Day Eleven - The House of the Devil (2009)


  The last few years have seen a handful of what I call homage-films. Those that attempt through visual style, story-telling methods, and music to capture the feeling of an earlier era in cinema. Films like Grindhouse and The Devil's Rejects aim to recreate the 1970s exploitation genre. The House of the Devil is another example of this trend. This movie attempts to capture the effect of slow-burning horror films of the 70s and 80s, and one critic hit the nail on the head by comparing this to early Polanski films. The story involves a young college student in the 80s who desperately wants her own apartment and needs to find money to pay for it. She answers an ad posted outside her dorm seeking a babysitter. The job turns out to be a little more than she bargained for when she shows up to find genre vets Mary Woronov and Tom Noonan in a creepy old house and no child to sit for. Eventually we learn that she is there for satanic purposes. The movie does a great job at capturing the look and feel of the era, and delivers some decent gore (although not in abundance) and I was more than a little inclined to cover my eyes at certain times from anticipation. Highly recommended to genrephiles.