Repeat the following name after me three times: Ti West. Ti West. Ti West. Pray that Hollywood doesn't tuck him into its throbbing succubus and then wring his brilliance out into its rancid, gold spittoon gifted by Dubai. With The House of the Devil, one of the most gorgeous, sexy, and vital horror films in recent memory, the 29-year-old writer/director has bowled me over. I haven't been this excited by an independent film from a new, uncompromising voice in modern cinema since Jody Hill's The Foot Fist Way. If you follow my work at /Film, oh shit, you know what that means: I might proceed to drive my unwieldy love-cart off a cliff that is this oncoming jump…so if you choose not to follow, I'll leave you with an echo. "Take those greedy scumbags at Platinum Dunes hostage, tie them up at the bottom of a Lake and force them to watch THOTD a million times…Happy Halloween." The pool will be good for Mr. Devin. This is the best horror film of 2009.
The Quasi-Sexist and Sexual History that Brought Forth The House of the Devil, and the Current State of Survival Girl Horror in Pop Culture
Much like this review, The House of the Devil is a love-letter to the awesomeness that is the unsure, hot chick. I'm not the first writer to suggest that the horror film—particularly the Survival Girl niche—can serve as the ultimate, if culturally-maligned, platform for young guys to reveal and bask in the myriad strengths, vulnerabilities, and attractiveness of the female; and really what is Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill if not the genre's archetype Survival Girl marching into a kung-pow spaghetti Western fantasia? And his Death Proof but a botched head-on fetish collision with the genre's idea that audiences should adore a female star(s) and then flinch as she faces death (fulfilled in Inglourious Basterds) or worse? Why the need to bring Tarantino up at all in my review? Well, Tarantino brought many of these genre notions to the aughts' zeitgeist and to academia, and quite loudly so. He also treats his female characters with the care and attention, unlike so many Hollywood genre films, that Ti West exhibits here with The House of the Devil.
Some of my thoughts about horror films, past and present, might sound taboo and sexist if not for decades of cinematic precedent, alongside numerous essays on the subject. The horror film is one of the greatest manifestations and mediums allowed the male psyche, for men to unreservedly express the complicated inner need to vault amazing girls up totems of perfection and then, without IRL complicity, drag them to hell thereafter. The ending to these types of films can be a highly personal thing, inspired by past relationships, neurotic complexes, artistic flourish, and more than a little depravity under the guise of fun. Search, worship, get your heart brokenDestroy.
I've always found the best horror (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Wes Craven's ANOES) to contain an essential purity by way of primality. Such films deal in sex and death, and therefore are not mainstream, or indie or arty, or a footstool for the Academy. The terror in such films simmers inherently in the bones of women and girls and, however inexplicably, in front of the cameras and eyes of guys. Thus, many of these genre entries are agreeably disregarded for being cheap and low-brow to the point of exploitation—earning cultural value only in retrospect, like so much pornography from decades past.
But today, horror is arguably in a more stagnant state than ever before, with big companies like Platinum Dunes inexplicably exploiting the past's low budget exploitation with their corporate-jock remakes and capitalistic coldness. The horror genre was and remains a dependable source for easy cash—the Weinsteins are currently betting on it as they always have. But to me as a horror fan and not a market analyst, it seems like the core horror franchises that an entire generation has grown up with should finally be updated and treated with a better eye for titillation. If only Tarantino had directed the Friday t
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