Ashley Rickards in At the Devil’s Door (IFC Films)

There are horror movies that wink and nudge at you, knowing you understand the tropes and the paces. They allow you to keep an ironic distance from the circumstances and have a good laugh. There are other horror movies that are a roller-coaster fun house. They make you jump in the air and look ridiculous so you and your friends can laugh at your behavior. Then there is At the Devil’s Door. Its makers want to do one thing and one thing only, and that is to scare the bejesus out of you. And boy, do they succeed.

It starts in the California desert where a cute as a button 16-year-old girl is in luuuv with a typical California dude who takes her to his crazy uncle to play a “game” and maybe win $500. Well, she wins all right, and considering the crazy uncle starts muttering about the left-hand path, you know that the poor girl is going to wish she never played.

The action moves to what looks like a particularly rainy northwest city, and focuses on two sisters. Both parents are gone. Leigh (Catalina Sandino Moreno), a real estate agent, wants to settle down and start a family. Vera (Naya Rivera), younger and an artist, likes her alone time and does not savor attachments. Problems occur when the older sister is sent to inspect a house that the aforementioned teenage girl once lived in.

I really don’t want to get further in the plot than that. What I want to say is that director Nicholas McCarthy and his crew do an astounding job creating tension and a feeling of dread. Not since John Carpenter has someone done so much with a tracking camera and depth of field. And jump scares? I’m a hardened horror dude and I leaped out of my chair about five times. If you get one out of me, you’ve done your job well. So kudos there.

The plot is, if you think about it, ludicrous, but it still has some surprising twists and jolts. There’s also some sleight of hand here, where you are busy eyeing one plot strand and then another one supersedes it. The whole film comes together quite nicely in the end. Well, for us. I mean, this is a relentlessly downbeat flick. There are very few flickers of light and the ones that are there get snuffed out prettily handily.

There are minor quibbles: some wooden exposition delivered woodenly by the otherwise capable cast and attempts to drop some topical subjects—home foreclosures—to explain the uncertainty of millennial society. But that ends up being half-hearted window dressing. Once the spooky comes, all else is forgotten and At the Devil’s Door’s sole purpose becomes making sure you sleep much less comfortably at night. And, at that, it succeeds quite admirably.