At the Devil’s Door

At the Devil’s Door

With his movie “At the Devil’s Door,” Nicholas McCarthy, an aspiring horror director, delivers on the potential of “The Pact,” a somber ghost story that did not quite live up to expectations. It’s certainly not perfect: some of the big scares are repetitive and much of the dialogue is corny (“He wants to be all of someone,” a character murmurs) or unsubtle theme polishing (talk radio banter and obnoxious expository dialogue repeatedly remind us that “At the Devil’s Door” is about the American economic recession). But it’s consistently moody, relentlessly driving you toward a gut-punch ending, and so any valid complaints seem petty in hindsight.

McCarthy starts his movie in 1987 with a bombastic prologue that goes on way too long. Waifish teen Hanna (Ashley Rickards) agrees to play an ominous shell-game with her boyfriend’s creepy trailer trash uncle and accidentally sells her soul to the devil for $500. Then she goes home and gets attacked by a mysterious shadow.

Then comes the title card, and we jump ahead to the present day, where a realtor named Leigh (Catalina Sandino Moreno) is informed that one of her listings was the scene of a very strange suicide. Now it’s up to her artist sister Vera (Naya Rivera of “Glee”) to figure out what happened and why it’s happening again.

McCarthy takes his sweet time doling out information, so it takes a little while for Vera to become “At the Devil’s Door”’s main character. The film tells its story like a relay race: each woman sees a ghost and then hands off control of the plot baton right as things start getting good. This means McCarthy doesn’t always appear to be steering his own movie; this impression isn’t helped by too blunt dialogue such as when Leigh explains to a prospective buyer, “I know I can get you a good house, even with all the bad news out there.”

But as the plot thickens, McCarthy’s reach starts to match his grasp. Until then, creepy atmosphere and Bridger Nielson’s gorgeous cinematography put the film through its paces. It also helps that McCarthy has a recipe-specific collection of tropes in mind for his movie’s climactic but confounding scare scenes: an out of focus man shaped shadow; a circular smudge on the floor; women suspended in mid-air by an invisible force; a frightened little girl in a red slicker straight out of “Don’t Look Now.”

These images are liberally recycled throughout Vera, Hanna and Leigh’s respective story arcs but just when it seems like we might be getting stuck in this funhouse loop forever, McCarthy breaks his movie’s cycle of shared generic motifs and steers it confidently toward a devastating dialogue-free confrontation that is easily one of the creepiest, most haunting sequences in recent American horror cinema.

“At the Devil’s Door” reminds me of an early John Carpenter movie in that its characters don’t “[refer] to characters in other movies,” as Carpenter once put it. They do share something with Carpenter’s characters though: they’re simple people whose actions tell you everything you need to know about them. You will remember McCarthy’s name after this one.

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