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. 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.
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?
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