Forum Overview :: The Netflix Instant Forum :: What's more significant, the movie you're watching or what you think about it?

[quote name="Fullofkittens"][youtube id="6SOur3WwZvM"] What if Gus Van Sant, instead of making a shot for shot remake of <i>Psycho</i>, made a film that was just like <i>Psycho</i>, with the same camera techniques, score, etc, but told a different story, to a similar effect? <i>The House of the Devil</i> is less a great horror movie than it is a great curiosity. I don't know any way to describe it other than "a 2009 filmmaker set out - and then admirably succeeded at - making one of 1982's best horror films." I won't go into any spoilers but I will say that if this movie came out in 1982 it would be a classic today. However, it didn't; it came out in 2009 as some kind of weird genre tribute. Director Ti West (<i>Cabin Fever 2</i>) pulled out all the stops to make it looks as authentically 80s as possible: the IMDB trivia makes some claims about how they used zooms instead of dolly movements to make it look even more 80s, and that's totally believable, because everything in the film seems to be 100% authentic. You find yourself wondering how they got such a good print of such an old movie. All this authenticity in the service of something that seems so useless (the time period the film takes place in) threw me into a weird critical problem while watching the movie. What the hell are the filmmakers doing here? Why would they go to all this trouble?! Is the director making some kind of joke, or is it literally an homage to his favorite movies? Or - and this is a possibility that I find the most troubling for some reason - does Ti West just think this is the best horror movie he could make, and if he could he would just try to forget that the last 25 years of horror movies even happened? And then as I'm thinking all this, I am confronted with the idea of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affective_fallacy">affective fallacy</a>: should my reaction to *any* film even figure in to whether I recommend it to you? If I had never seen 2 dozen movies where a hot babysitter gets herself into danger in a spooky looking house, would <i>The House of the Devil</i> be a great horror movie instead of this puzzle box that it ended up being for me? I recommend it![/quote]