For about the last month now I have received several emails related to the upcoming Magnet release of The House of the Devil and hadn’t paid it any attention. However, today I had a spare moment and decided to give the trailer a peek to see if it was something I should even bother adding to the database. For the most part the trailer didn’t do all that much for me outside of the above quote from “Vanity Fair” writer Jason Zinoman. I mean, “early Polanski”? Really?
So I hunted down the article it came from and lo-and-behold I found it. It turns out Zinoman offered up this opinion out of the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year writing:
The House of the Devil, which recently opened at the Tribeca Film Festival during a good year for indie horror fans, is the rare scary film that does not pander to its audience. Set in a desolate college town in the 1980s, the movie, which includes lots of feathered hair and tinny synthesizer music, tells the familiar story of a babysitter all alone, an unsettling phone ringing and an empty knife rack. But those looking for an homage to the slasher era will be disappointed. Director Ti West cares less about plot and gore than establishing a rigorously naturalistic mood, which he details with the precision and care of the early films of Roman Polanski. Most provocative of all is the movie’s pace, stunningly slow, boasting long, creepy scenes of empty windswept streets. Mr. West—a thinking man’s horror director whose film borrows its title from Georges Melies’s 1896 silent short, widely considered the first horror movie—understands that to truly terrify, you must first do the heavy lifting of suspending an audience’s disbelief. In a recent online interview, West complained that his producers, surely fixated on shrinking attention spans, cut the movie without consulting him, which may be the reason why despite all its stylistic sophistication, House of the Devil still seems a little slighter than it should be, as if it were missing some necessary anxiety-producing subtext. Patience sadly is no virtue in the current horror genre.
It’s not an overall rave, but it’s enough for me to think this one may be worthy of a once over so I just sent out a request for a screener as well as added a bunch of goodies for all of you to check out.
First off, I added 11 images to the gallery which you can check out here and Apple recently debuted the trailer which you can watch directly below or right here in high definition.
The House of the Devil will premiere on Amazon, XBOX Live and Video on Demand October 1st and in theaters October 30th.
