By JASON COMERFORD

Editor/writer/director Ti West is horror cinema’s latest and most interesting triple threat, and he is steadily building an intriguing body of work that aims higher than the aggressively average gut-rippers that clog bargain bins. West’s 2009 chiller The House of the Devil announced the arrival of a serious and determined talent, achieving a deliberately retro production aesthetic through the use of elements like 16mm film stock, 80s-style credit fonts, and a story fashioned around the “Satanic panic” scare that swept through the country in the Reagan era. The film ultimately takes far too long to arrive at an obvious and rather inconclusive ending, but there’s a lot to admire about it, and it set the stage for West’s followup, 2011’s The Innkeepers, his finest effort yet.

West’s frequent musical collaborator, Jeff Grace, cut his teeth as part of Howard Shore’s musical team, assisting on Shore’s Lord of the Rings scores as well as The Score, Panic Room, Spider, and Gangs of New York, before striking out on his own. Grace has slowly and steadily built a fascinating body of work primarily in horror (West’s films as well as The Last Winter, I Sell the Dead, and Stake Land), but in other genres as well (particularly his striking score for Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff). The House of the Devil finds Grace operating at full capacity, building a sense of menacing unease through the use of prepared piano, the offset tunings emphasizing the isolation of the film’s main character, Samantha Hughes (Jocelin Donahue), whose lonely babysitting job threatens, at any moment, to turn deadly. As Grace explained in an interview with Daniel Schweiger for Film Music Magazine:

As always, Ti wanted to go for some different sounds, so we started talking about piano. I thought about it a bit and started messing with prepared piano. There’s the whole isolated element to Samantha. She’s in a weird house, in a weird situation (babysitting for a very odd family, the baby turns out to an old person), in the middle of nowhere with no one else around. There are a lot of pregnant pauses that needed to be dealt with, but that is all opportunity to create a sonic world to draw the audience into the film. And in a film like that it becomes a real balancing act. You don’t want to overstate things or have the score attract too much attention to itself, but it’s really just a person standing in a hallway or looking at a door. You don’t want to reveal too much too soon, and Ti is always cognoscente of audience expectations and keeping people guessing.

Once the tide (finally) turns, Grace goes all-out, unleashing a series of blistering cues as Samantha is captured and terrorized by the Satanists upstairs. “He’s Calling You” is a climactic highlight, with strings trembling and bristling over clusters of percussive strikes as Samantha’s dark fate unfolds. Grace’s score for The House of the Devil is relatively brief (just over half an hour on MovieScore Media’s CD release, paired with his music for Graham Reznick’s thriller I Can See You), but incredibly effective, and it’s an excellent entry point into the oeuvre of one of film music’s most promising talents.