by Michael Sullivan

Paranormal Activity (2009) has been slaughtering--pardon the verb--the box office lately! Granted, This Is It (2009) won last weekend, but that’s not being reviewed because that’s not a real film. According to Box Office Mojo, Paranormal Activity, which only cost $15,000 to make, has raked in upwards of $80M domestically--a big win for Paramount. I’ve already made my opinion of the film clear, but regardless, that’s the horror film Halloweeners chose to see this weekend...which is unfortunate, but this is the film they should have seen.

The House of the Devil (2009) is the latest entry in a recent 70s/80s throwback trend: Black Dynamite (2009), Inglourious Basterds (2009), and Drag Me to Hell (2009) with it to name a few. This one in particular is a babysitter slasher about Samantha (Jocelin Donahue), a college student who answers an ad to babysit for a very curious family to make the money to pay her rent. When she arrives, she learns she’s actually watching an elderly lady and not a child as expected. This is the first signal of odd things to come--oddities that escalate to the fever pitch horror fans have come to expect by a film’s climax.

What’s probably most remarkable about this film is its unified vision. It is very clear, immediately, that writer/director/editor Ti West managed the film very closely to ensure every aspect was aesthetically uniform. The film is an homage to tropes of horror films from the 70s and 80s, but it updates the stakes so the images are more shocking or intense than they would have been during that time. Likewise, every aspect of the film feels lifted from decades past: similar framing, similar acting, very similar writing, and similar set dressing. It’s startlingly easy to forget this film was made in 2009, which is very cool.

Still though, like I said, the stakes are very much raised. The film may borrow from an earlier age, but it’s scary today. As a satanic horror of the occult, a sub-genre made rich by works like William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) and John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness (1987), The House of the Devil fits right in (Casper). It gets under your skin.

See it, if you get the chance. Horror films like this one, with this much love and attention to detail, don’t come around that often. The House of the Devil is only playing in three theaters in the nation (the Sunset 5, for fellow Angelenos). But despite its limited release, it is a stellar, stellar film. If you care about the horror genre, particularly the future of the horror genre, at all, please go out and see this film.