Ti West's The House of the Devil skims away so much of the noisy and excessive clichés of today’s terror flicks that it feels like a breath of fresh air – quite an achievement for a film that very consciously mimics the style and feel of 1980s horror.

Taking his cues from John Carpenter and early Bob Clark, West delivers a quiet, enthralling genre film with a disarmingly simple story. Inherently broke college student Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) has just found a perfect one-bedroom apartment away from her consistently post-coital roommate Megan (Greta Gerwig). It’s the 1980s, and all she needs is a few hundred dollars – so she takes notice when she strolls past a bulletin board ad looking for a babysitter.

After an odd telephone conversation with her future employer, Samantha bums a ride from Megan and heads out to the eerie Victorian home of Mr. and Mrs. Ulman (Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov at their creepiest). The Ulmans have a date to watch an eclipse with some friends and offer the college student her new rent and then some for a few hours spent not with their son, but with Mr. Ulman’s mother. On her way back home, Megan is brutally murdered, lending Samantha’s ensuing slow exploration of the house a sense of overwhelming dread.

Leaving the screening of Devil, two men complained that the film's deliberate, unsettling pacing was boring and stagnant. But it is precisely because of this very precise attention to minor action and movement that The House of the Devil achieves such an unrelenting grip on our fear. Whereas the practitioners behind movies like The Unborn or the reprehensible Saw series build up and release their terror torrents in the span of a few minutes, West's film never allows us respite; from the moment Samantha enters the house, not a second passes where we feel like she might be okay for the next.

This isn't to say that The House of the Devil rethinks the wheel the way Neil Marshall's The Descent or Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's Inside did. Rather, the film takes its place alongside Rob Zombie's excellent The Devil's Rejects as another gross-out nostalgia trip. By revisiting the era where schlock horror was born and grooming it with an acute sense of pacing and imagery, West exposes the shallowness and crass execution of modern horror.



This house needs a paint job.