MovieChat Forums > The House of the Devil (2009) Discussion > The crowd is fickle

The crowd is fickle

posted 9 years ago by samgiannn
6 replies | jump to latest

I seem to have noticed that people love to hate on movies with fast jump cuts, cheap jump scares, and bad CGI in recent horror movies (a la Ouija/Lazarus Effect), yet when a movie like this or It Follows comes out with none of that stuff, people love to hate how it's "boring" and "trying and failing to be retro". What do you people want? "We want stuff to happen in movies!!!" Stuff did happen in this movie. Quite a bit, but it was mostly in the final act. The middle act set up a lot of mystery as to who that stranger was that killed Meghan or why that old woman was always up in the attic. I also felt like it was a way to throw you off guard for the really bloody and insane final act. "You're just on the bandwagon!" Well, a lot of people like this movie, and I just so happen to be one of those people. I understand if slow movies just don't appeal to you. That's completely fine; just say that you didn't like it because it was slow or boring or whatever you thought it was.

[–] sasha_the_brit 9 years ago

My problem was that it was utterly predictable, exhausted pretty much every possible '80s religious cult horror trope, and on top of that slow-paced and boring.

[–] KitchenKnives 9 years ago

Then you watched it already knowing the cult angle, so it was spoiled for you. That's not a flaw on the part of the movie, most of what was suggested implied either a deformed person, creature or something supernatural hiding upstairs.

[–] gargarie 9 years ago

it's called "house of the devil"...

[–] gargarie 9 years ago

Well, there's a delicate balance between those extremes... We call it "pacing". I can't say I wondered much why the stranger killed Megan... Obviously he was an Evil Satanist. It just seemed unnecessary (and in fact if Megan survived, the film could have used phone calls between Sam and Megan to build up pressure and fear). Tension only works when the film cultivates curiosity and dread about coming events... But this film shows its hand very early and all I could think was "Just do the sacrifice already." And then the sacrifice itself was really goofy. So was the followup.

Skeleton Key has a very similar plot structure, and, while it's not one of my favorite films either, it does a much better job of showing how to pace a film like this, letting tension build up by slowly revealing elements of horror... No one thinks this film is slow and boring because they want flash cuts and jump scares and CGI gore... What it needs is mystery and character development.

[–] svalinanikola 9 years ago

I thought It Follows was much better than this. It did a good job with suspense.

[–] vilafire 7 years ago

The people who like It Follows and hate jump scare crap like Paranormal Inactivity are not the same people who dislike "boring" movies like this one.