'The House of the Devil' goes for scary, not gory

Call it "slow horror," "art horror," "indie horror," even "hipster horror" if you must, but in "The House of the Devil," filmmaker Ti West is definitely doing something that stands apart from the usual guts and gore of most contemporary horror movies. Preferring the slow burn to fast thrills, West somehow transforms the mundane into the macabre, and when his film finally takes a step into the supernatural, it comes as even more of a shock because of the muted atmosphere that precedes it.

Already available on video-on-demand, "Devil" opens in Los Angeles, New York and Austin, Texas, theaters on Friday. The film has enjoyed a successful run at international festivals, and the genre website twitchfilm.net recently called it "quite simply, the American horror film of the year."

The movie's setup utilizes some familiar elements: A female college student (Jocelin Donahue), fed up with her slovenly, oversexed dorm roommate, sets out to find an apartment of her own. Scrambling for cash to make a deposit, she takes a last-minute baby-sitting job for a couple who live out in the country that pays extra well but seems stranger and stranger the more she finds out about it. As the night proceeds, the punishing boredom of a tedious job eventually builds into an explosive satanic freak-out finale.

"We all know something's going to happen," said West of the film's measured pacing. "It's called 'House of the Devil.' The audience knows where it's going."

Tucked into a booth at a Los Angeles restaurant infamous for being the location of Sharon Tate's last dinner before the Manson murders, West, in skinny black jeans and a faded heavy-metal T-shirt, with a scruff of beard and scraggly hair, looks like someone sent down from Central Casting for the role of indie film director. The 29-year-old West writes, directs, edits and often operates the camera on his films, and "Devil" is his fourth feature after "The Roost" (2005), "Trigger Man" (2006) and the unreleased, stuck in post-production limbo "Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever."

"The House of the Devil," shot in Connecticut in 18 days for just under $1 million, has a deadpan 1980s setting, including a spot-on retro title sequence and theme song, though the period is used more for its odd, eerie blankness rather than any rib-nudging irony.