Movies: Trusting young normal human girl wanted to watch completely normal human child of unremarkable human parents.

There's probably no better example for how absolutely familiar the well-trod ground over which Babysitter Wanted walks is than the shot of Angie (played by the preternaturally young-looking Sarah Thompson) plucking a phone number off a babysitter wanted flier hanging on a bulletin board on the college commons. It's one of those movie-real moments that only doesn't strike us as fake because we've seen it repeated so often in fiction that we've grown to accept it as reasonable. Like elaborate terrorism-for-hire plots or the idea that mental asylums all look like a cross between Disney's Haunted Mansion and the Bastille, we've seen so many people put up random posters for a babysitter - instead of using their social network of personal connections, as most folks do - that this bizarrely non-discriminating way of hiring somebody to watch your offspring doesn't strike us as odd. Or, to put a finer point on it, we know it's odd because Babysitter Wanted is a horror movie, so we know it's a horrible idea to go to the home of somebody who is fine with any babysitter just showing up. We know the poster might as well read, "Trusting young normal human girl wanted to watch completely normal human child of unremarkable human parents. References unnecessary. Non-virgins need not apply. NO CELL PHONES!" What strikes us as not odd is that nobody in the film thinks that it is odd. It's a genre plot point that's become so comfortable that it doesn't even evoke a twitch on disbelief-suspensometer.

The babysitter flier is one of those genre cliches that has become so overused that it no longer seems like a short cut or lazy storytelling, but rather a small shared ritual, like saying "bless you" when somebody sneezes. And in that small space of the knowing exchange of shared meanings, Babysitter Wanted delivers a surprising amount of simple pleasure. This isn't to say that such a willingness to embrace genre expectations doesn't come with some serious drawbacks. BW engages the viewer so effortlessly and places so little in the way of demands on the viewer's attention that the experience is inevitably a shallow one. But some pleasures are narrow. When I was a young boy, I was obsessed with card tricks. My stubby, sausage-like fingers ensured that I would always lack the dexterity to master such tricks myself. I had to content myself with simply learning all the secrets and watching others perform them. When I watch a magician perform a card trick, I (usually, but not always) can see exactly how the trick is done and follow every slight of hand and misdirection. Because of this, I think I enjoy the tricks far more than the uninitiated. For those being "tricked," there's always a hint of potential aggression there. For me, there's the uncomplicated, refreshingly simple pleasure of watching somebody being competent enough to successfully complete a tricky task.

Speaking of cards, let's lay them out on the table. Babysitter Wanted is really nothing more than a poor man's House of the Devil. Or, to give BW its chronological due, House of the Devil is nothing more than an artsy remake of Babysitter Wanted. The plots are similar: young college girl takes a babysitting gig for a family living in a remote house, there's a satanic angle, chasing and sacrificing ensue. But there, the differences end. Reviewers of West's retro fright pic often praised it with negatives: no jump scares, no torture porn, no ADD-friendly pacing and editing, and so on. From the list of negatives, you could imagine a theoretical alternate version of the film that deployed far more typical genre tropes; but you don't have to, Babysitter Wanted is that hypothetical flick.

Aside from storytelling choices, the key difference between the films centers around the treatment of their source material and, by extension, each film's relationship to its genre. BW lacks the period trappings, apparently a major draw for legions of folks who felt that the lack Walkmans in contemporary American cinema was a dire failing much in need of correction. But otherwise, the two films are genetic relations; BW and HotD both draw deep from the well of "Satanic panic" films of the 1980s, only the former does it without the self-conscious display of influences and technique. House treats the whole Satanic stories subgenre as an archival tourist spot, a curious destination to visit and document. By contrast, Babysitter treats it as just another subgeneric tributary, perhaps somewhat attenuated but still flowing, that pours in the mainstream of horror. This is distance is typical of West. The result is that West's work, even at its most energetic (Cabin Fever II), possesses an emotional detachment. This isn't a criticism of West; his most sublime moments often come from his careful indifference to the demands of genre and his movies would lack their delicious sadism if he trafficked in fan-service. In contrast, Barnes and Manasseri are eager to please and driven to fit directly into the expectations of their viewership.

What struck me while watching BW is that we no longer recognize how weird the standard horror flick is. In a way, West's flick is a far simpler beast. Its obsessive awareness of influence acts to restrain it. It wants to be a very specific thing - an '80s cult flick - and only that. By contrast, Babysitter pulls from satanic panic flicks, uses some torture porn elements, throws in some slasher like hunting scenes, goes in for some black comedy, and so on. These things are presented in a oft repeated and utterly familiar context, so the use of these elements doesn't seem particularly surprising or innovative. But, watching them come together, it dawned on me how many influences, how much film history appears in even the most run of the mill horror film. Most horror films, regardless of their merits and intentions, are the result of a century of artistic history and they carry the marks of this heritage, for better or worse, on their face.

One of the most common visual metaphors for evolution is the ascent of man illustration. You know the one: there's a chimp on the far left side, the start of a series of increasingly bipedal and hairless humanoids, that ends with a fully human individual. The problem with that picture is that it suggests variable levels of evolution. Chimps aren't proto-humans that couldn't cut it and therefore never got the bennies of a fully upright posture. Chimps are the result of the same millions of years of evolution as humans. They are equally, but differently, evolved. The same, in a strictly metaphorical sense, can be said of that most reviled of horror products: the "standard horror flick." Babysitter Wanted never voluntarily picked up this burden and it is almost unfair for me to place this weight on such a slender and innocuous flick, but for a brief 93 minutes, the film reminded me that even the commonplace is highly evolved.

Books: Horn section.

What happens to supernatural horror after it moved past the idea of the uncanny?

There's a scene in Joe Hill' sophomore novel, Horns, in which our main protagonist - a luckless slob named Ig - has a short conversation with a waitress at a roadside bar and grill. For the story to make any sense, you need to know that Ig has two fairly large horns growing out of his head. Ig never gets the idea to pull a Hellboy (though Hellboy himself probably thought of it as pulling a Concrete) and shave them off, so they're fairly pronounced by the time the waitress see them. In the course of their banter, she asks Ig, "Is it a mod?"

Ig confesses to not knowing what a mod is.

She clarifies, "A body modification. Did you do it to yourself?"

This is typical of the book. The supernatural is not awe inspiring or stunning. It doesn't produce existential vertigo or shake the pillars of our understanding of the world. Instead, it is just one more weird-ass thing in a world chock full of weirdness.

At first I was reminded of Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, specifically the discussion of how a unicorn sighting, discussed enough, devolves into the common place and is eventually folded into the mundane world and refashioned as a sighting of a horse with an arrow through its head. Though, on further reflection, that analogy doesn't fit. It isn't that there aren't unicorns, to use Stoppard's terms, but rather that they are no stranger than the fact that there are also horses walking around with arrows through their heads.

Which is genuinely weirder: A man who is forced to grow horns or a who decided voluntarily to attach horns to his forehead?

The central problem creators modern supernatural horror face is that the supernatural is neither stranger nor scarier than real life. It is the central problem of the New Horror movement (Peter Straub's term, not mine - take it up with him) and a hallmark of the newest wave of genre fiction, alternately dubbed the New Fantasists, the New Weird, or Interstitial Fiction. And Hill confronts this problem in his latest novel.

Let's get back to Horns. Ig's horns are not a body modification. They started growing after Ig, small time loser black sheep of the wealthy local celebrity family and alleged rapist and murderer, committed sacrilege by pissing on statue of the Virgin Mary during a bender. The statue was set up at the scene of the murder of Merrin Williams, the love of Ig's life and the woman he was accused of raping and murdering. Ig was never convicted of the crime because the DNA evidence the police hoped would connect him to the crime went up in a mysterious fire at the out-of-town lab facility to which it had been sent. Ig, of course, maintains his innocence. But not even his own family doesn't believe him.

The disfiguring nature of horns turns out to be the least of Ig's problems. He soon discovers that the horns have an inexplicable power over others. Whenever somebody sees the horns, they begin to tell Ig about their deepest, darkest, secret desires. Then, inevitably, they ask Ig's permission to act on these desires, they ask for permission to sin.

Remember those old cartoons where an anthropomorphic duck would be at a moral crossroads, then suddenly an angel and a devil - both Lilliputian versions of the main duck - would appear on his shoulder. The angel would advocate for the moral high ground and the devil would push for committing whatever sin the water fowl was on the brink of committing. Ig basically starts transforming into the devil on your shoulder, the voice of temptation.

Of all the superpowers in the world, the last one you should ever want is the power to read minds. Unfettered access to the unspoken thoughts of others is like unfiltered access to sewer water. There's a reason we don't say everything on our minds. Besides, do you really want to know the sleazy details of your spouse's private kinks? What about you brother or sister's? Mom and dad? Ig finds this new found ability to compel confessions maddening. Everywhere he goes, people see the horns and start chatting away about the worst things they can think of. His doctor confesses the sexual passion he feels for his daughter's 14-year-old best friend. His mom confesses that having kids was the biggest regret of her life. His grandmother confesses that she feigns her senility in order to punish her children and grandchild for their weakness. His father confesses that he bought the arson gig that secured Ig's freedom. A local cop confesses that he cops a feel (pun intended) when he is patting down arrestees. The local gas and sip attendant reveals that he wants to kill his desperately ill wife and start life over again with a mistress in Florida. And so on and so on.

In the midst of all these confessions, however, Ig's brother, Terry, confesses that he always believed Ig's innocence. Ig couldn't have killed Merrin, because Terry knows who did it.

With that confession, Ig's suicidal spiral ends, replaced by a mission of revenge that will put him in conflict with a person whose deep reserves of bloodthirsty evil will prove a match even for a (literal) devil like Ig.

Hill's second novel is less assured than Heart-Shaped Box, his debut haunted road novel. Though this unevenness isn't the product of Hill losing his nerve or doubting his talents. Rather, he bit off more than he could chew. There's at least two books in here: One dark comedy about a man growing into the role of the devil and the other a grim story about a doomed romance poisoned by unrealistic ideals of love. He never full balances these two strands, nor does he fully explore the Ig's new role as the devil (most notably, if he's the devil, does that prove the existence of God?) or the status of Merrin's real killer, who Hill suggests might also be a devil like Ig, but may not be. It's unclear if Hill's ambitions outstripped his abilities or if he lacked discipline to keep things tight. Still, the result is more sloppy than disappointing. For my part, I'd rather have a wealth of interesting, if not fully explored ideas, then a lack of ideas. Furthermore, even in the service of too many ideas, Hill's writing remains fresh and energetic. Hill also has a profound sympathy with his characters - even the most vile. He is willing to climb into their skin and speak in their voice, an abdication of authorial control over the interpretation of their text that is, in its own small way, genuinely heroic.

Less a horror story than a dark fantasy, Hill's work owe less to the American mainstream horror tradition his father so dominates and more to the eccentric visions of Thomas Disch, the off-kilter Brit sensibilities of Gaiman, instinctual storytelling primitives like Joe Landsdale, and modern genre revivalists like Kelly Link. What links them altogether is their dry, laconic approach to the uncanny. In the traditional horror novel, visitations from the impossible are a source of deep unrest. In works like Horns, they are something to endure or exploit, something to navigate or learn to live with.

Nearly a week ago, I posted the first chapter - a short two-paragraph chapter - of Horns. In it, Ig wakes up with a monster hangover and discovers his horns. Regular ANTSS commenter Sassy said that it reminded him of Kafka, specifically one assumes it reminded him of The Metamorphosis. There is something Kafka-esque about Horns and the New Horror moment it is part of, though it runs deeper than the transformation trope (which is hardly Kafka's invention). It's in the exhaustion of the transcendant, the idea that even visible evidence of a reality beyond our own won't make getting through the long and tiresome day any easier. When people confess their secret sins to Ig, it is hardly a revelation. They do it off-handedly, with the slight sense of relief one feels when you unburden to a stranger at a bar. There's a impatience to it, as if they'd rather quit talking about it so they can just get back to whatever it was they were doing. They embody the modern crisis of modern horror. It isn't that we don't believe in a transcendent world. It's that we're solipsistic to care. We vaguely hope that the banshee's death-signfiying wail won't be so loud as to drown out the crate dive Lady Ga Ga rarities mix that guy who is only sort of our Internet friend made us and we kinda accepted simply because he's a facebook friend but we think Lady Ga Ga is about as musically talented as a canker sore and he's kind of a bore, but still, free music, fuck yeah!

In his defense, Hill works in a narrative reason for everybody's nonchalant attitude to the fact that a devil is prowling in their midst, but it's clear that it is simply a beard. The story doesn't need it and I don't think Hill cared.

Horns is odd in that it is a flawed book that is still quite strong. An imperfect and occasionally unwieldy book, it is the work of an author determined to expand their range and willing to take the occasional fall if that's what it takes to push to boundaries. The result feels jagged and occasionally underdeveloped, but it's never dull.