It’s not unusual for young filmmakers to experience some sort of pain and frustration in making the transition from DIY no-budget feature making, to working with other people’s money and within higher profile marketing and distribution strategies. What is unusual, is for said filmmakers to talk about that pain and frustration candidly with journalists. Before I saw The House of the Devil at a Tribeca pre-festival press screening, its writer/director Ti West contacted me and told me that he wasn’t sure which version of his fourth feature would be screening for the press. There’s what he calls his director’s cut, which he says was finished last December; then, there’s a version with a four minute chunk shorn out of the film’s middle, an edit which West says was mandated very recently by Devil’s producers, the Chicago-based MPI subsidiary Dark Sky Films, in the hopes of enlivening the prospect of a Tribeca sale. When I did see the film I couldn’t see any obvious slash marks, and I was looking. Still, it wasn’t hard to see how a financier could jump to the conclusion that The House of the Devil could be a hard sell.

Though a huge step up in terms of image quality from his 2006 festival hit Trigger Man (the director spent the intervening years between this and that working on a comparatively high-budget Cabin Fever sequel, with which he’s no longer directly associated and which has still not been released; more on that later), Devil employs a similar pacing and narrative approach to West’s earlier work made with the support of producer Larry Fessenden. West seems to be developing a patented style: long stretches of quiet creep, so intensely controlled that only the cultural references distinguish it from a European art film, giving way to unforgiving violence which unsettles while still avoiding the show-it-all sadism of torture porn. If the performance-driven Devil (which stars Jocelin Donahue, Tom Noonan, Mary Woronov and Greta Gerwig) is an indication of where he wants to go and what he’s capable of, this seems like a worthwhile artistic pursuit; unfortunately, as West is well aware after losing some degree of control over two consecutive directorial efforts, worthwhile artistic pursuits don’t have much of a place in the contemporary horror climate.

I called the director after seeing the film and told him that I liked what I saw, even if I wasn’t sure which version of the film had been shown.

“Did she play the piano?” West asked.

“No.”

“Then it’s not my version.”

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