Babysitters are born snoopers. Once the kids are asleep, these teenage girls have nothing to do but explore the house in which they are staying. What else are they going to do? Watch TV? Do their homework? Yeah, they'll do some of that too, but there seems to be something irresistible about someone else's house and stuff when you are fifteen years old. I discovered some weird identical twin porn once while I was baby sitting. Ick. Still, if you are baby sitting in a house like this:
For people like these:
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| Mary Woronov and Tom Noonan as the Ulmans |
Especially if you babysit Mrs. Ulman's elderly Mom, who looks like this:
Yikes. Now granted, Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) showed up to babysit expecting a kid, so that bait and switch wasn't her fault. And, the Ulmans offer her $400 for four hours of work, which is just a ridiculous amount of money for sometime in the 80s. I'm guessing 1983 because of the huge size of Sam's Walkman tape player, combined with The Fixx's "One Thing Leads to Another" and Thomas Dolby's "One of Our Submarines" on the soundtrack. Awesome soundtrack choices BTW.
Ti West has a tendency to create ridiculously nosy female characters. He does so with the lovely Samantha, and repeats that deadly type with Claire in The Innkeepers (2011).
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| Claire pokes around the Yankee Pedlar Inn in The Inkeepers (2011) |
Samantha's nosiness is a little much in The House of the Devil (2009), West's ode to babysitter horror with dashes of Satanism thrown in the mix. She wanders around every inch of the house, and pokes her head into almost every door (except the one with the 3 dead bodies, heh).
Yes, Sam is desperate for money, but her level-headed, trash talking friend Meghan (Greta Gerwig) tells her that the situation is just too WEIRD. And one should always listen to Gerwig's characters!
Oh, and one shouldn't eat too much pizza. Especially if the creepy couple for whom you are babysitting mention 3 TIMES that the phone number for pizza is on the fridge. Stay away from pizza, or it gets delivered by this guy:
Who actually also dresses like this:
And then, again, you'll end up like this:
With this kind of ritual being performed on you by the scary crone woman/elderly Mom:
I've seen this film twice now, but the first time I don't think I was entirely sober, so it didn't stick with me. This time I thought to myself, "Wow, if this is all it took to conceive a child (of Satan), women would be lining up for this kind of thing." But I am utterly and completely twisted, as my physical therapist just told me 3 times today while she was working steadfastly on my back and neck.
Hmmm, I'm getting ahead of myself. Somehow, and I mean SOMEHOW, Samantha manages to untie herself and escape this pentagram ritual space. Like your stereotypical Final Girl, she runs into her dead friends.
She wields a big phallic weapon.
And she ends up a complete bloody mess.
I know that in many ways, Horror film fans champion the Final Girl for surviving. Sometimes I just don't know if surviving is really worth it. If I had a choice between Samantha's fate and Meghan's, I'm going with Meghan's. So many horrible things happen to Samantha, that the choice she makes at the end seems kind of smart. But, West has to add a Rosemary's Baby type twist at the end that made me just ask, really?
