SUMMER OF SATAN: The House of the Devil

Ti West was a name I’d heard a lot, not in mainstream film criticism, but via bloggers who are passionate about horror cinema and make the effort to seek out new and interesting work. But until I picked up a copy of ‘House of the Devil’ dirt cheap on DVD recently, I knew nothing of his work.

That gets remedied. As of now.

‘The House of the Devil’ is both an homage to 1970s and 1980s low-budget American horror movies, and a reclaiming of an aesthetic all but mothballed in an age of blurrily fast cutting and overuse of CGI. West films his incrementally creepy tale in the style of a late 70s film and using techniques redolent of the area: zooms instead of dollying, lengthy tracking shots, extensive title credits, etc. But, to his credit, he emerges with something more than a mere filmmaking experiment; something more satisfying than, say, Soderbergh’s ‘The Good German’.

Opening with the assertion that, in the 1980s, 70% of Americans believed in the existence of abusive Satanic cults, ‘The House of the Devil’ immediately submerges us into a world of personal cassette players (explanatory note for under-18s*: kind of like the iPod, but bigger and with far less songs), cheesy music, Farah Fawcett hairstyles and boxy Volvo station wagons. (West also mentions that the film is based on “true unexplained events”; a wonderfully paradoxical sentence that presumably covers a multitude of invention and/or falsification.)

We quickly meet our heroine, Samantha (Jocelin Donahue), a college student looking to move out of the room she shares with a boy-crazy fellow student whose name I either didn’t catch or wasn’t important enough to be given a name in the script. (That’s “shares” as in “has to find other accommodation while roommate is entertaining anything with an X and a Y chromosome”, by the way.) She lucks out finding a landlady who cuts her a deal because Sam reminds her of her daughter; she waives the deposit, leaving Sam with only one problem: coming up with $300 for the first month’s rent.

This was the first thing ‘The House of the Devil’ did that I found particularly canny: while rooting itself in the 70s/80s aesthetic, it provides its heroine with an all-too-contemporary financial motivation (a narrow but valid parallel to ‘Drag Me to Hell’ here). Answering an ad for a babysitter, and calling on her pal Megan (the wonderful Greta Gerwig) to give her a lift out to their isolated homestead, Sam finds herself in the employ of Mr and Mrs Ulman, a couple so creepy that the Addams Family would probably cross the road to avoid them.

Another canny victory for West: the casting. Sam’s future landlady is played by Dee Wallace (‘The Howling’), Mrs Ulman by Mary Woronov (‘Death Race 2000’, ‘The Devil’s Rejects’) and her cadaverous husband by Tom Noonan (the man who launched a thousand involuntary bowel movements as Francis Dollarhyde in ‘Manhunter’). Indeed, Noonan gets his best role since Michael Mann’s psychological classic (and, for my money, still the best Thomas Harris adaptation) – he’s avuncular, refined and downright fucking scary in just the right combination. That he gives such a fine, nuanced performance – as does Donahue, easily one of the most winning horror heroines in recent years – is proof positive that West isn’t just an insightful student of the genre with a keen intuition for a tense set piece. He’s also a bloody good actor’s director.

And while I’m singing the guy’s praises, let me offer him fervent thanks for this above all: he assumes from the outset that his audience is intelligent, able to make connections, and won’t get bored if he concentrates on atmosphere and tension instead of delivering wall-to-wall torture porn viscera or crass sexual objectification. Shout it loud – Ti West respects his female protagonist and takes her seriously. He respects his audience and trusts them to respond to atmosphere, suspense and the occasional well-timed revelation.

Sure, he delivers the goods in a sustained, but not unnecessarily protracted, finale which plunges Sam into a waking nightmare and drives her to a desperate but gut-wrenchingly understandable final reel act without the need for laboured exposition or agonised overacting. But it’s the time and attention to detail he invests into building up to said finale that pays dividends and proves you don’t need swathes of CGI and geysers of stage blood to orchestrate a genuinely dark and nasty denouement.

Released at the culmination of a decade in American horror cinema defined by remakes (‘The Hills Have Eyes’, ‘Halloween’, ‘The Omen’, ‘The Amityville Horror’, ‘The Wicker Man’ etc etc), ‘The House of the Devil’ is infinitely more in tune with the spirit of an earlier – and arguably better – age in genre cinema than anything Platinum Dunes or the other bandwagon-jumpers have offered us. Ti West plays his hand perfectly, creating a slow-burn skin-crawler of the old school that lingers in the mind.

*Please don’t tell your parents you read this blog.

Seizure (guest review by Aaron)

Thanks once again to my buddy Aaron for contributing a guest review.

Edmund (Jonathan Frid) is an accomplished horror author who's referred to as "the modern-day Edgar Allan Poe". He has recurring nightmares about being terrorized by three of his own characters, but the nightmares eventually become a reality for Edmund and his houseguests one weekend when they actually show up at his home and force everyone to partake in a series of sadistic games. There's Spider, the Dwarf (Herve Villechaize), Jackal, the Executioner (played by the naked black cop with the cowboy hat from CRUISING), and their leader, the Queen (Martine Beswick). Jackal is a mute, whereas Spider constantly runs his mouth and talks a big game, but the Queen calls the shots.


If anyone knows how to make a grand entrance, it's Herve Villechaize's character in this film. Edmund and his houseguests are understandably startled by a brick that crashes through a window, which, unbeknownst to them at the time, signifies the beginning of the end. Following the breaking of the window, Spider calmly crawls through it and plants himself in the center of the living room with his hair pulled back into a tight ponytail to reveal his beady eyes. In his thick French accent, Herve recites the following lines:

"Now, we will play a lillah game. The game is fun for da young, but penful for da old. It will match each of you against the uzzer in a razor un'da rouse [ed. 'race around the house']. Supair-vised by my poor mute friend Jackal, five time you will make da circle. Until the [inaudible] of you cross the finishing line. Last. He... or she... will be executed."


Not much is known about Spider, other than the fact that he obviously slays animals much larger than he, such as bears or tigers. This is evidenced by his trophy necklace made of animal teeth. He's killed so many animals that he ran out of room around his neck and made a belt from the leftover fangs he's collected. And, the reason why I'm putting a lot of focus on Spider instead of talking about the film's FAUST influences and whatnot is because he's one of the highlights of this surprisingly "OK" film. For me, there's nothing scarier in this world than sharks and a hairy Herve Villechaize running at you with a knife in hand, and why more horror movies didn't capitalize on this while the troubled French actor was still alive, I have no idea. I'd rather be visited in the middle of the night by a clown covered in spiders than Herve Villechaize... or a shark.

It should be noted that Spider, the Dwarf makes small appearances (get it?) earlier in the film before making his presence known to Edmund and the rest of the houseguests. One of the older female houseguests reaches out to her dead husband on a nightly basis by basically having conversations with herself, and he supposedly replies back from beyond the grave, which is most likely a figment of this crazy bitch's imagination. Anyway, while doing so on the night that all hell eventually breaks loose, she's greeted by Villechaize's character who proceeds to moisturize her face with some sort of anti-aging cream. I shit you not.

Allow me to go back a little and talk about some of the supporting characters (Edmund's houseguests). I'm not exactly clear as to why this odd assortment of characters were staying the weekend at Edmund's in the first place, and it's either my fault for not paying enough attention to the film, or the film's fault for not really elaborating on what was going on. Let's just say it was the film's fault. Anyway, one of the characters is played by Mary Woronov, who starred in pretty much every cult movie ever made. Don't get me wrong, I love me some Mary Woronov, but, for what it's worth, this is the only film I've seen her in where she actually looks attractive. However, this could be due to the poor quality of the film masking her man-like facial features. Her character is married to an obnoxious rich dude named Charles (he owns 2% of Texaco), with whom she has an open relationship with (they openly cheat on each other). The other characters aren't really worth talking about.


Early in the film, when all of the characters are hanging out around the lake near Edmund's estate and Charles is trying to hit on some random teenage girl who just happens to be there, a message is broadcast over the radio in regards to three escaped mental patients, led by a former female professor at Harvard who was responsible for fatally stabbing one of her students. Yes, the old "escaped mental patients" convention. It's a very cliche horror/thriller convention, but it works here for reasons that I don't need to get into.

I love that the Queen is a very dominant character in SEIZURE!, which adds an element of female empowerment to the film, but it doesn't serve any particular purpose in the overall theme; this isn't a bad thing, but merely an observation. If these evil characters are in fact a figment of their creator's imagination, there's nothing that would suggest he has any strong negative or positive emotional connections to women, which eliminates any symbolism as far as the Queen is concerned.


SEIZURE!, as a whole, is a very bizarre film in both theme and atmosphere. As I mentioned earlier, it's surprisingly not as bad as I expected it to be. The Mill Creek-ish quality of the DVD left much to be desired, and I think a good print of the film would do it justice, whereas something like, say, DRILLER KILLER should be viewed in the lowest type of quality possible in order to preserve that sleazy Grindhouse feeling. Perhaps even more bizarre than the film itself is that there seems to be a lot of downtime in between the antagonists mentally and physically torturing Edmund and his family and friends. For example, Edmund and another older gentleman have enough time to discuss the parallels between the Queen and the Hindu goddess Kali, and at one point Edmund even has time to bump uglies with his wife who may or may not be a ghost, or something.

Did I mention that this is Oliver Stone's directorial debut? Yeah, there's that, too. Overall, an odd and mildly interesting fever dream of a film that some will find nonsensical and boring as shit and others will appreciate for its psychological elements and general weirdness. I definitely fall into the latter category. It's no U-TURN, but - in all fairness - what is?