myself grinning from ear-to-ear.

The verdict from the Naugahyde Recliner of Judgment is that The House of the Devil is a Very Good Movie. Jocelin Donahue, who plays Samantha, spends a lot of screentime alone and silent and is very captivating and engaging while doing so. The House of the Devil doesn't have shrieking cats leaping out of closets or hyperkinetic editing. It doesn't depend on 'boo, gotcha!' scares or sudden musical stings. It builds suspense at a stately and effective pace, producing lots of goosebumps and tingling neck hairs along the way. And when the payoff comes, it is gratifying and fitting. The movie also does a top-notch job of recreating the look and feel of the 1980s.

I've had cellular and cordless phones for so long now that I'd forgotten what it was like to get tangled up in a telephone while looking for a pen. I smiled when The House of the Devil reminded me what that was like, a nice little detail.

Oh, and one last indulgence: I totally love this shot of Megan, the tough profile, the moptop hair, the super-long cigarette.

Now that you've finished reading this, go watch The House of the Devil. And go read Final Girl.