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.
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.
The rest of the line-up of the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival has been released — that is, the Encounters, Spotlight, Showcase, Restored/Rediscovered and Midnight sections. As expected, Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience is there, as are quite a few Sundance holdovers, and the Oscar Winner That No One Has Seen, Departures. Earlier this week, I summed up the competitions; my picks for the most-promising-looking of the rest, with descriptions provided by the festival, follow after the jump.
From the “Yes, I do occasionally leave my house” file: tomorrow I’m looking forward to seeing Trigger Man, which is screening at the Pioneer Theater, which is screening for one week as part of their Fourth Annual Month of Horror, Terror, and General Mayhem. Someone, at some point described Trigger Man to me as “Mumblehorror”; it’s also been spun as “a low-budget twist on a Michelangelo Antonioni film” and “Old Joy with guns.” If just one of those descriptors proves accurate, I’ll be happy. Check out the crappy-quality (but still sufficiently creepy) trailer, embedded above.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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