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?
Movies featured: Halloween (1978), Corpse Bride (2005), Friday the 13th (1980), Beetlejuice (1988), The Shining (1980), Ghostbusters (1984), Coraline (2009), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1995)
Cinematographers: Pete Kozachik (Corpse Bride, Coraline, The Nightmare Before Christmas), Jace Disla (Coraline), Dean Cundey (Halloween), Barry Abrams (Friday the 13th), Thomas E. Ackerman (Beetlejuice), John Alcott (The Shining), László Kovács (Ghostbusters)
Directors: Tim Burton (Corpse Bride, Beetlejuice), Mike Johnson (Corpse Bride), John Carpenter (Halloween), Sean S. Cunningham (Friday the 13th), Henry Selick (Coraline, Nightmare Before Christmas), Stanley Kubrick (The Shining), Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters)
Wendy: This is KDK 12 calling KDK 1. KDK 12 to KDK 1.
Ranger: This is KDK 1. We’re receiving you. Over.
Wendy: Hi. This is Wendy Torrance at the Overlook Hotel.
Ranger: Hi. How are you folks getting on up there? Over.
Wendy: Oh we’re just fine, but our telephones don’t seem to be doing too well. Are the lines down by any chance? Over.
Ranger: Yes. Quite a few of them are down, due to the storm. Over.
Wendy: Any chance of them being repaired soon? Over.
Ranger: Well, I wouldn’t like to say. Most winters they stay that way until spring. Over.
Wendy: Boy, this storm is really something, isn’t it? Over.
Ranger: Oh yes. It’s one of the worst we’ve had for years. Is there anything else we can do for you, Mrs. Torrance? Over.
Wendy: I suppose not. Over.
Ranger: Well, if you folks have any problems there just give us a call, and Mrs. Torrance, I think it might be a good idea if you leave your radio on all the time now. Over.
Wendy: Okay. We’ll do that. It was real nice talking to you. Bye. Over and Out.
Sterling Hayden lays down the law to this lawless crew, and it’s a master class in close-work cinema.The entire picture is a minor masterpiece of noir fatalism, with a tone that’s desperate and downbeat at the same time. Astute observers will notice that this heist movie is the DNA from which Quentin Tarantino created Reservoir Dogs.
And what a bunch of ugly mugs are on hand to pull off this caper (when Sterling Hayden is the handsome one of the bunch, you know the camera won’t help anyone). Elisha Cook Jr.—film noir’s ever-inept leprechaun—brings his bug-eyed anxiety to the table. J.C. Flippen brings a more subdued kind of worry, something resembling shame, while his hair (clearly an inspiration for the Heat Miser) seems to be undulating off his head.
Still uglier mugs from Central Casting come on board: Ted de Corsia, Joe Sawyer, and the always deranged Timothy Carey, whose heavy-lidded visage ought to be the main image for the DSM-5’s section on sociopaths. His very presence signals ice-cold brutality and mayhem (it was Carey to whom Tarantino dedicated the script for Reservoir Dogs, by the way).
And there has to be a dame, therefore a leggy, vulgar Marie Windsor slithers around as Elisha Cook Jr.’s calculating wife, who is capable of everything and ashamed of nothing. Windsor took roles in a lot of the cheaper, darker noir pictures of that era, effortlessly defining the very concepts of cheapness and darkness.
In any case, the dialogue crackles, thanks to a script assist by hardboiled legend Jim Thompson. Lucien Ballard’s camera is in the right place, with the right angle, with the right lighting. And if you see little moments that hint at big moments in Kubrick’s later work, well, yeah, there’s that to enjoy here as well.
