"The House of the Devil" [West, 2009].

[karamazov.]

Unrealistically stupid decisions by characters are of course standard fare to the genre, because they can allow for a certain kind of audience manipulation, which at the hands of a Hitchcock, or von Trier, could perhaps be further wielded to such a degree [{here, instead, a victim of absurd, ott circumstance, but} think of our poor, poor, diminutive hero in "Dancer in the Dark"] that it becomes a glorious deconstruction of cinema -as such.- This film has no such lofty artistic ambitions, but, regardless, this is a nicely done retro-horror with period stylistic choices that are more than nail-on-head enough to prevent the film from becoming parodic fluff, and an, imo, excellent balance of cheese and moments that [the fainting scene on the stairs, etc.] are genuinely unsettling.