Editorials
Exploring the Voyeurism in Ti West’s ‘The House of the Devil’
Celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, Ti West’s The House of the Devil remains one of the most memorable and effective horror films in recent memory. He employs a very deliberate pace to set the tone and to slowly build tension over the course of the film. On top of this pacing, he utilizes a very specific brand of voyeurism to bring the audience into the story.
Desperate for money, college student Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) agrees to an unorthodox babysitting job in a remote farmhouse on the eve of a full lunar eclipse. As Samantha settles into her surroundings, she begins exploring the large house. As time goes on, she becomes more and more uneasy. The emptiness of the house feels almost claustrophobic and overwhelming, before it suddenly feels not empty at all. The shadows seem to harbor a presence and unseen eyes watch her from the darkest corners. Eventually, Samantha realizes that nothing about this job is as was promised and she is in the grips of a sinister plot orchestrated a group of very dangerous people.
The film is brilliantly effective in setting up a sense of dread and allowing it to grow slowly as the story progresses. Much of this suspense comes as Samantha slowly explores the house after the Ulmans depart. She travels from room to room, switching on lights, observing the state and decor of the room she enters and investigating anything that may be of interest, before turning the lights off again and moving along. Though she was invited into the house, the invitation did not necessarily extend to her having the run of the place, and thus, her actions carry a slight taboo. Should the Ulmans have returned suddenly, Samantha would no doubt have quickly returned to the living room, pretending to have been there the entire time.
The way in which West includes the audience as a subtle participant in the proceedings is particularly interesting. The House of the Devil carries with it a voyeuristic angle not commonly seen in most horror films. Through the way we see Samantha and the way we watch her observe and interact with the house, the film invites us slightly past a “fly on the wall” status and allows us to be present in the moment. We are exploring the house with her as invisible companions. We are just as curious as she is to find out what lies beyond each door and how her strange employers spend their days, and though we get a sense of fear from the idea that she might get caught (or discover something untold), we also get a bit of a thrill in watching her.
There is a second layer to the illicit observation presented in this film, and that is the audience’s own voyeurism of Samantha’s voyeuristic act. Though we are on this journey with her, we are separated from her. Much like watching Norman Bates peering through his peephole, we are witness to Samantha’s explorations.
In these moments, there exists a physical distance between us and Samantha. We never venture too close, and most of this sequence is filmed at a medium distance, allowing us to see most of Samantha’s figure framed in every shot. The camera maintains a very distinct separation; we aren’t physically with her as much as we are watching her. West incorporates several shots where the camera, already positioned inside of a room, observes Samantha entering that space, rather than following along behind her. We see her in the doorway as she approaches. She turns on a light, looks around briefly, and exits. We see her movements as if we were simply part of the furniture and she has invaded the space that we already occupied. Similarly, she can be seen through several exterior windows. Samantha will pull a curtain aside and we observe her through the glass, as if we were looking in from across the street. We silently watch her movements as she takes a voyeuristic trip around the quiet farmhouse.
This storytelling approach is fascinating because it makes the audience very much a part of the proceedings, but adds in an extra layer of tension by separating us slightly from our protagonist. It makes everything feel slightly unsafe. We feel that Samantha is not alone in the house and is being constantly observed by unseen eyes because WE are the unseen eyes. Inasmuch as the Ulmans are close by and are waiting for the right time to strike, we are silently observing Samantha’s every move.
We become increasingly fearful for her as the film goes on, in part because West has kept us at arm’s length the entire time. We know that she has entered dangerous territory, and though we can’t predict her exact fate, we feel helpless to stop it.
The House of the Devil is a masterful film for a number of different reasons, but the layered voyeurism at play is one of the ways it really stands apart from other horror films. Some have complained that the film is slow, but it is this measured approach that really allows the tension to sink in. By making the audience both complicit in and separate from Samantha’s actions while inside the house, West asks us to take a unique place in both the story and in the way we process it.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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