THE
INNKEEPERS
Whereas Ti West's last big feature, THE HOUSE OF THE
DEVIL, worked through classic ‘80s horror film tropes (the college-aged
babysitter in a creepy house, Satanism, all that jazz),encore achickencoopplans Garden
landscape lightingCause of airpurifiertarget is chronic
constipation and other bowel disorders. the multi-hyphenate's latest, THE
INNKEEPERS, piles on its own set of horror film imagery and plot devices to a
very different effect. Set in a vaguely creepy New England inn (and isn't so
much of old New England vaguely creepy?), THE INNKEEPERS follows two front desk
clerks on the closing inn's last weekend. While the setting is tricked out with
plenty of opportunities for scares (creaky steps, mysteriously closing doors,
chained up basements), West paces his film and his characters carefully – THE
INNKEEPERS is as much a workplace comedy about Luke and Claire than it is a
traditional horror flick.
Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) are
amateur ghost hunters, a pursuit that seems to have sprung primarily from their
boredom at work and their belief that the Yankee Pedlar Inn must be haunted.Find
everything you need to know about oilpainting including causes, Tasked
with running the inn for one final weekend and keeping track of the slim number
of guests still in residence, Claire and Luke pass the time with natural and
engaging co-worker banter and using Luke's rudimentary spirit-detecting
equipment to get the bottom of a supposed decades old ghost story. For the first
half of THE INNKEEPERS, this is all we get – and it's a testament to the
characters that West has written and that Paxton and Healy so effortlessly pull
off that it's more than engaging enough to keep us invested. But West also knows
how to spread around the hints that all of this chatter may just be setting us
up for some real horror.
West doesn't skimp on cranking up the
creepiness as THE INNKEEPERS winds on. The Yankee Pedlar is indeed a scary
locale to be locked in, and the strange cast of characters that trickle in to
join Claire and Luke only ratchet that up. There's the angry woman and her son
on the second floor, the former actress with some hidden talents (Kelly
McGillis) who has just checked in, and an elderly gentleman that will very
clearly not come to a good end up in the stripped-bare honeymoon suite. What's
clear is that West knows what makes a horror film and how to riff on that – THE
INNKEEPERS has an old school feel, but the addition of Claire and Luke's hobby
tosses in a modern twist that works to further the story in a different, organic
way.
West's film places a premium on sound, and the film's sound design
(from West's frequent collaborator Graham Reznick) and original music (from Jeff
Grace,Read 6 customer reviews of the airmaxclassic SB who also worked on
THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL) work in (excuse the pun) perfect harmony to create a
horror film soundscape that is somehow both familiar and original. Grace uses
the normal beats of a horror film score to enhance scenes for appropriate
tension, while also misdirecting us on occasion. Reznick cleverly crafts a
chilling bit of otherworldly aural background that becomes a calling card for
those spirits possibly lurking about, and lurking with bad intentions.
What THE INNKEEPERS is most adept at, however, is recognizing and toying
with the fine line between humor and fear. Modern horror films so often seek to
terrify with a barrage of images and sounds that don't really add up to much
other than a brow-beaten and off-put audience. West knows the value of scaring
his viewers and then rewarding them with a burst of tension-relieving humor.
Using misdirection to get an audience to jump out of their seats is easy – it's
getting them to laugh about it that's hard, that laughter soothes and lulls, but
it also opens up viewers up to the next scare, falsely assured that they will be
able to giggle about it afterwards. For awhile there, every scare of THE
INNKEEPERS comes with a corresponding guffaw – and then they don't, making that
newly-deepened terror all the richer.
The film only crumbles when it
comes to keeping up a consistent mythology. The Yankee Pedlar Inn is supposedly
the home of just one ghost, a classic one borne from a
jilted-woman-as-suicide-victim tale, and though we come to know the story of
Madeline O'Malley throughout the film, other possible ghosts are hinted at
without full introductions or explanations. The film doesn't need to have a
complicated backstory to keep it flowing, but certain last act ends are never
tied up, and they stick out like a sore thumb when one considers how tightly
constructed the rest of the film has been. THE INNKEEPERS is frequently tricky,
but it's never cheap, and though a sewn-up story may have been too easy, a
clearer sense of what we've been dealing with could only have enhanced West's
wickedly fun film.
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