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West is clearly unafraid of engaging with some of the genre’s stereotypes, as he proved with 2009’s well-received Eighties-style Satanic slasher House Of The Devil (staying at the Yankee Pedlar while filming and feeling a supernatural vibe from its dark history was the inspiration behind The Innkeepers). The starstruck Claire confides in her but continues with the ghost-hunting despite Leanne’s cryptic warnings.
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#FILM THE INNKEEPERS TV#
It doesn’t take a psychic to figure out how things will pan out – but one turns up anyway, in the shape of Leanne Rease-Jones (McGillis), a former TV actress who’s now reinvented herself as a ‘healer’ and ‘spiritual guide’ and is in town for a convention. Both are intelligent but bored underachievers, so when the owner leaves them in charge of the virtually-deserted hotel on its last weekend before going out of business, they see a chance to exploit the growing craze for ‘ghost footage’ websites by recording and filming evidence of the resident apparition – Madeline O’Malley, a young bride-to-be who was driven by tragedy to commit suicide in the hotel over a hundred years ago. Working on a fraction of the budget of Cabin In The Woods and without the self-imposed ‘single-take’ limitations of Silent House, West goes for establishing a high level of intimacy with his central characters, focusing on mundane details while building a gradual sense of menace and unease.Ĭlaire (Paxton) and Luke (Healy) are desk clerks and general dogsbodies at the Yankee Pedlar Inn, an old-fashioned hotel in a small Connecticut town. The last act produces a crescendo of terror and peril, but the reason it works so well is that West first involves us so deeply in the characters.A slow-burning horror film, set in a creepy American hotel with a sinister past – no-one can say that Ti West shies away from a challenge.Ĭomparisons with Kubrick’s The Shining will be inevitable, but The Innkeepers stands up well enough on its own as another attempt to answer the vexed question: how do you make a horror film that still makes you jump, and care what happens to its protagonists, when the genre’s tropes have been examined to the point of self-parody? It’s a play-it-both ways spooker, always maintaining the possibility that the ghost is in Claire’s mind - though West cannily rams home the point that this doesn’t really make any difference.
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Yet the climax is triggered by the heroine’s streak of duty - it seems everyone has cleared the haunted place when she remembers there’s one last mystery guest on the top floor who needs to be alerted. The way they mistreat the guests is funny and strangely sad, especially when Kelly McGillis shows up in a wonderful turn as an ex-soap actress-turned-psychic healer who chugs hotel miniatures to dampen her sense that something really bad is going to happen.
#FILM THE INNKEEPERS MOVIE#
Even if the ghost never shows up, the movie could get by as a weird romance between these characters, who play running jokes on each other, and react badly when others enter the bubble of their little world. This gives the funny, fragile, appealing Claire (Sara Paxton, turning on talents taken for granted by the makers of the Last House On The Left remake and Shark Night) a sidekick in slackery, droll, buttoned-down net-nerd Luke (Pat Healy). The House Of The Devil was a lady-in-peril film which kept its heroine alone on screen in an old, dark house for practically its whole running time. The big scare in the first half of The Innkeepers is an internet prank that you’ll still jump at it shows how good the film is at creating a pervasive air of dread out of a depopulated lobby, the slightly off reactions of characters who can never flat-out tell each other things that should be obvious, and the old favourite, gathering shadows at the end of an era. Following up his effective The House Of The Devil, Ti West prefers a traditional approach. Many recent ghost stories, from Insidious to The Woman In Black, try to be like ghost-train rides - rattling through stories to spring as many scares on audiences, and unwary protagonists, as possible.