Last weekend, I watched "The House of the Devil" on Blu-ray with a lot of admiration. The film is an appreciation of genre and cinema. A simple story executed with immense skill by the director, Ti West, he deserves as much credit for what he leaves out as to what he keeps in. Until the last 20 minutes, the movie is a build-up of suspense that plays like a well tuned piano (forgive the cliche). The middle section of the film is essentially a babysitter alone in an empty victorian house. Her wanderings from room to room in silence brought a chill that I had to get cover under a blanket on my couch. The best scene is her ascending the stairs with a knife in hand to the second floor in shadows that is as well done from anything of Hitchcock, Carpenter and Polanski.
There are wonderful details. The period clothes are correctly understated. The protagonist walking across an empty college campus recalls not just low-budget reality, but how less active and populated life was thirty years ago. The freeze frame credits at the end filled so much late-night and weekend afternoon TV watching back then I almost reacted with my remote to switch the channel. Lots of fun.
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