There are no good new releases currently in theaters.
If you want to have a good time at the theater this upcoming weekend, just see “Guardians of the Galaxy,” and if you’ve seen it already, I would recommend watching it again rather than going to see any new releases in September. Every year, the movie industry suffers a drought of good content from September until November, and 2014 is no exception.
Thankfully, the offerings of video-on-demand have grown exponentially over the past few years, making this time of the year a bit more pleasant to get through for film buffs.
While scouring a few digital libraries, I came across the 2011 indie horror film “The Innkeepers.” Seeing as Halloween is about six weeks away, I decided to get into the spirit of the holiday early, and I gave “The Innkeepers” a watch. Thankfully, I don’t regret my decision.
To start off, I was pleasantly surprised by the film, but not in a way that I had expected from a horror film. I went in hoping to be terrified of turning off the lights while watching the film, but, to be frank, the film really isn’t that scary. Sure, it has its moments of terror, but they are relatively few and far between. What I was truly surprised by was how much I ended up caring about the characters.
The story is pretty straightforward. Two hotel clerks, Claire and Luke, are working the front desk during the final weekend of the hotel’s operation. They’re on a quest to prove that the hotel is actually haunted, as is suggested by some local urban legends.
The film does a great job of characterizing these two as a couple of semi-lazy outcasts finally trying to do something to garner the attention of their peers. It starts off with a healthy dose of banter between the two, firmly establishing the characters’ personalities while giving just enough exposition to explain why they do what they do. In fact, a large majority of the film is dedicated to developing these characters and building them up before tearing them down in the finale.
It’s an effective technique, and one that is unfortunately quite rare to find in horror films. The film plays the psychological game for a while, refusing to say whether or not the urban legends are actually true. It is disturbing to watch the psyches of these two likable people slowly unravel.
It’s the film’s strongly established sense of normalcy that makes it so effective as a horror film, more so than most horror films that just devolve into a barrage of jump-scares and an endless amount of gore. Watching a world that seems immediately familiar with characters that can be easily empathized with slowly twist into a ghost story from hell is unsettling, to say the least.
Many horror films use humor to relieve tension, but “The Innkeepers” does a great job of blending the two together. Sometimes I found myself laughing with the characters out of fear; other times the scares are underlined with a sense of self-awareness. Eventually, it becomes clear that humor can’t always save you from what’s lurking in the darkness.
I’ve always been a big fan of horror films that can be disturbing without relying on violence or gore. I believe that disturbing imagery can certainly supplement a horror film, but only when the filming techniques are already solid. Gore and violence should not be a substitution for creating actual tension and dread with the camera.
“The Innkeepers” is relatively tame by today’s horror movie standards, but director Ti West’s ability to use a tracking shot effectively or to leave the camera lingering on a scene just long enough to build tension proves to me that he understands what makes a horror film memorable. So, for blending strong filming techniques with good, witty writing and an uncomfortable amount of tension, “The Innkeepers” gets my recommendation.
