I think it probably has something to do with the nearly impossible chic of a mid-eighties Volvo, which I drove, and mine was even more chic than Greta Gerwig’s car, which is white and has cloth seats. Mine was metallic graphite gray with a camel colored leather interior. And I mean, nothing says upper middle class eighties chic like the safest car on the road.

But honestly, I have great nostalgia for the period in which this film is set. And this is going to sound weird, but I have great memories of the Satanic Panic eighties. I grew up in a small town in northeast Pennsylvania. I spent a lot of time with my friends exploring abandoned industrial buildings off in the woods. There were a lot of pentagrams. There were a lot of 6-6-6s. And by the time I was in maybe the fourth or fifth grade, there were legitimate articles in local papers about desecrations at cemeteries. The Satanic Panic was really fueling a lot of people's imaginations.

I don't know how familiar you are with a little-known couple called Ed and Lorraine Warren, the couple who investigated the Amityville Horror house, whose stories are the basis for the films in THE CONJURING franchise. But around that same time, in a town called West Pittston, which was not more than a stone’s throw from where I grew up outside of Scranton, Ed and Lorraine Warren made a whistle-stop tour in the mid eighties investigating the the haunting of Jack and Janet Smurl, which frankly sounds like a greasy hand print.

I remember reading “legitimate,” and the air quotes are writ large here, “legitimate” newspaper articles about the discovery of pig bones arranged in the shape of a pentagram buried near the foundation of the house. The children were being levitated down the stairs. Jack Smurl was raped by a succubus. I mean, this was crazy, crazy shit. It was memorialized in a book called The Haunted, and that book was later turned into a made for television movie on the nascent Fox network starring Jeffrey DeMunn from THE MIST and THE WALKING DEAD. And Sally Kirkland from a booby hatch near you. And that movie can be found on YouTube. And I encourage all of you to watch it tonight.

I also want to say that despite my nostalgia for the Satanic Panic craze of the eighties and starting repressed false memory therapy and all these kinds of things, I do think that the film is a gorgeous style exercise, because it captures the feeling of that period so expertly. It's shot on the 16 millimeter film. There is more than a healthy dose of film grain applied to every frame. And it feels true. And not just because we get Dee Wallace in the opening scene. I think it's a pretty great love letter to a time and a period and a style. And I think that Ti West as writer, director, and editor is the very sincere author of a great love letter.

Listen to our episode on THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL here.

Bradford Louryk