WINTER OF DISCONTENT: The ABCs of Death

Beware the anthology (or portmanteau) film. Two problems dog the format: weak or contrived framing device, and inconsistency across its stories. The only anthology film I’ve seen that avoids these problems – that is, in fact, an out-and-out work of art – is Masaki Kobayashi’s ‘Kwaidan’; that all four of the tales it comprises were realised by one director is a good indication of why it succeeds where others fail. Even the Ealing Studios classic ‘Dead of Night’ takes a misstep with Charles Crichton’s over-egged segment about the rival golfers.

‘The ABCs of Death’ gets at least one thing right: it jettisons the necessity for a framing narrative. Instead it delivers, one after the other, 26 meditations on death, each by a different director. Some are subtitled, some are animated, some are black comedies, some are serious dramas, some are surreal, some predictable and others just downright fucking sick (I’m looking at you, Timo Tjahjanto, Jason Eisener and Yoshihiro Nishimura). To describe it as a mixed bag is being understated. To trot out the “too many cooks spoil the broth” cliché is both lazy and not quite accurate: given the degree of scatological obsession on display here, the cooks in question aren’t just spoiling the broth – a fair number of them are also taking a poo in it.

At least four segments take place in lavatories (the twentieth story is in fact called ‘T is for Toilet’), and only Ti West’s ‘M is for Miscarriage’ actually bothers to generate any real social horror from the setting. Elsewhere, Noboru Iguchi’s ‘F is for Fart’ tries to elevate flatulence and soft-core lesbianism to the level of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. Bear in mind that Iguchi is the classy motherfucker who gave the world enema fetish porn videos before moving into the, ahem, mainstream with the likes of ‘The Machine Girl’, ‘RoboGeisha’ and ‘Zombie Ass’, and you’ll probably have some idea of how far short he falls.

Sex is predictably omnipresent. Banjong Pisanthanakun’s ‘N is for Nuptials’ is basically a shaggy dog story where an indiscreet mynah bird royally buggers up a marriage proposal. ’O is for Orgasm’ sees Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet serves the same pretentious mishmash of homages, arthouse obscurism and style-over-content that marred their tedious feature-length debut ‘Amer’ (itself a portmanteau outing that never adds up to the sum of its parts). ‘V is for Vagitus (The Cry of a Newborn Baby)’ strays from the horror genre in favour of a dystopian sci-fi mini-epic about patriarchal governments and reproduction. The most disturbing of this set is Tjahjanto’s ‘L is for Libido’, which starts out as a weird conflation of ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ and ‘Fight Club’ (had he been given another letter of the alphabet, Tjahjanto could just as easily have presented the piece as ‘W is for Wank’), peaks with the best visual pun on impotence I’ve seen, and would have been utterly brilliant if he’d faded to red at that point. As it, he plunges on into ‘Serbian Film’ territory and the last minute or so leaves a fetid taste in the mouth.

But not as bad a taste as Eisener leaves with ‘Y is for Youngblood’, a misjudged and leeringly unpleasant tale of a zombie deer taking revenge on the paedophile who coaxed a young boy into killing it. Conceptually, had the paedophile been less of a rubber-faced cliché and his actions been suggested rather than Eisener wallowing in them like a pig in a particularly odious patch of excrement, the material could have worked. This could – and should – have been a serious psychological drama (is the deer in the protagonist’s mind? is he being driven towards insanity or immolation by his own guilt?), but as anyone who’s seen Eisener’s ‘Treevenge’ or ‘Hobo with a Shotgun’ will know, all he’s interested in is upping the ante on already well established genre tropes and grossing out his audience. He has no moral compass as a filmmaker, and probably no idea that life actually happens outside of a ribbon of celluloid running through a projector.

It’s a damn shame that so many problems plague ‘The ABCs of Death’, with the exception of ‘F is for Fart’ its first third establishes a fairly high standard. Nacho Vigalondo’s ‘A is for Apocalypse’ is the perfect opener for a portmanteau film: stylistically bold, disorientating and with a killer punchline; Adrian Garcia Bogliano’s ‘B is for Bigfoot’ quite simply owns the urban myth subgenre; Ernesto Diaz Espinoza’s ‘C is for Cycle’ comes on like a distilled version of Christopher Smith’s ‘Triangle’; Marcel Sarmiento’s provocative ‘D is for Dogfight’ is the film’s high point, a wordless dissertation on bloodsports, audience complicity and the death of innocence – hard to watch but never less than aesthetically valid, it shows up a lot of the later segments for the pabulum that they are; Angela Bettis’s ‘E is for Exterminate’ uses mordant humour to document those tiny acts of cruelty (in this case the killing of a spider) that so many of us rationalise; and ‘G is for Gravity’ uses the first-person POV to chilling effect in a dialogue-free description of a suicide.

Interesting that ‘Dogfight’ and ‘Gravity’ eschew dialogue. Ben Wheatley’s ‘U is for Unearthed’ – the film’s other genuine standout – uses the same technique (first person POV with so little dialogue as to be neglible) to capture the final moments of a fleeing vampire as it’s run to ground and staked. It’s a simple enough reversal of a done-to-death scene, but Wheatley gets the absolute maximum out of his couple of minutes. 

There are one or two other offerings that are worthwhile – Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett’s black comedy ‘Q is for Quack’ and Srdan Spasojevic’s bizarre, hallucinatory and brilliantly imagistic ‘R is for Removed’ deserve honourable mentions – but overall the variance in quality control isn’t just obvious, it’s a deal-breaker for long stretches of the two hour plus running time, particularly in the final stretches where headfucks like Jon Schnepp’s ‘W is for WTF!’ and Nishimura’s ‘Z is for Zetsumetsu (Extinction)’ rub shoulders with Eisener’s stinker and Xavier Gens’s ‘XXL’, where all the viscera a bathtub can hold can’t make up for how tedious and predictable his treatment of the material is.

Even at a few minutes apiece, presenting 26 separate stories, in such wilfully divergent styles, as a single coherent movie was always going to prove something of a poisoned chalice. I’ve not seen ‘The ABCs of Death 2’, but I understand the producers attempted to even things out tonally by focusing on black comedy. Hmmm. Maybe it’ll crop up on Winter of Discontent, maybe it won’t.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: V/H/S

If ‘V/H/S’ had been made in 1988, and you’d rented it from a video store (y’know, back in the day when you walked or drove to your nearest video store and rented a movie on a big clunky VHS tape), it would have been the. Best. Horror. Movie. Ever.

But it was made in 2012, I saw it on DVD and it isn’t. In fact, it’s pretty appalling. It’s often shoddy in execution, routinely misogynistic in content, and most of its characters are venal, vulgar and thoroughly unlikeable. But, hey, it’s the Winter of Discontent here on The Agitation of the Mind, so let’s give this motherfucker its day in court.

‘V/H/S’ is a portmanteau film consisting of a framing device and five short films. The framing device is intriguing in concept but lousy in execution. Three douchebags who molest women and film their escapades for sale to a “reality porn channel” (why they aren’t in jail since they point the camera at each others’ faces almost constantly is never explained) are hired by some random third party to break into an old house and retrieve a video tape. We’ve seen them break into an empty property already and their modus operandi is smash things up, spray graffiti and say “dude” and “fuck” a lot. Their behaviour evinces no real improvement on the professionalism front when they undertake the job. They find a dead guy in front of a bank of TV screens in an upstairs room and a fuckton of VHS tapes in the basement. Instead of bagging up the tapes en masse and getting the fuck out of Dodge, they spend an inordinate amount of time alternatively exploring the basement (which seems to be occupied by a possibly spectral figure) and watching some of the tapes. Their explorations take the form of jerky handheld camcorder footage that keeps pausing or cutting out. Imagine watching an episode of ‘NYPD Blue’ shot on the cheapest camcorder known to mankind and played back on a video recorder whose tape heads have been coated in treacle and you’re halfway there. Five minutes and it becomes almost unwatchable.

And it’s no great relief when the first short film kicks in. Here’s the plot: three frat boy douchebags outfit a pair of spectacles belonging to the myopic member of their party with a pin-camera, and set out to find a girl or girls to bring back to their motel room with the intent of selling the resulting orgiastic footage to a … oh, great; repetition sets in already. As well as the first of many inconsistencies. Notwithstanding that there’s a flaw to every found-footage horror movie I’ve ever seen – let’s call it Just Put The Fucking Camera Down And Run You Moron Syndrome – there is no sense whatsoever in their ludicrously elaborate plan … when they could easily have secreted a camcorder somewhere in the motel room and set it to motion-detect recording. And had they done so, ‘Amateur Night’ – such is this segment titled – would have been about two minutes long and saved me a headache. If anything, the camerawork is shakier and more blurred than in the framing story. The protagonists are just as big a trio of tossers. Attitudes towards women are equally appalling. There is, however, a comeuppance once they’ve lured two girls back to the room, and the last few minutes work reasonably well … until a lurch into outright fantasy renders the whole thing utterly stupid, not least because the production had nowhere near the kind of budget required to make the pay-off work.

There follows another five minutes of the Original Douchebags back at the old house, then we’re on to ‘Second Honeymoon’, directed by Ti West, and thank God we’re in the hands of a director who can actually bother to frame a shot let alone deal in establishing characters and developing a slow-burn sense of tension. Married couple Sam (Joe Swanberg) and Stephanie (Sophia Takal) are taking an on-a-budget road trip across America; a second honeymoon it may be, but their interactions make it clear that their marriage is running out of steam. West plays this out against a dusty series of drab locations, mainly tourist spots that are starved for tourists. The big creepy scene is reserved for a motel room that makes the place in ‘Vacancy’ look like the Hilton, and while it’s swiftly revealed as a variation on an old urban legend, West pitches it perfectly. The whole thing pays off in a twist ending that practically begs for the ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ theme music, and never quite justifies the amount of time spent building up to it. Nonetheless, it represents a trade up in quality which carries over, to greater or lesser degrees, through the remaining sections.

Glenn McQuaid’s ‘Tuesday the 17th’ is a nifty little subversion of the camping trip/slasher scenario. Here we have college pals Joey (Drew Moerlein), Spider (Jason Yachanin) and Samantha (Jeannine Yoder) heading into the woods with their new friend Wendy (Norma C Quinones). Wendy acts kind of weird from the start, almost casually mentioning how a group of her mates met their gruesome ends out in the wilds the previous year. Joey et al assume she’s joking … that is until something starts decimating their already finite numbers. The nature of said something is McQuaid’s stroke of genius. Every time the killer shows up, the video footage is distorted by what seems to be a tracking error. The distortions are timed so perfectly that you’ll find yourself rewinding in the hope you can actually catch a glimpse of the fiend – be it human, animal or otherworldly – on a second viewing. Everything about this segment unsettles, from the occasional pans to animal corpses (or at least we assume they’re animal corpses) during Wendy’s monologues, to the strange manner in which Wendy conducts herself, to the ultimate revelation of why Wendy hooked up with them, to the brutally inevitable finale. ‘Tuesday the 17th’ is the film’s high point, and even if the final two stories don’t measure up to it, at least neither of them plumb the depths of the framing story or ‘Amateur Night’.

Douchebag reprise, more yawnsome wankerishness, then Joe Swanberg’s ‘The Sick Thing that Happened to Emily When She was Younger’ comes along and epitomises the best and the worst of ‘V/H/S’. The best in that, like ‘Tuesday the 17th’, it embraces the format rather than being restricted by it. Playing out as a series of skype conversations between Emily (Helen Rodgers) and her med student boyfriend James (Daniel Kaufman), the story moves through sexual power games and body horror before paying off in a ‘Twilight Zone’ style lurch into outright sci-fi. The worst in that it relentlessly objectifies women, and trades logic for cheap scares. The least of its crimes against the suspension of disbelief is how come a skype conversation ended up being recorded on VHS, particularly when (a) James assures Emily that he’s not downloading any of their sessions and (b) is later shown to have bloody good reason not to. ‘TSTtHtEWSwY’ is ultimately a nifty concept that wasn’t thought through to any real degree, and would probably have been abandoned had any real critical scrutiny been given to the difficulties of realising it convincingly.

‘10/31/98’, directed by the collective known as Radio Silence, starts well and effectively sidesteps the VHS-in-the-digital-age problem that dogs most of the stories. As the title suggests, we have a home video shot 15 years ago. Such a simple work-around that it’s almost inexplicable that none of the other contributions opted for it. It’s Halloween and a bunch of twenty-something drinking buds get kitted out in fancy dress and head off to the wrong side of town where a happening party is, well, happening. Only they get the wrong address and discover a human sacrifice in progress. Once they adapt to the fact that what’s happening isn’t, as they initially assume, a particularly elaborate Halloween tableau, they intervene and rescue the young woman who’s about to be offed. But before you can say “oh, thank Gawd for that, finally an antidote to all the misogyny”, it turns out that she’s genuinely possessed and an instrument of Satan and the mean lookin’ dudes who were about to fuck her shit up good were actually doing the Lord’s work and everything goes to hell in a sequence of fairly impressive special effects for such a low budget but you know what fuck the special effects because ‘10/31/98’ is little more than a re-emphasis of the woman-hating that ‘V/H/S’ grooves on. 

‘V/H/S’ has three segments you can make a case for as genuinely worthwhile. The other two are flawed at best. The framing device reeks. Conceptually, there’s a lot going on – or at least a lot that could have been done with the concept. As it is, ‘V/H/S’ is overlong and too easily defined by what doesn’t work rather than what does.

You're Next

Trailered as a vicious, aggressive home invasion thriller, yet talked up by many commentators as a whipsmart horror-comedy, Adam Wingard’s ‘You’re Next’ is an awkward and frustrating piece of work that wouldn’t, in the normal scheme of things, earn an Agitation of the Mind recommendation, but scores big for one reason and one reason only.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Wingard, who directed the framing story in ‘V/H/S’ (look out for a review during the November/December Winter of Discontent season) is part of a loose collective of low-budget filmmakers generically known as the “mumblegore” movement. Four of the principle cast members are fellow directors: Joe Swanberg, Amy Seimetz, Margaret Laney (under the pseudonym Sarah Myers) and Ti West. There’s a scene where Swanberg, playing a prissy shit-stirring little twerp, suggests to West, playing a wannabe indie filmmaker, that he might be better off making commercials. This – and a couple of scenes that edge in wilful absurdity – is the only evidence Wingard offers that his film is in any way, shape or form a comedy. 

Here’s the basic set-up, which the trailer communicates in about five seconds while the film itself takes a good quarter of an hour: retired defence contractor Paul (Rob Moran) and his perennially nervous wife Aubrey (Barbara Crampton), gather their children – smug git Drake (Swanberg), rumpled academic Crispian (A.J. Bowen), moody younger brother Felix (Nicholas Tucci), and helium voiced daddy’s girl Aimee (Seimetz) – for their 35th anniversary. Quite apart from the fact that Moran and Crampton look barely a decade older than their supposed offspring, the unfeasibility factor is ramped up by the fact that Drake, Crispian and Felix (who sound like they should be characters in an animated series about pastel coloured super-cats and their amazing adventures in the kingdom of pussies) all turn up with ridiculously attractive women on their arm: respectively, model-like Kelly (Laney), badass chick Erin (Sharni Vinson) and unsmiling vamp Zee (Wendy Glenn), while Aimee is showing off her artsy and equally unconvincing other half Tariq (West).

(That gratuitous bit of detail I threw in about Paul’s former profession: if you’re expecting a ‘Severance’-style satire, all I’ll say is don’t get your hopes up.)

Anyway, our cast of expendables sit down to the traditional family meal – they pour some nice wine, say grace, and get stuck into a big fucking argument – when three psychos in animal masks crash the par-tay and save them the hassle of killing each other by doing it for them. Tariq is the first casualty, courtesy of an arrow in the head. I can only assume this was Wingard and co.’s revenge on West for showing the rest of them up by actually making decent movies. Yeah, that’s for ‘House of the Devil’, you talented bastard!

More murder, maiming and mayhem ensues, until it becomes apparent – and this is only a spoiler if you haven’t seen the trailer or read even the most careful review – that Erin is a final girl in the way that Oliver Reed was moderately fond of the odd pint. Which brings us back to that “one reason and one reason only” caveat. Take Vinson’s performance out of the equation and ‘You’re Next’ is basically crap. As a horror-comedy it’s stultifyingly devoid of humour, be it outright comedy or genre-bending satire. As a straight-up horror, it’s massively derivative and often sloppily executed. (Horror and comedy are, after all, the two genres where you absolutely have to establish and maintain a tone throughout and time every gag or scare utterly to perfection; if either of them slip, the result is tedium.) Case in point: psychos in animal masks are scary as long as they remain anonymous under their masks, the same way that their motivations are scary as long as they’re unrevealed. So guess what Wingard and scripter Simon Barrett do? They take the masks off and establish motive. Yawn.

The script is bland, the cinematography unremarkable and the performances are generally uninspiring, with two exceptions: Moran, who is just terrible; and Vinson, who is utterly and wonderfully magnificent. “One reason and one reason only”: Sharni Vinson, who deserves to be the next big thing on this showing. She transcends a script which would have rendered Erin, never mind her resilience and capacity for righteously fucking up the collective shit of those who wish her ill, as one- or even non-dimensional as the rest of the characters if the hands of a lesser actress.

Vinson single-handedly raises the film’s game: the second half, driven by her charisma and athleticism, propels Erin into the upper echelons of the all-great final girl league tables. It’s a damned shame she wasn’t served by better writing and directing, but I’m immensely grateful to her for bootstrapping ‘You’re Next’ into the realms of watchability. Wingard owes her a “thank you” note etched in gold.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #10: The Innkeepers

I reviewed Ti West’s ‘House of the Devil’ as part of last year’s Summer of Satan retrospective and it was a real find. West respected his audience’s intelligence, respected his heroine’s plight (Joceline Donahue’s performance was spot-on and her character never corralled into being a mere scream queen), and built tension through atmosphere and character rather than relying on cheap scares or torture porn nastiness. 

Featuring a Ti West movie as part of this year’s 13 for Halloween was a done deal!

‘The Innkeepers’ consolidates much of what made ‘House of the Devil’ a success: an empathetic heroine who is recognisably human with all the confusion and vulnerability anyone would display if confronted by the unexplained or horrific; a slow-burn approach to narrative that suggests and unnerves rather than lambasting with exposition or playing the horror card too early; and a clearly defined location that anchors the movie and defines its atmosphere so effectively that its architectural presence is almost a character in its own right.

In ‘House of the Devil’, it was the kind of gothic-styled house that wouldn’t look out of place in Amityville or Haddonfield. In ‘The Innkeepers’, it’s the Yankee Pedlar Inn, a hotel on the verge of closing down. The owner is in Barbados and not really concerned about business – or the lack during – during its final weekend as a going concern. Staff is down to two junior employees – Claire (a never-better Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) – the rooms on the top floor have been stripped and closed off, and the only remaining guests are actress-cum-medium Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis), Gayle (Alison Barlett), a brittle and recently estranged woman with her young son in tow, and an unnamed old man (George Riddle) who checks in demanding the third floor suite where he spent his honeymoon.

The events that happen to, and around, this small cluster of people have their beginning and their end in the story of Madeleine O’Malley (Brenda Cooney), the betrayed bride whose spirit is said to haunt the establishment. Luke buys into the legend, spending his time building a Yankee Pedlar website and filming and recording various areas of the inn, determined to capture some supernatural activity on tape. Claire, though sceptical, assists him. Yet it’s Claire who becomes attuned to the first hints that the past is coming back to haunt the place.

West does two very canny things with ‘The Innkeepers’. Firstly, he lets the Yankee Pedlar grow on you (and gradually begin to creep you out) at the same rate that it does the protagonists. He lets you discover things about the inn – and about Madeleine – at the same time that Claire and Luke discover them. In a genre where filmmakers often rush to play their hand, almost desperate to telegraph to the audience that the protagonists are in peril, West understands the virtue of patience. Accordingly, there is a pacing and elegance to his work absent from most contemporary cinema. ‘The Innkeepers’, with its haunted hotel imbued with the shadows of the past, has the ingredients of a classic ghost story and that’s what West lets it be.

Secondly – pace – my use of the description “haunted hotel”, West has the infinite wisdom not to try to walk in the footprints of ‘The Shining’. It would have been so easy, and so disastrous, to set up the Yankee Pedlar as a kind of Overlook Jnr. West sidesteps this potential pitfall with all the elegance that he demonstrates elsewhere.

And if all this talk of elegance and classicism suggests that ‘The Innkeepers’ is more redolent of the old BBC ‘Ghost Story for Christmas’ adaptations than American horror cinema’s most exciting young practitioner, then send for the bellhop and have him take your worries away. When it needs to be, ‘The Innkeepers’ is genuinely creepy. And what it comes time for the big nasty scares at the end, West conjures a claustrophobic and downbeat finale.

There is very little wrong with this film – the for-the-sake-of-it final shot is a minor annoyance – and once again West demonstrates an excellent facility with actors (across the board, the performances are note-perfect) and conjures an incredibly handsomely mounted production on a limited budget. With his contributions to anthology films ‘V/H/S’ and ‘The ABCs of Death’ well received, and ‘The Sacrament’ and ‘The Side Effect’ in pre-production, West is a talented guy who’s doing consistently good work – that he’s barely into his thirties bodes well, hopefully, for more great genre movies in years to come.

SUMMER OF SATAN: The House of the Devil

Ti West was a name I’d heard a lot, not in mainstream film criticism, but via bloggers who are passionate about horror cinema and make the effort to seek out new and interesting work. But until I picked up a copy of ‘House of the Devil’ dirt cheap on DVD recently, I knew nothing of his work.

That gets remedied. As of now.

‘The House of the Devil’ is both an homage to 1970s and 1980s low-budget American horror movies, and a reclaiming of an aesthetic all but mothballed in an age of blurrily fast cutting and overuse of CGI. West films his incrementally creepy tale in the style of a late 70s film and using techniques redolent of the area: zooms instead of dollying, lengthy tracking shots, extensive title credits, etc. But, to his credit, he emerges with something more than a mere filmmaking experiment; something more satisfying than, say, Soderbergh’s ‘The Good German’.

Opening with the assertion that, in the 1980s, 70% of Americans believed in the existence of abusive Satanic cults, ‘The House of the Devil’ immediately submerges us into a world of personal cassette players (explanatory note for under-18s*: kind of like the iPod, but bigger and with far less songs), cheesy music, Farah Fawcett hairstyles and boxy Volvo station wagons. (West also mentions that the film is based on “true unexplained events”; a wonderfully paradoxical sentence that presumably covers a multitude of invention and/or falsification.)

We quickly meet our heroine, Samantha (Jocelin Donahue), a college student looking to move out of the room she shares with a boy-crazy fellow student whose name I either didn’t catch or wasn’t important enough to be given a name in the script. (That’s “shares” as in “has to find other accommodation while roommate is entertaining anything with an X and a Y chromosome”, by the way.) She lucks out finding a landlady who cuts her a deal because Sam reminds her of her daughter; she waives the deposit, leaving Sam with only one problem: coming up with $300 for the first month’s rent.

This was the first thing ‘The House of the Devil’ did that I found particularly canny: while rooting itself in the 70s/80s aesthetic, it provides its heroine with an all-too-contemporary financial motivation (a narrow but valid parallel to ‘Drag Me to Hell’ here). Answering an ad for a babysitter, and calling on her pal Megan (the wonderful Greta Gerwig) to give her a lift out to their isolated homestead, Sam finds herself in the employ of Mr and Mrs Ulman, a couple so creepy that the Addams Family would probably cross the road to avoid them.

Another canny victory for West: the casting. Sam’s future landlady is played by Dee Wallace (‘The Howling’), Mrs Ulman by Mary Woronov (‘Death Race 2000’, ‘The Devil’s Rejects’) and her cadaverous husband by Tom Noonan (the man who launched a thousand involuntary bowel movements as Francis Dollarhyde in ‘Manhunter’). Indeed, Noonan gets his best role since Michael Mann’s psychological classic (and, for my money, still the best Thomas Harris adaptation) – he’s avuncular, refined and downright fucking scary in just the right combination. That he gives such a fine, nuanced performance – as does Donahue, easily one of the most winning horror heroines in recent years – is proof positive that West isn’t just an insightful student of the genre with a keen intuition for a tense set piece. He’s also a bloody good actor’s director.

And while I’m singing the guy’s praises, let me offer him fervent thanks for this above all: he assumes from the outset that his audience is intelligent, able to make connections, and won’t get bored if he concentrates on atmosphere and tension instead of delivering wall-to-wall torture porn viscera or crass sexual objectification. Shout it loud – Ti West respects his female protagonist and takes her seriously. He respects his audience and trusts them to respond to atmosphere, suspense and the occasional well-timed revelation.

Sure, he delivers the goods in a sustained, but not unnecessarily protracted, finale which plunges Sam into a waking nightmare and drives her to a desperate but gut-wrenchingly understandable final reel act without the need for laboured exposition or agonised overacting. But it’s the time and attention to detail he invests into building up to said finale that pays dividends and proves you don’t need swathes of CGI and geysers of stage blood to orchestrate a genuinely dark and nasty denouement.

Released at the culmination of a decade in American horror cinema defined by remakes (‘The Hills Have Eyes’, ‘Halloween’, ‘The Omen’, ‘The Amityville Horror’, ‘The Wicker Man’ etc etc), ‘The House of the Devil’ is infinitely more in tune with the spirit of an earlier – and arguably better – age in genre cinema than anything Platinum Dunes or the other bandwagon-jumpers have offered us. Ti West plays his hand perfectly, creating a slow-burn skin-crawler of the old school that lingers in the mind.

*Please don’t tell your parents you read this blog.