Matt Nida’s review published on Letterboxd:
House of the Devil is a loving homage to horror movies of the 70s and 80s. However, it's far from being a Jason Eisener-style pastiche, and is instead the first retro-horror in ages that genuinely feels like it could be a lost classic from an earlier era. The plot is simple enough: colleague student Samantha needs cash, so she takes a babysitting job in a creepy house out of town. Bad things happen. That's pretty much it, but as well as borrowing a lot of the visual stylings of earlier classics (the superbly well-chosen location could have been used in The House By The Cemetery or The Amityville Horror) director Ti West apes the restrained sense of pacing. The film is a tight 90 mins, but it's well over an hour until things really start kicking off; a few well-placed scares earlier keep things interesting, but West admirably maintains a sustained sense of rising dread without resorting to cheap shock tactics. Jocelin Donahue is perfectly cast as scream-queen archetype Samantha, and the wonderful Greta Gerwig is great fun as her goofy mate Megan. A terrific little film that stands alongside its predecessors, rather than simply aping them.