The House that Hitchcock (and a Healthy Dose of Stage Blood) Built

It seems to me that the last decade has seen the unfortunate proliferation of an unfortunate subgenre of horror movie.  I don't have a name for this subgenre...but I will describe it and give some examples.

• Movies of this subgenre rely mostly on gross-out gore for their scares.  (E.g., Hostel, where a completely peripheral character's eye slides out of its socket and down her cheek as her face gets blow torched.  Yeah.)  

•  The protagonists of this kind of film are typically uncompelling, vapid if not outright stupid, and sometimes mean.  You want these fools to get killed.  (E.g., the "hero" in the unapologetically and violently sexist Deadgirl, which asks the important question:  Is gang rape still gang rape if the victim is a zombie?  The Descent, despite its favorable Rotten Tomatoes rating, also gets a thumb down from me and inclusion in this category.  If I had friends like those two-faced spelunking girls, I would hope they got eaten by subterranean naked mole rat people.)  

• The characters behave ways in which people do not behave for psychologically obscure reasons.  I attribute this characteristic largely to laziness and basic bad writing.  (Here I especially think of Ink, a boring movie about the dream lives of people.  It depicts only the tritest of dreams - really facile wish-fulfillment dreams (e.g., a kid hitting a homerun in the majors, a middle-aged lady eating cake and losing weight).  Dreams so completely devoid of symbolism or ambiguous meanings, that I began to wonder if the writer had ever actually had a dream.  The Last Winter, so bad even Ron Perlman couldn't save it, also struck me as particularly poorly written - like a less original, less frightening knockoff of John Carpenter's fantastic The Thing.  )  

• These movies that have so earned my disdain have a special affection for portrayals of brutality uncomplicated by anything as interesting as a plot or suspense; as though depicting cruelty alone constitutes horror.  (Among the offenders: Wolf Creek, High Tension and Hostel gets a second mention because I disliked it so much.)  

Celebratory cruelty in horror movies, while I'm on the subject, enjoyed a special renaissance after the release of Saw; which is brutal, yes, but also well-written, innovative, psychologically taut and truly scary, not to mention possessing that rare gem of horror filmdom: a great surprise ending.  An army of mediocre filmmakers looked at Saw and chose to mimic only its fairly shocking violence, but none of its plot sophistication.  I have come to think of gory brutality in horror films like I think of CG effects in fantasy or action films: they are delightful when well-executed but patently unnecessary.  Cruelty punctuated with buckets of fake blood, like slick computer animation, can satisfyingly add to a film that already has other things going for it - clever writing, good characters, psychological depth - but as a gimmick, they cannot save a film that has none of these aforementioned qualities. Still persists the proliferation of horror movies featuring brutal cruelty, unmitigated by clever dialogue or tightly-wound suspense (or even humor, often used to great effect in some excellent horror films, e.g., any Sam Raimi horror movie, Shaun of the Dead, Killer Klowns from Outer Space) .

So, with this crap parade of recent horror movies, I had been losing my faith in the genre as contemporarily imagined.  In the last month, however, I have seen a handful of really superlative new horror movies.  I plan a 'best of' list for some future post, but for the purposes of this entry I examine the one that most tripped my trigger: The House of the Devil.

As the title suggests, this film is a basic girl-trapped-in-scary-house-with-unknown-evil plot. What elevates this movie to art (really -  I don't throw Hitchcock comparisons around lightly), is its reliance on building suspense through editing, pacing, through what is implied but not shown, and through what is feared but not known.

 Ti West wrote, directed and (excellently vital to the movie's greatness) edited The House of the Devil.  Released in 2009, it is set in a fully-imagined late '70s/early '80s America - feathered hair, taper leg jeans, wall-hanging curly-corded rotary phones, the whole enchilada.  This movie is better than retro, however.  It really recreates the period.  West even shot it using 16 mm film.  I started watching The House of the Devil without knowing the film date and  West rendered the period so authentically, only the naturalistic dialogue tipped me off that I was watching a more recent film.  And since I have mentioned the dialogue...

The House of the Devil is extremely well-written.  The dialogue between the protagonist, Samantha, and her best friend, Megan, particularly impressed me (well played by Jocelin Donahue and Greta Gerwig, respectively).  It felt like I was watching two actual women who behave as actual friends and relate to each other as actual people would.  This makes one care about them.  I do not think I can overstate the importance of sympathizing with one's horror film protagonist.  If she's too stupid or too unbelievable, you just wish she'd get killed already.  That kind of negativity for one's protagonist only works if the film has a self-conscious B-movie cheese factor and thus works as comedy.  In a sincere horror movie, liking the protagonist is vital.  And The House of the Devil is sincere.  It completely lacks the self-referentially jaded and satirical quality of films like Scream or New Nightmare (good horror flicks both, but their scariness relies on breaking rules of the horror genre, not on playing by those rules excellently).

I mentioned West's superior editing.  Many shots have odd angles, slow and tense pans, or unusual points of view.  West has assembled these interesting individual shots in a way that gives the film pacing suggestive of Jaws.  Early(ish) on, we get one violent, schocking and confusing scare.  Then the film reverts to its established pensive yet paranoid tone, which it maintains while slowly increasing the tension right up until the denouement and the breathless, rug-out-from-under-you ending.  

Which brings me to another comparison: the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film that grasped how underexposure heightens fear and tension.  When you see only silhouettes and quick glimpses of Freddy's horribly scarred face and terrifying razor claw, when you see a girl getting ripped to shreds and tossed around a room but you can't see the perpetrator, the scare is much more thrilling than one you can look square in the eye.  It reaches you almost primordially, like a Lovecraftian "unspeakable" Cthulhu scare.  Ridley Scott also nailed this means of frightening his audience in Alien.  As the Elm Street franchise proved, the more familiar the monster's countenance, the campier his presence.  (NB:  I exclude here New Nightmare, as that film represents Wes Craven's first adventure into self-referential horror - it is scary because it doesn't take the rest of the franchise seriously, just like Scream is scary because it doesn't take the horror genre, in general, seriously).   

One final note about The House of the Devil: it features two amazing performances by the equally wonderful Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov, as the owners of said devil house.  These two are so understated, so polite when Samantha first meets them, and yet so menacing.  You distrust them on a gut level, though for the first portion of the film they also seem strangely kind and reasonable.  Noonan's first scene alone is worth watching the whole movie for. 

In sum, this film is a treat for the horror fan who finds psychological scares harder to shake than visceral ones and Ti West is a thinking viewer's filmmaker.  I can't wait to see his next big thing, and I sure hope it's a horror movie.