The House of the Devil

Quentin Tarantino should study this movie. Impeccably groomed both as an homage to cult-horror flicks from the 1980s--think The Entity, not A Nightmare on Elm Street--and as an original feature, The House of the Devil manages gently to mock its models while also taking them seriously, not merely imitating them in every detail--though it does so masterfully--but also developing and improving their style and method. Instead of forcing us to intellectualize the genre, as Tarantino does--though this too is spirited and worthwhile--The House of the Devil tackles a more difficult, if less academic, task: to reconstitute those models in a finer, more legitimate form. To turn them into art.

The House of the Devil is a superlatively careful movie. It abstains from kinetic camerawork. Its script is tight and practical but not weakened by overtures to spiritual or moral truths or any deeper significance. Its cast is minimal. All of which is, naturally, evidence of meticulous moviemaking, whose imperative to revive both the period's feeling and its appearance reveals itself most consistently (and most unconsciously) in the minute, scientific, categorical attention to even the smallest historical signature: the creaking quality of a dorm's wooden bed frame; the Reaganesque lettering on a discarded pizza box; the raised illuminated digits on a touch tone phone; the oversized proto-Walkman; a chaos of fluffed hair on the collar of a stuffed green jacket. For those who were fortunate to live these sensations, every image, every sound steals back from oblivion the dissociated personality of that epoch. Not in the caricaturing untruth of approximation--the "compilation" strategy that manipulates our generalized, collective memory--but in the quiet, unthinking, unremembered life of the unmemorable: all those people you passed as a child whose hair retained, like a palimpsest, a trace of the 1970s but struggled in vain to forge new fashions and a new cosmetic literacy; all the eccentric clicking of strange gums that differ, though you know not how, from today's, or yesterday's, or tomorrow's gums; the touch of ungenerous sneakers on carpeted stairs; the look and taste and sound of a world before cell phones, inexpensive PCs, or the Internet. A time when travelers measured time by the distance to and from home, work, or school; when technology boasted audiocassettes and near-mythical mini-TVs; when college kids leased houses for three hundred dollars a month. The House of the Devil diligently restores these cultural frescoes, but it does so with such a natural, unlabored brush that you don't even notice; you only feel the ineffable familiarity of bright colors and know that you can trust this hand. It's the work of a professional. Even in its gripping, set construction, control of space, filter and channels, The House of the Devil--voice, object, echo--simply is 1980s America. Not the one we anthologize. The one we lived.

Now, what elevates the movie above homage and transforms it into something genuinely and authentically good, is its astonishing talent for reproducing all the banal contrivances of those old Satan-in-the-neighborhood, low-budget attempts at horror but entirely without parody, contrivance, or banality. William Faulkner claimed that to tell a dull story without boring the reader is the mark of a gifted writer. (He also publicly asserted that art is more important than human beings.) This wonderful film proves him right on the first count. I'm fumbling at how best to express myself and my sense of how vital this particular virtue lifts the movie to new levels of taste and ambition, but trust me: this kind of tightrope-walking--making the ordinary deeply persuasive without making it anything more than ordinary--is nearly impossible to pull off, and when something or someone does pull it off, you want to see the result. It's unforgettable. It's not unlike the French lunatic defying his way between two enormous American buildings: he's just another guy walking, but fuck, man.

That said, let's not forget that we're dealing with a restructuring of a genre that deals in Satanic cults and conservative, suburban families fearing the whimsical abduction and sacrifice of their loved ones at the hands of bloodthirsty, demon-summoning strangers. It's not a terribly smart or subtle worldview. So if you come to this movie, even in its mastery and brilliance, expecting a deep story or complex characters, turn it off and watch Andrei Rublev instead. If you want to see something tedious and vapid miracled into states approaching perfection, give it a chance. But don't expect any Slothropian "lingerings"; what will abide is not moral difficulty or social angst, but form--pure, empty, exhilarating--spilled through its lonely heaven. A

Slothrop: But is it scary? Cuz if it is, I don't like it.

Koko: No scarier than houses and devils usually are.