House of the Devil
Directed by Ti West
Written by Ti West
Starring Greta Gerwig, Dee Wallace, Mary Woronov, Tom Noonan
Release Date October 30th, 2009
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.
Find my full length review at Horror.Media, linked here.
