The House Of The Devil: Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Marked For Death

So many directors are remaking classic horror movies from the ’70s and ’80s, and yet it’s occurred to almost none of them to do what Ti West has done in The House of the Devil and come up with an original horror story but set it in the ’80s. In fact, judging from the scene in which the main character bops around to The Fixx’s “One Thing Leads to Another” (on cassette!), I’m going to precisely peg the film’s setting as early in the winter of 1983. With that one creative masterstroke, West removes his story from the world of cellphones, text messages, and irony and places it in the golden age of urban legends, of seductively eerie stories about Satanic cults operating in pleasant New England neighbourhoods, of serial killers with hooks for hands, razor blades in Halloween apples, and babysitters who find out the phone calls are coming from inside the house!

And in fact, The House of the Devil begins with its heroine, a young woman named Samantha (played by a pretty newcomer named Jocelin Donahue, who recalls such “perfect girlfriend” actresses from the early ’80s as Karen Allen and Brooke Adams) answering an ad for a babysitter. But when she arrives at her clients’ huge house somewhere out in the Connecticut boondocks, the husband (Tom Noonan) tells her there’s actually no baby — she’ll be taking care of his elderly mother-in-law while he and his wife (Mary Woronov) go out for the night.

Something doesn’t quite add up with his story — he insists that the mother is so private and self-sufficient that Donahue probably won’t even need to check in on her, but he’s also desperate enough to pay her $400, which is a ridiculous babysitting fee today, and even more so in 1983. And as a cash-strapped college student, Donahue can’t turn down that kind of money, so she swallows her misgivings and resolves to spend a few hours in Noonan’s big old creaky-spooky house. And did I mention it’s the night of a lunar eclipse?

It’s obvious from very early on that Noonan and Woronov are setting Donahue up as some kind of Satanic sacrificial lamb, but West holds back on providing just enough details to make every moment she spends in that house, prowling around half-lit corridors and slowly opening all sorts of squeaky-hinged doors, feel exquisitely suspenseful. I did some house-sitting when I was a teen, and there is definitely unusually unnerving about being alone at night in someone else’s home — even if you have their permission to be there. Factor in, as The House of the Devil does, the presence of some mysterious, unseen old woman who keeps making the floorboards creak and the plumbing moan, and you’ve got a total creepfest on your hands.

Aside from a couple of unconvincingly choreographed action beats during the climax, The House of the Devil also manages to deliver a satisfying payoff to all that ominous buildup... and the way West packs that payoff into the final three words of dialogue suggests a writer/director with a real flair for old-fashioned horror storytelling. I bet that if The House of the Devil actually had been made in the ’80s, people would still fondly remember it as “one of those movies that scared the shit out of me when I was a kid.” Luckily, it was made this year, so we probably won’t have to endure the shitty remake until at least 2029.