Synopsis
A young college student who’s struggling financially takes a strange babysitting job which coincides with a full lunar eclipse. She slowly realizes her clients harbor a terrifying secret, putting her life in mortal danger.
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Cast
- Jocelin DonahueSamantha
- Tom NoonanMr. Ulman
- Mary WoronovMrs. Ulman
- Greta GerwigMegan
- AJ BowenVictor Ulman
- Dee WallaceLandlady
- Heather RobbHeather
- Darryl NauRandom Guy
- Brenda CooneyNurse
- Ti WestFavorite Teacher
Recommendations
- 83
Entertainment Weekly
There's wit but never a wink in this smartly shot production, which pays homage to the 1980s without fetishizing the era. - 83
The A.V. Club
If nothing else, Ti West’s retro “Satan rules!” thriller The House Of The Devil gets the look and tone of early-’80s horror schlock exactly right. - 80
Time Out
West is far more adept at and interested in sustaining an unrelentingly ominous mood than in executing the genre-required spook shocks. - 80
Los Angeles Times
The buildup is undeniably effective; for most of the movie, it provides the same kind of thrills as "Paranormal Activity," if somewhat less brilliantly. - 80
Salon
A clever picture, and something of a novelty -- it's not going to change the face or direction of horror filmmaking in any drastic way. But it's fun to watch something that's so obviously made with love. - 80
The New York Times
Mr. West shows a real gift for the genre, particularly in his ability to generate dread with pinpricks rather than bludgeoning shocks, something even veterans twice his age have difficulty achieving. After years of vivisectionist splatter, here is a horror movie with real shivers. - 70
Variety
Call it the best '80s babysitter-in-peril movie never made. The House of the Devil delivers about as much as one could reasonably hope from the not-quite-alone-in-the-house category, with the bonus of authentically re-creating the low-budget look and feel of that era's classic horror entries. - 70
Village Voice
Pumping the audience with inhale-exhale zooms and out-of-the-way close-ups, director Ti West's ratcheting of suspense in this alone-in-an-empty-house tale is proficient, if not psychologically piercing, in the best "Let's Scare Jessica to Death" fashion.
