#mike nichols

“Did you hear that?”

Instead of trying to reinvent or revise the horror genre, American director Ti West plays the haunted house movie at its own game with his film The Innkeepers, knowingly traversing its tropes with consummate ease. He has no qualms with following genre conventions, yet with The Innkeepers, West has created something altogether different from a very similar mould. How? The secret’s in the ingredients.

Take the idea of a scream queen, for example. They are, for want of a better term, the “brainless tits and ass” of a film, an object to fetishise over while the film’s antagonist (be it werewolf, ghost, or hockey mask wearing murderer) goes about their bloody business. Claire, Sara Paxton’s character in The Innkeepers, is far from your average scream-queen. She’s a real person reacting rationally and logically to horrendously scary occurrences. She’s also incredibly well characterised in the same way that your average scream-queen isn’t. West takes a lot of time to allow the audience to get to know her, and it really pays off once the well engineered scares kick in.

In this regard, it can be said that The Innkeepers bares at least a passing resemblance to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Both films create and sustain an atmosphere of dread through a use of languid, usually static camerawork and capitalise on them with the occasional terrifying set piece. However, the comparison doesn’t really stretch much further than that. The Shining is a film that focuses on the tragic fall of a man, whilst The Innkeepers looks at the tragedy of a girl with no future. This essentially makes The Innkeepers a horror version of The Graduate, dealing with a young central character with no dreams and no aspirations.

A more obvious point of reference would be with mumblecore, the blossoming sub-genre of the American indie that deals with issues of wasted youth, awful relationships and what it is to be young in modern times. At one point in the film, Claire is talking with one of the guests at the hotel in which she works, a moderately famous actress, who asks her about her life (“Are you an aspiring actress?”), to which Claire responds: “Me? No, I just work at the hotel”. She’s lost, much like Benjamin Braddock, and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. But instead of throwing herself into an affair with an older woman, she investigates supernatural occurrences at a hotel – purely because it gives her something to do.

With this characterisation, West has stumbled upon a great formula for a horror protagonist: she’s the epitome of wasted youth, with both nothing and everything to live for. In fact, The Innkeepers is a film that suggests a solution for this so-called boredom. It’s a film that not only functions as A-grade horror, but also as a terrifying parable for the modern youth. The moral of the story?

Get a fucking job.

Richard Avedon, Mike Nichols and Elaine May