Ti West’s The House of the Devil finds its sweet spot in the paranoid shadow of misdirection, so it’s best not to reveal much of the plot beyond what you’ll know from watching the trailer: it’s the 80s, and a sleepy college town is obsessed with an impeding eclipse, and a young, pretty co-ed in desperate need of some quick cash takes a mysterious babysitting job in a big, secluded manse, for a creepy couple who don’t actually have a kid. What actually happens is less important than what West teases could happen. Duality is the order of the day: there are two houses that could potentially be devilish, two girls — serious brunette Sam (Jocelin Donahue) and the more playful blonde Megan (Greta Gerwig) –– at the mercy of two men (Tom Noonan and AJ Bowen), each with two evident personalities. The final punchline even sets up a new twosome whose story could easily fuel a second film.

It would be easy to peg Devil as a superficial exercise in vintage pastiche –– the film non-ironically borrows the look and feel of the horror produced in the era in which it’s set — but West’s more impressive nod at classic horror is his mastery of misdirection. I was recently asked to make a list of my favorite horror films of all time, and it shouldn’t be a surprise to readers of this blog that all five films I chose were made before 1980, and three of them before 1950. If horror films weren’t unequivocably better before gore and graphic violence and were standard practices available to makers of mainstream scary films, a lot of the Code-restricted frighteners that have survived to become classics (cult or otherwise) are richer in subtext, more evocative of base human fears, and more effectively politically and/or philosophically provocative. In other words, in the classic horror and sci-fi films that I love, there tends to be more than one thing going on: there’s what we see, there’s what we don’t see but imagine or infer is also happening, and there’s what, as a product of the clash between the actual visible evidence and what our psyches produce as an extension or embroidery on what we see, there’s what we leave believing it all really means.

This kind of multi-faceted address requires an active viewer, and is very different from the wink-wink, self-important pseudo social commentary that’s been recently injected into the Saw franchise, and which itself seems like a retread of what Eli Roth claimed as the driving force behind both Hostel movies. Both recent torture porn franchises are ideal for a jaded, passive audience: they delight in showing everything in gruesome, fetishistic detail (hence the “porn”), while telling us that all the sadism is really about our real, contemporary anxieties. They don’t trust the viewer to actually access those anxieties on their own.

The House of the Devil is nothing if not a monumental feat of director-on-viewer trust. When I interviewed Ti West in April of 2009, he was upset that the production company that owned the rights to the film, his fourth feature, was screening Devil at the Tribeca Film Festival with four minutes gutted from its midsection against the director’s wishes. The producers thought the director’s cut of the film took too long to get to its bloody climax. “It’s called The House of the fucking Devil,” West sighed. “It’s gonna get there.” Now Magnolia is releasing The House of the Devil (in theaters on Friday, on VOD and Amazon already) with the four minute chunk reinstated, and it’s hard to imagine anything coming along in the next two months that disabuses me of the notion that this is the best horror film of the year.
Devil does, still, get there, but much of the film’s genius lies in West’s comittment to setting the viewer’s brain spinning through nearly unbearable anticipation. The House of the Devil takes the old-fashioned, low-budget horror trick of presenting the ordinary with just enough aural enhancement to send imaginations into overdrive. We become increasingly certain that something horrible is going to happen, but beyond a brief, brutal early taste West withholds actual horror over and over again. Eventually the viewer’s paranoia becomes so tangled in the protagonist’s paranoia that we — on the other side of the screen and ostensibly safe from danger — cease to know better than the people on screen. This is scary in a way that unrelenting brutality could never be.

West’s third feature was a sequel to Roth’s Cabin Fever; after a series of conflicts and budget issues, he walked off the project last year. That movie has just recently screened in Austin and LA, in a form which West has vocally disowned. I haven’t seen Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, but it seems clear that somehow this less-than-ideal experience helming a (relatively) big budget franchise film functioned as the missing link between West’s 2007 SXSW premiere Trigger Man, and the more accomplished Devil. The latter film offers an advanced iteration of stylistic building blocks that were evident in the former: bravely long stretches in which dread mounts but ultimately “nothing” happens, tied together with a control over atmosphere that shares DNA with the slow cinema of a festivalist’s dreams, and all of it very suddenly resolving in a violent climax that’s just graphic enough to work as visceral payoff for the long investment. West was right to be frustrated at the unnecessary, if temporary, truncating of his cut. It is a horror film — it is going to get there. The excruciatingly tight windup makes the release that much of a relief.