JocelinDonahue

I can be impatient about things sometimes, and that was certainly the case with The House of the Devil. From the moment I saw those magnificent posters it was love. As soon as the Video on Demand version was available I downloaded it and happily handed over my ten bucks. Chances are I'll be seeing it again in the theater this Friday, October 30 when it opens.

In preparation for the festivities Magnolia Pictures is conducting a live Twitter chat with The House of the Devil director Ti West. You can join the chat this Thursday, October 29 from 11-12 PM PST. Type #DEVILHOUSE in the search bar and hit enter to follow the conversation. Insert the #DEVILHOUSE tag in your question for Ti to make sure it stays on thread. Perhaps I'll ask if it's normal to want spankings from Tom Noonan dressed as Francis Dollarhyde. Sorry.

Twitter has been a very successful marketing tool for many flicks, including the recent indie haunt Paranormal Activity. It's nice to see Ti's indie spirit supported by Magnolia after the Cabin Fever 2 debacle. IFC.com is currently premiering West's new web series Dead & Lonely, which tells the tale of two lonely singles looking for love. However, one of them is a vampire. You can check out my interview with West about the series here.

Follow Horror Squad on Twitter to find out if we asking anything embarrassing this Thursday. Or just because you like us.

Screamfest, held annually in Los Angeles, came to a close this past Sunday, and as with all film festivals that means crowning the winners in various categories. There was no huge sweep this year, though the Spanish pre-apocalypse drama Before the Fall (Tres Dias) took home the most awards with a total of three; Best Editing (Nacho Ruiz Capillas), Best Actor (Víctor Clavijo), and Best Director (F. Javier Gutiérrez). I haven't seen the film, which was produced by Antonio Banderas and tells the story of a world with only 72 hours between itself and a planet-killing meteorite, but I've heard good things, which are now all the more confirmed by these accolades (though it's worth noting Before the Fall is not explicitly a horror movie).

Jocelin Donahue took home Best Actress, an award she certainly deserves considering she carried the excellent Satanic Panic film House of the Devil wonderfully. However, I'm not so on-board with the festival's decision to give The Human Centipede (First Sequence) Best Picture. I've seen the film about a mad doctor that surgically grafts three people together in a butt-to-mouth chain and I have to say it's nothing special. There's no question that it has a great, highly twisted concept, but it also has a weak setup, a weaker pay-off, and isn't all that challenging considering what the "plot" is. Dieter Laser is a riot as the insane man wanting to create a new kind of Siamese Twin, but beyond his performance there's little of interest to be found.

Time for some rumor control. Contrary to what one would assume watching The House of the Devil, writer-director Ti West does not have the power to bend time and space to his will. Ti West is not a time lord, he is a mere mortal like the rest of us, he just happens to have the ability to make a film that lives and breathes as if it fell out of a wormhole from 1983. Plenty of horror directors attempt the throwback film, but few pull it off and even fewer pull it off as convincingly as West has with The House of the Devil.

Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) is an impossibly cute college gal dying to escape her slovenly roommate. In order to afford the too-good-to-be-true rent on an apartment she's just discovered, Samantha has to, against her better judgment, answer a Babysitter Wanted flier pinned to the ad board on campus. The man on the phone (Tom Noonan) is a little creepy and a little too eager to find a babysitter on the night of a rare full lunar eclipse, but that's just something Samantha is going to have to put up with if she wants to move out. So the ill-fated coed asks her best friend to drive her out to the isolated house in the woods, where things eventually prove to be even worse than Samantha imagined.

What follows is a remarkably restrained, expertly-maintained atmosphere of tension and dread that is in no rush to evolve from its controlled burn to full-on Satanic panic. And if there's anything that House of the Devil has going against itself, it's the fact that very little happens for long stretches of the film. Granted, this is liable to only be a problem for those who like their horror movies fast, quick and drenched in red, but for those among us who can appreciate a 95-minute film that remains wholly fascinating without exploiting any of the aforementioned qualities, House of the Devil is a near-perfect film.