The Owl Service (Peter Plummer, 1969/70)

Perfect viewing for chill British autumn (even though it’s set during the summer), I’ve recently found myself revisiting the 1969 Granada TV adaptation of Alan Garner’s ‘The Owl Service’, scripted by the author in collaboration with director and producer Peter Plummer.

Although memories of this series and its accompanying aesthetic have been extensively excavated by the Ghost Box/hauntology mob in recent years, to the point where it’s become a pretty obligatory signifier of ‘that sorta thing’, Garner’s story still holds a special place in my imagination. I’m far too young of course to have seen the series when it was first broadcast, or even when it was repeated in colour during the ‘80s.* At some point during my childhood though, my dad decided to read the book to me as a bedtime story – an endeavour he was forced to abandon about a third of the way through, because it was scaring the bejesus out of me.

I remember being completely engrossed by the tangled mystery of the whole thing – the magical dinner plates, book-destroying telekinetic outbursts, rediscovered medieval frescoes and creepy Celtic myths – but at the same time, it was clearly all a bit much for me. Used to dealing with far more straightforward narratives, I just didn’t know what to make of it all. You know that feeling - of being absolutely fascinated by the possibilities that these disparate elements seem to imply, yet terrified by the dark secrets that might be revealed in the process? For me it all started here.





Apparently my dad was under the impression that it was a children’s book – indeed, it was published as such. Many aspects of the story though - from the stifling atmosphere of familial conflict, to the deeply uncomfortable sexual undertones and the quite complex treatment of the class and ethnic identity – strike me as decidedly grown-up.

Raised in the Welsh countryside and sometimes subject to broadly similar concerns, ‘The Owl Service’ holds an obvious resonance for me, but it sticks with me above all because it provided me with perhaps my first real exposure to the kind of unresolved, emotionally resonant mystery that I’ve ended up prizing above all things in film and literature, and that has subsequently led me to Lovecraft, Machen (an unavoidable touchstone here), Nigel Kneale, David Lynch and any number of incomprehensible European horror films.

One of the things that most struck me when revisiting the TV series is how perfect the casting is. Each of the actors, simply in manner and appearance, is a perfect encapsulation of the kind of archetypal figure he or she is portraying… as I suppose befits a story in which modern, self-motivated individuals find themselves pushed into assuming inescapable roles within a reoccurring cycle of mythic fate; a kind of pre-gothic romantic tragedy imposing itself upon the contemporary world, even as its participants struggle not to succumb to their attendant stereotypes.

Every gothic of course needs a tempestuous female focal point, and I doubt Gillian Hills ever bettered her performance here as Alison, her character unmoored and never quite settled, shifting scene by scene between a manipulative brat, a childlike innocent and a naïve, natural mystic tapping into some undefined, destructive force. Although Gardner’s story remains rather coy about such things (the direction and costume choices in the TV series somewhat less so), it is clear that Alison, much like Mia Farrow’s character in ‘The Secret Ceremony’, is in the process of being simultaneously defined and strangled by her emerging sexuality, torn between the pull of childhood and adulthood, and unsure how to deal with either.

Hills herself had of course experienced what we can only assume was a pretty tempestuous teenhood, having allegedly been scouted out by Playboy at the age of 14(!), she appeared in Roger Vadim’s ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ in 1959 before playing the lead in classic Brit-exploitation flick ‘Beat Girl’ a year later. It’s certainly pretty unnerving seeing her convincingly playing a seventeen year old in ‘The Owl Service’, a full decade after her first starring role and several years after her brief but memorable turn in ‘Blow Up’ helped open the floodgates for full frontal nudity in international cinema, and it’s probably not that much of a leap to assume that she incorporated some of the anxieties of her recent past into a fairly astonishing performance here.




It goes without saying I suppose that such a character should become ground zero for an old-fashioned ‘possession’ narrative – one of the many generic threads that makes up ‘The Owl Service’s distinctly odd fabric, and one that could (some would probably say should) have been merely implied by the series, rather than thrown straight at us. Garner and Prosser’s decision to literally depict Alison’s possession is still one of the most startling aspects of the series, and must have seemed outright astonishing in the context of British TV in 1969, when such supernatural grotesquery very much did NOT sit at the same table as the ‘serious’, Pinter-esque drama of the rest of the series.



As Alison’s opposite number, the ill-fated Michael Holden (who died under mysterious circumstances in a London bar in 1977) is also very good as Gwyn – his character something of a representative of a new amalgamated Welsh identity, smart and sensitive and looking to move beyond his roots in the inward-looking rural working class - a late-blooming Welsh counterpart to the Northern heroes of the late ‘50s kitchen sink new wave novels, perhaps? Whether by accident or design, Gwyn also ends up becoming the only fully welcoming, sympathetic presence in the story. Not that any of the other characters are outright dislikeable, but as in any well-composed character drama, there are no villains here. All of them embody a certain mixture of sympathy and threat - as in Pinter, we feel sorry for them in their assorted misfortunes even as we recoil from their assorted minor cruelties. But somewhat uniquely here, we also feel anxious about the damage they might wreak on the unfolding narrative itself. Will Clive’s well-meaning conniving or Roger’s frustrated bullying stir things up too quickly, forcing the dissolution of the status quo and derailing the ‘investigation’, before the secrets of the house and the land beneath it can be revealed…? Not that they’ll ever be revealed, we implicitly understand, but still, somehow, we must know, dammit.



Maybe I’ve just been watching too many cheap horrors recently, but it’s nice to encounter a story in which secondary and purely ‘functional’ characters gradually move beyond their allotted roles, attaining unexpected depth - one dimensional orges unfolding like a kaleidoscope as the psychic battles heat up. Gwynne’s mother Nancy, excellently played by TV actress Dorothy Edwards, is particularly noteworthy in this regard, as she gradually opens up about the personal history that led her back to the house, providing one of ‘The Owl Service’s several reminders that we should never be too quick to dismiss a character as a sour-faced fishwife or an empty-headed lunk - for even the most utilitarian fictional placeholder can hide revelations as vital as those of our fiery protagonists and instigators, if only the pen and camera dare grant them time.


Witness the exemplary presence of moron/sorcerer Huw Halfbacon, played by veteran Welsh actor Ray Llewellyn, through whom ‘The Owl Service’ attains a level of cracked, sinister poetry. Reminiscent of the italicized, uknowable jabber mouthed by Lovecraft’s characters in their last moments, the cadences of his outbursts still raise goose-flesh, and have clearly touched many legions of psyche-folky souls over the years, passing into the wider lexicon of those who’d seem to evoke the essence of this particular cultural backwater. “I am a stag of seven times, I am a fire upon a hill,” he exclaims at one point, stumbling backward against a gnarled treetrunk, possessed with a startling mixture of fear and exultation; “I am a hawk in the sun’s tears, I am the wolf in every mind!” Stirring stuff indeed.



Likewise, the decision to never show the character of Alison’s mother on-screen is unusual and strangely effective - emblematic of the numerous odd, seemingly random decisions made by the TV adaptation. There is no immediate practical reason why we shouldn’t see her, but as the other characters constantly discuss her and act upon her thoughts and wishes, she becomes an ever more imposing, almost fantastical presence in the narrative, always watching and commanding, always unseen.

On a more prosaic level, I really liked the strict colour coding of the story’s central trio – Alison = red, Gwyn = blue/black, Roger = green. You probably don’t need to spend too long consulting works on emotional symbolism to figure out what’s going on there, but apparently the colour scheme was devised to mirror the then-current conventions of electrical wiring (red=live, black=neutral, green=earth I believe, but best not put it to the test by asking me to rewire any old plugs), helping to explain Gwyn’s otherwise slightly perplexing comments about plug wiring in the early episodes, and also casting interesting light (so to speak) on the fact that the house in which the story is set still lacks mains electricity – a decision taken by Alison’s mother to preserve its historical ‘authenticity’ – a stance mocked by Roger when he complains of the ‘phoniness’ of rigging up an electrical doorbell for guests.




Aside from anything else, this colour-coding provides a great example of the lengths the production team went to get the most the most out of the new colour TV technology, cramming just about every shot with bright primary colours and rich natural textures, to the extent that some of the costuming in particular has an almost absurd, hyper-real quality to it, hammering home the red/blue/green dynamic until it becomes unmistakable even to a casual viewer.

Shot on 16mm film rather than the video that swiftly became the norm for colour TV productions, ‘The Owl Service’ easily overcomes such over-indulgences, and the series overall has a beautifully grainy, kinda timeless look to it that easily matches up to most late ‘60s feature films. Although very much OF its time, the aesthetic of the series seems to OWN its time rather than being owned by it, if you see what I mean.



Above all though, rewatching The Owl Service got me thinking about WHY these kind of open-ended spiritual mysteries – confusing, esoteric stories with no crowd-pleasing gimmicks and no satisfactory conclusions - were so popular on British TV during the ‘70s. Penda’s Fen, The Stone Tape, Children of the Stones etc. – it is genuinely extraordinary to think that there was a time when these troubling works were broadcast to the nation on ITV and BBC1 – the shadows of Arthur Machen and William Morris writ large across prime-time entertainment. Why, of all things, would the nationally broadcast TV series – that most conservative and closely scrutinised of media – become such a willing conduit for this kind of deliberately inexplicable product..? Was there something in the air during these years? Something in the water at Television Central?




I suppose that, much like ‘Twin Peaks’ in the USA all those years later, the success of ‘The Owl Service’ (and ‘Quatermass’ and ‘The Prisoner’ before it) proved to TV programmers that this kind of demanding, elusive drama can serve to grab the public’s imagination far more powerfully than the usual dumbed-down logic would tend to assume – a lesson that we could well do with relearning, if the past few decades’ utter collapse of creativity or expertise in British TV is anything to go by.**

And speaking of ‘Twin Peaks’ (gratuitously comparing stuff to ‘Twin Peaks’ being a bit of a preoccupation of mine it seems), the similarities – conscious or otherwise – between ‘The Owl Service’ and Lynch & Frost’s series are surely worth a mention. The nexuses of fairytale-like imagery that feature heavily in both series, repeated and expanded upon with almost ritualistic regularity as the story progresses; the sublimination of unspeakable sexual and familial troubles into supernatural form; the carefully-guarded secrets passed between members of a small rural community, understanding that they must ‘protect’ themselves from some force they sense but can’t really define; the forest-dwelling idiot-savant…. could ‘Twin Peaks’ owe more of a debt to vintage British folk-creep than is generally appreciated?

After all, the unsettling conclusion to ‘The Owl Service’ only serves to remind us of what ‘Twin Peaks’ states aloud: the owls are not what they seem.


*Shot in colour on 16mm film to show off the possibilities of incoming colour TV technology – and looking absolutely beautiful for it on the DVD - ‘The Owl Service’ was initially broadcast in black & white due to some kind of union dispute with technical staff.

**I know, I know – I’m sure those more forgiving of modernity can point me toward X, Y and Z that’s really, really good, but after so long without watching TV just turning the damn thing on gets my back up. I mean, do they not even have editors any more? Every programme looks like they’ve just fed the raw footage into some sort of application that turns it into generic cheesy montages and reaction shots fitted to canned music and… I’m sorry, I could go on for days…

Mysterious Britain at the BFI.

BFI Flipside’s “Mysterious Britain” evening last week got off to an odd start in not quite the manner the organisers had anticipated, when Bruce Springsteen apparently announced a surprise public appearance to promote a documentary about himself, and claimed NFT Screen # 1, where the Flipside screening was due to take place, for that purpose.

I would have loved to witness the meeting between The Boss’s people and the soft-spoken British cinema archivist types, but needless to say, we’re now devoid of leg room, crammed into the substantially smaller NFT # 2. I don’t know whether or not late-arriving ticket-holders had to be turned away and given a refund, but I’m glad I got in early.

After a brief apology/explanation from curators Vic Pratt and William Fowler, it’s on with the show, the general gist of which is a collection of brief TV extracts dredged up from the BFI vaults, illustrating the British media’s approach to investigation of ‘strange goings on’ throughout the mid 20th century.

Proceedings begin with a 1973 broadcast on behalf of The Aetherius Society, a supremely weird religious sect based around the “sixty miles of audio tape” recorded by one Dr. George King, who claimed to be channelling the pronouncements of a holy being from Mars, who urged earth’s major religions to combine into some kind of benevolent mind-meld, turning back the tide of evil and atomic destruction. The footage of a young altar boy earnestly charging a battery with ‘prayer power’, backed up by an ethnically diverse congregation of four, was pricelessly eerie, as was the thought of an era in which BBC ‘community outreach’ funding could filter down to letting dubious outfits like this lot spread their message of hope via late night BBC2.

Next up, a 1972 edition of “The Sky At Night” which sees Sir Patrick Moore mixing it up with the druids during their midsummer rituals at Stonehenge. Sir Patrick says he found the druids to be pleasant and genuine bunch, before politely informing them that their veneration of the stones is clearly a load of bunk in the face of new research which reveals the Henge’s true function as a “primitive astral calculator”. “Well, there’s always 1973”, he cheerfully announces as the druids shuffle off at the end of their ceremony, disappointed that the overcast sky denied them a glimpse of the dawn. Words to live by indeed.

Sticking with standing stones and knighthood, Sir John Betjeman turns up next, narrating a short subject on the earthworks and stone circle at Avebury for a 1950s Shell Motor Oil travelogue series. Betjeman’s observations on the subject, though interesting, are strictly by the book, but the film is beautifully photographed. Black & white footage of the mysterious monoliths standing alone in a field of daisies and long grass with the scattered brick cottages on either side, is incredibly evocative, expressing the very heart of ‘weird England’ as it quietly thrived in the days of our parents and grandparents, almost too perfectly for words.


Next we have a full edition of an absolute genius ITV series from the late ‘50s entitled Out of Step, in which Daniel Farson, a sort of bullish proto-Boris Johnson figure, tracks down people who hold unusual views, and proceeds to antagonise and mock them. This week: people who believe in flying saucers! Are they cranks, frauds, or simply misguided? Farson’s first stop is the roof garden of the Rt. Hon. Brindsley Le Poer Trench, whose crumbling UFO paperbacks and inherently hilarious name certainly played a role in my childhood. Lord Trench gets bonus points for beginning his answer to the question ‘why do you believe in flying saucers’ with “well, speaking as the editor of Flying Saucer Review…”, and for repeatedly stressing that his sighting reports come from “serious, highly trained observers”, as opposed to, I dunno, some random bozos who just like wandering around staring at the sky. We get straight to camera statements from various of these observers, my favourite of which was a man who looked like a Dan Clowes caricature come to life, whose evidence of strange lights in the sky is somewhat undermined by the fact that his sightings have all taken place “in the area between two aerodromes”. If the aliens were to set up a base-camp on earth, he reasons, it would probably be in Stafford.

Subsequently, Farson seeks an opposing view from the retired Astronomer Royal, who sits in his drawing room absent-mindedly pondering the weight of the supplies these space-fellows would need to bring them to our solar system, and interviews a dentist who claims he was taken for a ride to Mars and Venus by interplanetary visitors (“if I may say so sir, it certainly sounds like one of us is being taken for a ride..”), and who states that the women on Venus were very beautiful indeed.

Looking back after subsequent decades in which the whole UFO mythos has taken on an increasingly dark and troubling tone, this programme’s light-hearted approach to the subject was a wonderful reminder of how simple and wholesome the whole business seemed prior to the arrival of cattle mutilation, recovered memory syndrome, suicidal cultists and the ever-present intimations of child abuse. I don’t know whether any other episodes of “Out of Step” have survived, but if so I’d love to see them – this one was a hoot.


Sixteen years into a darker future, and a queasy orange glow of deteriorated video tape colour hangs over a short news item about a young Birmingham couple sitting meekly whilst an exorcist (Church of England, apparently !?) banishes a poltergeist from their chilly-looking council house. The ghost has been doing terrible things, like turning the cooker off and hiding the husband’s wallet under the bed. The vicar conducts the ceremony from a little xeroxed booklet entitled “Exorcism”. I don’t know who wrote it, but it all sounds a bit fishy to me. Whilst we may be tempted here to focus our ghoulish retromancy on the kitchen’s lurid bad-trip flock wallpaper or the husband’s Tony Iommi approach to personal grooming, the truly notable thing in this case I feel is the way the parents leave their toddler to play unaccompanied on the front lawn for an extended period of time as they dutifully accompany the priest in his somewhat questionable business.

Back to the comforts of the black & white era, and next we have a delightfully baleful short programme from 1964, in which a BBC reporter recruits a cheerfully imaginative local historian to help interpret the remnants of several apparent folk magic ceremonies conducted in ruined churches in East Anglia. The presenter gives us a right mouthful in his introduction, automatically linking these rather generic magical talismans with a survival of pre-Christian Celtic tradition, which he then defines as “..the worship of Pan, or Lucifer”. Hmm. Anyway, he gets the biggest laugh of the night when he announces “it may be shocking to us to learn of the survival of these dark traditions, over fifteen hundred years since Christianity was accepted as the sole religion of the British Isles. But then… this is Norfolk.”

Perhaps my favourite item of the evening was a contemporary news investigation of the infamous Highgate Vampire flap, a sequence of events sparked by a spate of grave desecrations which took place in Highgate Cemetery through 1970. As The Sun reported on 19 August 1970; “A man armed with a wooden stake and a cross went on a vampire hunt in a cemetery. But all he found was the police. And they arrested him. Alan Farrant, aged 24, told magistrates at Clerkenwell, London yesterday: ‘my intention was to search out the supernatural being and destroy it by plunging the stake in its heart’”.


Farrant, a “former tobacconist of no fixed abode” according to this news item, was subsequently acquitted in court, and when we join him here he’s up to his old tricks again, clambering over the wall of the cemetery after-hours for his regular anti-Vampire patrol. Farrant insists he has seen Satanists at work in the cemetery at night, consorting with the figure of a glowing eight foot high vampire, and that it is up to him to try to stop them.

Meanwhile, the supremely Garth Marenghi-like Mr. Sean Manchester, self-styled president of the British Occult Society, considers Farrant a rank amateur, going about his own unauthorised nocturnal vigils with a more sombre demeanour and an altogether more expensive-looking crucifix and stake combo. The British Occult Society appears to consist largely of Manchester presiding over counterfeit Golden Dawn rituals in his darkened bedsit (WHITE MAGIC, he insists). When he illustrates the best methods of destroying a vampire for our reporter, he speaks with the authority of a man who has seen Peter Cushing’s performance in ‘Dracula’ more than once.

The view of the long-suffering Highgate Cemetery caretaker on the impending occult battle transpiring on his territory? “Well they’re a load of bloody nutcases, aren’t they” he sighs, sweeping up the broken glass of another nocturnal trespasser. It is notable I think that many of the incidents that inspired this vigilante action in the first place (a body dragged from it’s grave and beheaded, another staked with an iron spike, etc) seem perhaps to have been the result of some similarly misguided anti-vampire activity; if not the work of morbid schoolkids, then possibly of Farrant himself, or some other sorry soul who’d taken all those Hammer flicks a bit too much to heart..?

From the ridiculous back to the sublime, the screenings conclude with “The Living Grave”, a half-hour TV drama from 1980, scripted by Penda’s Fen writer David Rudkin, based around the premise that a young woman under hypnosis is channelling the spirit of Kitty Jay, tragic subject of a well known Dartmoor folk tale, whose grave is apparently marked with fresh flowers to this day. Mixing highly convincing hypnosis scenes, in which we witness a psychologist slowly guiding ‘Kitty’ back through the details of her life, with documentary-like footage of a some guys visiting the locations she is describing, “The Living Grave” is an extremely effective work, using its paranormal conceit to draw us completely into the short, sad life of a rural orphan girl in 18th century England.

Although far more straight-forward than “Penda’s Fen”, “The Living Grave” is no less poignant in its forceful demonstration of the way in which the past can live on in the present, not through the contrivances of spooks and hauntings, but through the continuation of stone and wood and landscape, like the oak beam in the barn where Kitty Jay’s tale ends, holding the memory of a disgraced 18th century teenager kicking away a bail of hay and hanging herself, as we see a 20th century farmer beneath it, messing around with some fertilizer sacks. It’s all happening at once, after all. Certainly the most chilling moment I experienced over the course of this 21st century Halloween, and a fitting end to another exquisite evening of retromancy from BFI’s Flipside strand.

Outside the auditorium, it looks like someone has knocked over some of those rope cordon thingys, and torn some posters off the wall. By the back entrance, some heavy looking security types are loading gitar flight-cases into a Transit van, saying stuff like “Ok, we’re all done” and “go, go!” Boy, it sure woulda been cool to see Bruce Springsteen.

Suffer A Witch To Dieby Elizabeth Davis (Signet, 1969)

I absolutely love this cover illustration – such beautiful, weird symmetry, so resonant of all the imagery surrounding the post-‘Rosemary’s Baby’ witchcraft fad. The strangely gentle effect of the watercolours, those neat bars of colour and the faceless child at the bottom - could almost be something Ghostbox might have come up with in a slightly different world.



The book itself also seems a perfect snapshot of this peculiar moment in popular culture, mixing Ira Levin style suburban witch cult paranoia with a none-more-70s paranormal/new age-inspired approach that freely merges malignant witchery with ESP, meditation and probably reflexology for all I know.

It’s… pretty terrible to be honest, highly reminiscent of that awful Bert I. Gordon / Orson Welles witch movie, but it more than makes up for such failings in historical/aesthetic value.

It seems Signet were pushing “Gothic” pretty heavily back in ’69;

House Of The Devil (Ti West, 2009)

Along with seemingly everyone else in the civilised world, I’m a long-time reader of of Stacie Ponder’s Final Girl blog, but until now I’ve never before managed to wrangle by writing schedule and idiosyncratic film-watchin’ habits sufficiently to allow me to take part in her Film Club. The overwhelmingly positive notices received by Ti West’s “House Of The Devil” though, together with the fact that the DVD seems to be on the shelves at a knock-down price every time I go to the shops, persuaded me to take a chance on it despite my general ambivalence toward modern horror, and… well fuck it, how many words is it going to take me to say “I had a copy lying around, so thought I might as well watch it and do a review”?


So, hmm – bit of a strange one, this “House of the Devil”, eh? Or rather, not so ‘strange’ at all really, given that it’s a film so thoroughly marinated in the established iconography of horror cinema that its supposedly terror-inducing contours end up seeming more cozy than anything – pure comfort food for fans of the genre.

What renders “House Of The Devil” unusual is rather the extent to which it seems to make a stand against the tide of conventional modern horror, offering no enticements or explanations at all to viewers unschooled in classic horror aesthetics, and the way it… well, uh, y’know, just the way in which it kind of jams together elements of the past in order to – in a sense – create something new.


Wes Craven’s “Scream” often gets rather tediously hailed as ‘the first post-modern horror film’, a claim that never ceases to infuriate me, partly because the film’s self-referential ‘innovations’ had already been explored ad-nausuem by smarter b-movies through the ‘70s and ‘80s, and partly because any argument that lends legitimacy to Craven’s candy-ass, cynical, misogynistic avalanche of crap is sure to get my goat. (Maybe you think differently? That’s ok, we can discuss it later, in the parking lot.)


In the past few years however, I believe we have seen popular culture begin to eat itself in a far more thorough-going and exciting fashion than the ‘90s irony culture embodied by “Scream” could have imagined, as a new generation ploughs the past back into endless new creations through filters of memory, deterioration and nostalgia. This methodology can be seen running wild through the world of music at the moment, via such flash-in-the-pan coagulations of aesthetics as ‘Hauntology’, ‘Witch House’*, ‘Glo-fi’, etc., but “House Of the Devil” is perhaps the first feature film I’ve seen which picks up these ideas and really runs with them, emerging as perhaps a good contender the first, genuine, 100% POST-MODERN horror movie.**

Much as Quentin Tarantino has made a lucrative and hugely enjoyable career out of crow-barring together all his favourite bits from old exploitation movies and imagining what might have transpired if they had had the resources, time and technical proficiency of Hollywood behind them, Ti West here seems intent on revisiting all the joys and peculiarities of VHS era horror that (presumably) enthralled him as a teenager. Step by step, he shows us what might have been if one of those weird, indefinably fascinating ‘80s shelf-fillers had been made as a labour of love by a talented a director who was able to take his time, concentrating on the film’s overall artistry and making those funny peculiarities a central feature of proceedings, rather than just a random distraction.


“House of the Devil”s plot-line is so minimal it’s scarcely worth reiterating. Girl gets baby-sitting job > goes to remote, spooky house > there are Satanists, in case you were wondering. I forget who it was who once defined gothic horror as “pretty girl goes into old house, gets the shit scared out of her”, but that's the deal here, no more no less. Most of the enjoyment in the movie arises not from the narrative, but from watching West shift his film through a whole universe of horror aesthetics with all the kaleidoscopic richness and randomised drift of a tumblr blog.


The film’s opening half hour, in which we bear witness the heavenly minutiae of our heroine Samantha (Jocelin Donahue)’s life as a small town college student in the 1980s, plays out like an extended love letter to all the oddly captivating prosaic detail that’s ever made your heart sing on an old horror tape. And when the actual horror itself finally gets going, we can sit back and let ourselves ricochet happily between slasher-era sartori (the takeaway pizza, the repurposed kitchen knife, the unsettling, jokey answerphone messages and all those endless phonecalls), late period ‘70s gothic (unnatural light through the stained glass windows, the harpsichord at the bottom of the stairs), hints of “Shuttered Room” style mad-relative-in-the-attic antics and Texas Chainsaw style deformed killer family mythos, Dennis Wheatley-approved old school Satanism, Phantasm-esque otherworldly graveyard shtick, all-purpose American haunted house tropes…. you name it, it’s probably in there somewhere.


Where West’s MO very much differs from Tarantino though is that “House Of The Devil” is a surprisingly subtle and slow-moving film – an approach that seems very brave given the fuck-yeah-gore approach favoured by most modern horror. In fact, it occurs to me that for a non-horror-fan viewer, unprepared to drink in the steady stream of referential, nostalgic reverie, “House Of The Devil” could easily become an unbearably dull experience – an exercise in deliberate mediocrity, lacking any entertainment-based pay-off.

As such, I can’t help but admire Ti West for taking a chance and placing the success of his film solely in the hands of those of us weird enough to react with joy at the sight of Samantha’s big, orange-padded walkman headphones, or at the beautiful climbing-the-stairs shots based on the bit where they find the mutilated body in ‘Night Of The Living Dead’. And given that he has apparently managed to make the film a roaring success on that basis, what can we say except HIGH FIVE, DUDE? What further proof could be needed that the Age of the Nerd is upon us?


The menacing kitsch of the house itself is wonderfully realised. These aren’t the kind of Satanists who live in rotting gothic splendour and leave a big ol’ grimoire conveniently open on the coffee table – rather their home evokes a horrid neo-classical banality that seeks to recall the stifling atmosphere of a million repressive parental homes. On second viewing, the empty, airless still-lifes that West frames within the house are by far the most chilling aspect of the film, recalling the way David Lynch filmed the interiors of the Palmer house in “Twin Peaks”, or the inexplicable dread of Pupi Avanti’s “House Of Laughing Windows” (a film whose influence seems to loom large over “House Of The Devil”).


Moreover, these eerie interiors represent the key point at which “House Of The Devil” really begins to transcend its status as a mere horror-movie-about-horror-movies, providing us with echoes of abuse and loneliness more subliminally menacing than any pasty-faced demonic crone. After all, you can punch one of those, but try punching an Edward Hopper painting. (Ok, obviously you COULD punch an Edward Hopper painting, but I’m talking figuratively here, let’s not go there.)


In fact, the only thing that ended up marring my enjoyment of the film was the inevitable satanic bloodbath that concludes proceedings – an odd thing for me to say, given that I generally welcome satanic bloodbaths as a fine addition to any motion picture. But, whilst there are a few wonderfully spine-tingling ‘evil reveal’ scares to be had in the closing twenty minutes of “House Of The Devil” (I’d tell you about ‘em, but I wouldn’t want to spoil ‘em), the full realisation of the film’s satanic shenanigans is rather hum-drum and predictable, somehow managing to feel infinitely less satisfying that the hour of sublime mudanity that proceeded it. I mean it’s some ok Satanism I guess, but it’s no "Devil Rides Out", y'know?

Actually, I probably would have enjoyed the film a lot more if the evil Satanists hadn’t revealed their existence AT ALL, and if Samantha had just gone to the house, hung around, noticed a few things that were *slightly* not-right, got a bit worried, and gone home. That would have been an amazing movie – a daring affront to the audience’s satanic bloodbath-based expectations, and a brilliant example of a horror movie whose horrors are created entirely in the imagination of the viewer; a new benchmark for restraint and the power of suggestion in the genre.

Sadly though, this isn’t that film, and when the time comes, the blood is spilled, the robes are donned, the knives are drawn, the doors are banged, the corridors are frenziedly run down, the teeth are bared, the colours are drained, and I start involuntarily humming The Ramones “You Should Never Have Opened That Door”.


Which is probably just as well I suppose. I mean, would anyone be rushing out to see this movie if the reviews had amounted to “ok, so nothing actually happens at all, but there’s some nifty interior décor and some great shot compositions, and the main theme music is totally killer”..?


This Ti West is a smart cat, I think. He knew what he had to deliver, and he got around to it within eighty minutes (PRAISE THE LORD, A MODERN MOVIE THAT ACTUALLY ENDS ON TIME), without resorting to any shitty ‘jump scares’ or ‘lightning strike’ cutting, and whilst still managing to turn in a film that often seems to function more as an extended video art project on aesthetic fetishisation than a narrative horror flick.

One thing that helps him to pull it off, I think, is sheer technical skill. Watching old VHS movies, and low budget cinema in general, we get used to certain things. Y’know what I mean - scenes will be inexplicably filmed in long shot, dialogue will not match on-screen action, bizarre music will deafen us at random intervals, people will talk about nothing in particular for minutes on end whilst the camera remains static, and so on. Some viewers learn to tolerate these deficiencies as natural wastage in between the cool bits, whilst some of us actively embrace them as perverse statements of otherworldly, homemade charm. But at the same time, would anyone want to watch a competent modern movie full of *deliberately contrived* long-shot addled padding..? Seems doubtful.


And so, like Tarantino before him, this is where West wisely breaks from mere re-enactment of the past, making sure that “House Of The Devil” is instantly recognisable as a good film, in the middlebrow newspaper critic / film studies teacher sense of the term. His directorial style is flawless, the film is perfectly paced, and flows beautifully. Every single shot is carefully and interestingly composed, full of rich incidental detail. The cinematography and production design is top notch. The acting is excellent, and all of the characters are lively, engaging and sympathetic (props in particular to Mary Woronov and Tom Noonan as our oddly loveable Satanist couple). The music is fantastic (opening credits theme = TUNE).

Even through sequences in which nothing whatsoever is happening, the film is a joy to behold. I could happily have watched Samantha and her best friend eating pizza and discussing the local property market for hours.


Subsequently, the film gains much of its power from the fact that the movie industry doesn’t usually let us see such specialist aesthetic fetishisation and vague, uneventful narratives in the context of a quote-unquote ‘good film’. “House Of The Devil” is a ‘good film’ that is utterly in thrall to the forbidden magic of ‘bad films’, and, as usual, the mainstream critics, copywriters and squares just won’t know what the hell to make of it, other than to acknowledge that it’s there, that people are watching it and enjoying it, and that it can’t be ignored forever.

A modest creative success on its own self-defined terms, “House Of The Devil” is far from the greatest film most cult movie buffs will have seen this week/month/year, but it DOES hopefully represent the stirring of a promising new approach to horror in the 21st century, and, speaking as a life-long fan of the weird, the obtuse and the cultish, it is always nice when one of ‘our guys’ manages to make a splash in the big pond, however fleetingly. Put me down as officially looking forward to whatever Ti West does next.


* Is that the best contrived sub-genre name ever, or what? Lovecraft fans will be delighted to learn there’s already a Brighton club-night called “Dreams In The Witch House”.

**As with all “the first [whatever] EVER!” type proclamations, this claim is of course utterly fatuous, and readers are encouraged to write in and tell me why “Abbott and Costello Meet The Wolfman” or “House of Frankenstein” or something was actually the first ever post-modern horror movie.