The Devil I Say

I check the web site Rotten Tomatoes on a fairly regular basis for movie reviews. A few weeks back, they ran a feature (though sadly, I can't find the link right now) where they ran down top reviewed movies of 2009. It was divided up into several categories -- for example, you could find the top 5 documentaries, top 5 action films...

And top 5 horror films. This is how I came to hear of The House of the Devil. I knew only that it was available on Netflix, was quite well ranked at RT without even making allowances for it being a horror movie, and that it was released in 2009. That was it. And I decided that was enough. Every now and then, it's fun to go into a movie completely blind, with almost no idea what you'll be seeing. So that's how I decided to approach this one.

I don't want to reveal too much here and perhaps spoil you from having the same experience I had. I'll keep it simple and say that the movie is set in the 1980s, and one of the things that makes it really quite clever is that the movie looks like it was made in the 1980s. Director (and writer, but we'll come back to that) Ti West clearly loves films, because he knows a lot about how a film from that period looks and feels.

From camera angles to pacing, the look of everything from the film grain to the opening credits, if you didn't know this movie was released last year, I'd defy you to suspect it wasn't actually a film from the early 1980s. So apart from anything and everything else, it's a pretty effective piece of "period piece" filmmaking.

Then there's the script. Here, I will keep mum about specifics and just say that the film is an incredibly slow burn. For the first half hour, it's really almost too slow, and yet there does come a point where a sense of creeping dread slowly starts to come over you as you watch. And I can honestly say that after that point, the next 45 minutes are among the most tense I've ever seen on film.

And the really remarkable thing about it is that it's really all about suspense. I don't want to say that "nothing" happens, but what your mind is invited to conjure up does most of the work. Every move of the camera, every strange sound effect... I don't know, maybe I was a bit on edge or something. But I watched this movie with a friend, and by the one hour mark, we were both pretty seriously amped up.

In fact, I'd have to say that the suspense was really almost too great. Finally, the movie starts to roll out on-screen horrors, and it's not nearly as effective. At one point, the filmmaker pulls a page from the Hitchcock playbook and shows us, the audience, something that none of the characters gets to see. And oddly, rather than ratcheting up the tension, I actually thought it deflated it considerably. What we're shown is just not equal to all the random things we can imagine by that point in the movie. And while the movie does slowly start to reclaim the suspense again, things sort of come unraveled in the final 15 minutes. It ultimately becomes a more conventional affair; the movie just isn't as good at showing as it is at implying.

But even though the first 15 minutes and last 15 minutes don't really live up to the fantastic ride of the bulk of the movie, it's still well worth seeing if you're a fan of the genre. In fact, I'd rate it a B+ overall, which actually slides it into the #8 slot of my "Top 10 of 2009" list, and bumps another low-budget horror film, Paranormal Activity off the bottom.

I was very pleasantly surprised.