The House of the Devil

Last night I ordered a movie from the On Demand TV service called The House of the Devil, a 2009 horror film directed by Ti West. The movie references and homages the horror films of the 1980s, and is set in 1980s America, telling the story of a student (played by Jocelin Donahue) who is really short of money and so takes a babysitting job at a remote house next to a graveyard and owned by a creepy old couple (played by Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov) on the night of a rare total lunar eclipse. The couple reveal that they don't have any children and want the student to look after an elderly relative. However before long she discovers some dark and gruesome secrets in the house. It's actually a fun and suspenseful movie which benefits a lot from it's slow pace but has plenty of gory set-pieces.

This morning I went along with my Dad to the Ocean Terminal shopping centre and I had some coffee and a muffin at Costa Coffee before we split up to look around. I bought some books in the centre which were Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division by Deborah Curtis, which is a biography of Ian Curtis, lead singer in the band Joy Divison, written by his wife, 1974 by David Peace and 1977 by David Peace, which are the first two novels in the "Red Riding Quartet" of crime novels, and a horror novel called The Tooth Fairy by Graham Joyce.

After the shopping we went to my parent's house where the latest issues of Fortean Times and Sight and Sound had arrived. The lead story in Fortean Times was about scientists who had been trying to discover whether the human soul had physical form and whether it could be photographed or weighed. The lead story in Sight and Sound was about the depiction of corrupt cops in cinema, the film career of pulp novelist Jim Thompson and a poll of film critics to find the best film books of all time.

My Mum had planned a barbecue for today but the weather was too cold and so we had to abandon it, but we had some barbecue chicken, peas and diced potato with garlic butter. After lunch Mum and I walked along to Sainsburys where I got a couple of DVDs, of the movies The City of Lost Children, which is a very good but very weird French fantasy, science-fiction, horror film that I've seen a few times before and Hansel and Gretel, which is a horror movie take on the classic story from South Korea.