A pretty college girl (fresh-scrubbed newcomer Jocelin Donahue) takes a babysitting job she sooo should have turned down — in a creepy house with rooms she sooo shouldn't enter. The resulting film, The House of the Devil includes a lunar eclipse, Satan worship, and cult actors Mary Woronov and Tom Noonan. Writer-director Ti West's crisp, economical, satisfying little horror pic reclaims the pleasures of the kind of old-school formula that the jokey Scream franchise deconstructed into satire. There's wit but never a wink in this smartly shot production, which pays homage to the 1980s without fetishizing the era.
