The House of the Devil (2009)

It's Ti West, so no surprise that it's immediately stylized with a strong late-70s/early-80s environment and credit sequence. The color is nicely muted and appropriately beige.

Samantha, our poor college kid, rents an entire New England century home from a very trusting lady to get away from her obnoxiously sex-crazed roommate. She doesn't actually have any money for rent, so she calls an anonymous number on a bulletin board to inquire about a babysitting position leaves a message with the creepy robot-voiced answering machine. Somebody mysteriously calls her pay phone back immediately, and doesn't identify himself. He asks her to meet him immediately, and then doesn't show up.

He calls her back, desperate and apologetic, and agrees to double her pay. Her friend Megan (Greta Gerwig, director of Barbie) drives her way out into the woods to a massive Victorian house where she meets her absurdly tall employer (Tom Noonan, the weird zoologist from Wolfen and Frankenstein's monster from The Monster Squad and priest of Late Phases) who speaks in riddles about the importance of tonight's lunar eclipse. He is very weird about slowly and badly explaining that this is a babysitting job for his mother-in-law, not a child.

Megan is not satisfied with the situation at all, but reluctantly leaves anyway. She meets a friendly, unknown man on the side of the road a few blocks away, who asks her if she's "the babysitter." He shoots her real fast and real hard in the face immediately after she says no.

Tom Noonan talks off-screen, Psycho-like, to an unseen upstairs person about how there won't "be any more mistakes" and how "this one is perfect." He said he was going upstairs to fetch "the missus", but his wife enters the room from the basement. The couple leaves, and slow, dead-silent meandering begins. Neither Samantha nor we have met the supposed mother-in-law. She orders a pizza, looks around, pokes at the organ, and wonders why she hasn't actually been upstairs to meet the person she is supposedly caring for.

Nothing's going on, so she pops on her walkman and has a little music video dance around the house. One Thing Leads To Another, and she knocks over a vase, breaking it and the music video, but not the rising tension. While cleaning up the mess, she finds a photo of a Volvo that triggers the string instruments in the soundtrack to waiver off-key.

Samantha whispers through the mother-in-law's door to ask if she's alright, but gets no response. The camera pans through the door and shows us the floor pentagram covered in eviscerated bodies. The building suspense is obliterated by a disruptively loud doorbell from the pizza delivery man / her best friend's murderer. The tension briefly reset, it's back to slow pacing around the old house and listening to pipes creak. She finds the upstairs bathroom full of patches of hair.

At the stroke of midnight, she yanks the pull-string on the attic light and the power to the whole house goes out, at the very same moment that the full eclipse begins, somebody else paces through the house, and she begins feeling the effects of the drugs that were in her pizza pie. She awakens gagged and bound in an floor pentagram, surrounded by candles. We finally meet the mother-in-law, a Pumpkinhead looking old witch.

They were pretty shit at knots, so she struggles free and stabs Noonan and the pizza man, leading to a brief house chase. There's some shooting, some stabbing. Unfortunately for Samantha, their demonic ritual actually worked, and she is the vessel. She tries to off herself, but it doesn't take.