Classic Movie Review: 'The House of the Devil'

Merely emulating the style of another era of film is not an idea, it’s an aesthetic. The 2009 horror movie, The House of the Devil, a breakout for director Ti West impressed a lot of people with its aesthetic. The film’s grainy cinematography evoked the early 1980s and the horror aesthetic of that time. Indeed, in style alone, The House of the Devil is quite impressive. Every last retro touch from the clothes right down to the heroine’s walkman looks perfectly of the period.

Beyond the aesthetic however, what do we really have in The House of the Devil? In my estimation, it’s not all that much. A couple of stand out sequences and a whole lot of implied creepiness that never really amounts to much. The House of the Devil is the ‘classic’ on this week’s Everyone’s a Critic Movie Review Podcast with Bob and Sean in honor of the release of Ti West’s far more thoughtful, terrifying and aesthetically rich, X.

The House of the Dead stars Jocelin Donahue as Sam, a college student eager to move out of her dorm and get away from her messy roommate. Sam has found an apartment close to campus and only needs $300 to get the place for herself. However, Sam doesn’t have $300.00 and she has about 6 days to get it. Thus when she sees a spare ad for a family seeking a babysitter she senses an opening for a quick few bucks.

While she jumps at the chance, Sam’s best friend, Megan (Greta Gerwig) is immediately suspicious. Her suspicions are fed when the man leaves Sam waiting for over an hour after agreeing to meet her to discuss the job. The mysterious man persists in calling on Sam to offer her the job and over Megan’s objection, she accepts the offer. Megan agrees to drive Sam to the house but also insists on joining her to meet the creep who hired her.

Said creep is Mr Ulman (Tom Noonan), a giant of a man far too ingratiating for his creepy countenance. When he insists on talking to Sam alone, Megan’s alarms are going off full blast. Mr Ulman reveals that in fact, he and his wife don’t have a child. They have invited Sam here on a false pretense. The actual babysitting subject is his elderly mother. Sam goes to leave but Ulman throws down several hundred more dollars to get her to stay and she relents.

And that’s where the plot kicks in. Alone in the creepy house after Mr. Ulman and his somehow, even creepier wife, played by Mary Woronov, leave, Sam can’t resist searching the house and looking in every creepy corner. Naturally, she ends up being plagued by various sounds from throughout the house, sounds that are intended to ramp up the tension and fearsomeness of this plot but mostly these scenes serve to drag out the run time of the movie and hardly add up to anything.

I mentioned a pair of standout segments in The House of the Devil. One occurs immediately after Megan storms off promising to return to pick Sam up later but upset that her friend is going to stay in this messed up situation. As Megan drives away, cursing Sam the whole time, she hears and feels her tire go out. Pulling over to light her cigarette and assess the damage, a creep suddenly reaches through her window with a lighter. It’s a terrific jump scare and a strong set up for the only strong shock in the whole movie.

The other stand out sequence finds Sam alone in the creepy house with her Walkman blasting away. As Sam dances around the house to the amazing tune of One Thing Leads to Another by The Fixx, the promise of the horror atmosphere sets in a little. The dark corners of the home feel sinister against Sam’s oblivious, joyful jaunt around the place. The sequence ends all too abruptly but I may feel that way because it was the only time I had fun while watching The House of the Devil.

That last line was a bit harsh, there is nothing actively bad about The House of the Devil. Every aspect of the movie is, at the very least, competent. There just isn’t much to it. Sam goes to a creepy house in the middle of nowhere, the people there turn out to be creeps and bad stuff starts to happen. There is a lot of meandering to get to an ending that I assume is supposed to be shocking but comes off rather mediocre in execution.

The plot carried out by Mr. and Mrs. Ulman doesn’t make much sense. Why did they need to lie about any of it? I get that they didn’t think they could get someone to come and sit with their elderly mother as a babysitter, but for the money they eventually offer to pay Sam, they could have hired someone with professional credentials anyway. Then they leave and why? Where did they go? They end up returning because they are essential to the ending of the movie, it's their plot, but where did they go and why did they need Sam in the house?

I could presume several motivations but in an effort to keep things mysterious, West chooses to keep too much information off screen or vaguely implied. In trying to build suspense, West fails to create a narrative through line for us as an audience to grab on to and for him to upend once his big ending arrives. In the end the middle portion of The House of the Devil feels far to disconnected from the highly predictable ending that the creepy couple are... gasp... creepy.

There is a lot of wheel spinning going on in getting to where the film goes. There are a number of unnecessary scenes that unfold to get where the movie is going. As much as I like the dance number did that dance number have much of anything to do with the plot regarding the devil that takes up maybe the last 10 minutes of the movie? Not really, no. It was creepy and demonstrated a strong directorial command but it never connected to the ending beyond the repetition of the phrase "One Thing Leads to Another" as a potential theme, of sorts though it's unclear what makes that a strong theme? Of course one thing leads to another.

The Ulman’s want Sam to be the vessel from which Satan will be born into the world. That’s the plan they have. This plan takes up the final 10 minutes of the movie. Everything else is window dressing. The rest of The House of the Devil is an attempt to craft an atmosphere of dread that only occasionally takes hold. We get flashes of the kind of directorial mastery that Ti West will eventually bring to X but only flashes. Too much of The House of the Devil is based on aesthetic homage and trying to force atmosphere through sound design.

We will be talking even more about The House of the Devil on the Everyone’s a Critic Movie Review Podcast, live on YouTube on Monday, March 21st, 2022 and on your favorite podcast platform the following day.