"Because of all we've seen/Because of all we've said/We are the dead."
--David Bowie, "We Are The Dead"
"That is not dead which can eternal lie/And in strange eons, even death may die."
--H.P. Lovecraft, "The Nameless City"
I came upon "Horror Hotel" strictly by accident. Since acquiring my new DVD player, I've been obsessed with building a library to complement it. Being an economy shopper, I was immediately intrigued by some of the cheap, double-bill DVDs of low-budget horror movies. My real goal was the companion piece for "Horror Hotel", "Carnival of Souls"...but I realized that I had acquired something incredibly special when I played "Horror Hotel" first.
The earliest scene that leaves the deepest impression is Christopher Lee's college professor screaming out his lecture to his students, "Burn, witch, burn, witch, burn!" The punctuating statement of a long dissertation on the local New England witchs, it impresses one of his students deeply enough for her to investigate a little deeper. She returns to the village where it all happened, a place so steeped in Lovecraftian darkness and fog that even Cthulu would think twice before entering. But the poor girl can't seem to help herself in probing just a little deeper, whereupon she finds...well, that would be telling, wouldn't it? Suffice to say, she winds up finding a whole lot more than she bargains for at the local inn...with DEADLY consequences.
The only real flaw with this movie is its public domain horror characters. Anyone looking for someone along the lines of Norman Bates, Ash, or Freddy Krueger is going to be supremely disappointed; no character here is quite that singular. But so what? Like any truly well-made Frankenstein monster, its whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. Thanks to the two essential factors that shine--acting and staging--this film lives and breathes like a Ray Harryhausen monstrosity, pitiless and cold in its intent on building the atmos-fear to fever pitch. From the initial burning of the witch Elizabeth to the disappearing familiar who marks his mistress' victims to the grisly fate of our initial heroine at the hour of thirteen to the desperate struggle for survival in the cemetary to the black irony of the last scene...simply put, this film should be shown to anyone who ever questioned Neil Gaiman's assertion that the genre we call Horror is not a place that a traveler should walk alone.
A final note: there is a supreme irony in the movie's resemblance to another, more revered black and white horror gem: Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho". The stories are different enough for the most dim-witted audience member never to be confused as to which was which, but the arc of the story follow the same threads: (minor spoiler alert) girl goes to far-out-of-the-way place, girl checks into hotel with slightly creepy owner/operator, girl is brutally murdered, focus switchs to boyfriend and another girl as protagonists, boyfriend and other girl throw down on the bad guy's @$$. Though both movies were made in the same year, 1960, I can't help but wonder if this was one of the films that Hitch was looking over when he saw how its mostly tacky brethren were turning a considerable profit. A master craftsman such as he could not have possibly missed the resemblance to his own film, one that is light-years more sophisticated than our current subject. But that is another review for another day...
--David Bowie, "We Are The Dead"
"That is not dead which can eternal lie/And in strange eons, even death may die."
--H.P. Lovecraft, "The Nameless City"
I came upon "Horror Hotel" strictly by accident. Since acquiring my new DVD player, I've been obsessed with building a library to complement it. Being an economy shopper, I was immediately intrigued by some of the cheap, double-bill DVDs of low-budget horror movies. My real goal was the companion piece for "Horror Hotel", "Carnival of Souls"...but I realized that I had acquired something incredibly special when I played "Horror Hotel" first.
The earliest scene that leaves the deepest impression is Christopher Lee's college professor screaming out his lecture to his students, "Burn, witch, burn, witch, burn!" The punctuating statement of a long dissertation on the local New England witchs, it impresses one of his students deeply enough for her to investigate a little deeper. She returns to the village where it all happened, a place so steeped in Lovecraftian darkness and fog that even Cthulu would think twice before entering. But the poor girl can't seem to help herself in probing just a little deeper, whereupon she finds...well, that would be telling, wouldn't it? Suffice to say, she winds up finding a whole lot more than she bargains for at the local inn...with DEADLY consequences.
The only real flaw with this movie is its public domain horror characters. Anyone looking for someone along the lines of Norman Bates, Ash, or Freddy Krueger is going to be supremely disappointed; no character here is quite that singular. But so what? Like any truly well-made Frankenstein monster, its whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. Thanks to the two essential factors that shine--acting and staging--this film lives and breathes like a Ray Harryhausen monstrosity, pitiless and cold in its intent on building the atmos-fear to fever pitch. From the initial burning of the witch Elizabeth to the disappearing familiar who marks his mistress' victims to the grisly fate of our initial heroine at the hour of thirteen to the desperate struggle for survival in the cemetary to the black irony of the last scene...simply put, this film should be shown to anyone who ever questioned Neil Gaiman's assertion that the genre we call Horror is not a place that a traveler should walk alone.
A final note: there is a supreme irony in the movie's resemblance to another, more revered black and white horror gem: Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho". The stories are different enough for the most dim-witted audience member never to be confused as to which was which, but the arc of the story follow the same threads: (minor spoiler alert) girl goes to far-out-of-the-way place, girl checks into hotel with slightly creepy owner/operator, girl is brutally murdered, focus switchs to boyfriend and another girl as protagonists, boyfriend and other girl throw down on the bad guy's @$$. Though both movies were made in the same year, 1960, I can't help but wonder if this was one of the films that Hitch was looking over when he saw how its mostly tacky brethren were turning a considerable profit. A master craftsman such as he could not have possibly missed the resemblance to his own film, one that is light-years more sophisticated than our current subject. But that is another review for another day...