Spending the Night at the House of the Devil

A Review of a Movie that Remembers What it Takes to Make a Horror Movie

There was a time when horror movies were fun. They were full of dark scenes and built suspense and the directors remembered some standards set by the greats of the horror genre in years past. Think about the movie "Halloween." I am talking about the original filmed by John Carpenter and not the Rob Zombie rehash. In your mind, is the movie filled with fountains of blood jetting from hapless, mostly-naked teenagers? In your memory, does the carnage start from the first scene and continue in an unending rampage until the very last scene? If that is the case, you're dead wrong.

Sure, the movie opens with a bloody scene of a young Michael Meyers offing his sister, but after that things settle down. Michael is actually in the end credits as "The Shape." That is what he is for most of the movie. He is a strange humanoid shaped that hides behind bushes, or pops up in the backyard mostly obscured by laundry. He is a shape in a car. Lori Strode spends much of the movie not even seeing him. Then, when the killing does start, Michael actually strangles most of his victims and the guy he uses the knife on does not spill a drop of blood on the floor. All of the movie is building in suspense and tension until Michael finally strikes and only then are you allowed to scream or jump and, even then, it is mostly to relieve the tension.

Hitchcock knew this. You may think that the infamous shower scene in "Psycho" is a bloody mess because you remember the traces of dark substance dripping at the feet of Janet Leigh and twirling down the drain. In fact, for that entire scene there are only two split-second shots where the knife appears to pierce flesh. The rest is all in your mind. Hitchcock knew how to build suspense. He knew that if he placed the thought in your mind that the briefcase the guy carried had a bomb in it and then he built the suspense, the explosion was not the suspenseful part, but the release of that tension.