As we put away the Halloween decorations, consume the last morsels from the bowl of candy, and compost the last shreds of the jack-’o-lanterns, we realize in retrospect that fall of 2009 was a particularly good season for horror films. In fact, one of the biggest hits was a simple, and simply shot, tale of a house haunting called Paranormal Activity.

Paranormal Activity is probably more famous right now for how it was made (on high definition, in secret, for eleven grand, and over the course of about a week) and its performance at the box office than for its actual achievement as a horror story. And it has correctly been compared to The Blair Witch Project as a sociological and aesthetic phenomenon. It is inexpensively made, designed to look like documentary footage, and makes a virtue of its amateurishness. But despite the carefully orchestrated advance word on the film, it also isn’t very scary.

The story concerns a couple, Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloat), in a normal, typical suburban house who suspect that something strange is going on around them. Micah gets a movie camera to chronicle their daily life coping with these disturbances and to photograph rooms while they are gone or asleep. Nothing much happens, really. There are funny noises in the attic, and later door slams and a shadow appears, and in the end Katie, who has been bothered by the ever-present camera and by Micah’s initial indifference and then his attempts to “solve” the mystery, erupts in violence. The solution to the mystery, when it arrives, is unclear, and seems to suggest that a demon has followed Katie from her old house to this one and possessed her.

What Paranormal Activity is really about is the tensions in contemporary relationships (Katie and Micah seem to do nothing but fight), the fear of bodily invasion, and the insecurity of the houses live in, which is a variation on the tension many Americans feel about their mortgages. At root, it is an “old dark house” horror story, updated to the Street of Dreams. (The “body invasion” theme is going to be picked up in another new film, The Fourth Kind, about alien abductions). But, ultimately, what Paranormal Activity reveals is that the pseudo-documentary technique keeps the viewer at too much of a distance from the events on the screen, and for horror to work you need to be involved with the characters or at least inside their consciousness. The documentary style is ultimately standoffish. The paradox of cinema is that fiction narratives are more “real” than documentary.

The “old dark house” story is also at the heart of two other horror films released this season. The Stepfather is a fairly direct remake of — and in fact an improvement on — the 1987 cult hit. The new one replicates the old one with some significant changes. The household that serial killer David Harris (TV’s Dylan Walsh) marries into has three kids instead of a teenage girl, and it is the eldest son, a troubled older kid who is just back from banishment to military school, who suspects his new dad of being evil. This version also drops the subplot of the relative of a previous victim tracking down the serial killer when the police are helpless or uninterested. But the killer’s psychology is the same, and essentially the same things happen — Harris is welcomed into the community, suspicions arise, he has to kill an inquiring buttinsky, and there is a final showdown that ends up in the attic (like the recent stalker film, Obsessed).

The original Stepfather is fine if somewhat low budget and didn’t need to be made, though there were two sequels that were of decreasing accomplishment. What was great about the first one was its subversiveness. The serial killer is obsessed with family, but no family can ultimately live up to his desire for normalcy. Instead he destroys the families he finds, suggesting that the desire for normalcy is ultimately misguided. The new version maintains that implicit critique. It also holds to the first film’s idea of the household as a battlefield, emotionally and finally literally. Harris takes over the basements of the houses he invades and turns them ostensibly into workshops, though there are also warehouses for his secrets. It’s his “subconscious.” The main floor of the house is the public face of the family, and the upstairs houses the compartments of the other family members’ identities. The attic, always the host of the final confrontation, is like the superego, dispensing justice. Here though, unlike the first version, a sequel is implied, whereas the original sequels had to tie themselves into knots explaining why the Harris character was still alive or now had a different face (the brilliant Terry O’Quinn didn’t appear in the third film).

The House of the Devil is not a remake, but it might as well be. If Paranormal Activity wants to trick the viewer into thinking that it is a record of an actual haunting, Devil wants to simulate a horror style from a previous generation. It aspires to capture the tone, style, mood, and effect of a ‘70s horror film. From its title card, with the copyright date at the bottom of the screen in the old style, to the “feathered” hairstyles of the girls in the cast and the swatches they wear, to its slow buildup, it’s uniformity of time and place, and its novelty casting of old horror film alums (Tom Noonan, Mary Woronov, Dee Wallace).

The plot concerns a financially strapped college girl who takes a job as a babysitter in a spooky old house on the evening of a total eclipse of the moon. The owners of the house, new to town, have other plans for her. Devil is written and directed by cult director Ti West, who has a burgeoning reputation, thanks to his films The Roost and Trigger Man. His approach in this film is classic ‘70s horror, character based, slow in development, full of misdirection, and with a twist at the end. It’s one of the best horror films to come along in a while and for horror cultists it is a welcome return to a calmer sort of horror filmmaking.

D.K. Holm is The Voice’s cinema critic and author of several recent and forthcoming books, including Film Soleil.