Sometimes you gotta bust out the heavy artillery to battle a Satanic murder cult.
I thought I’d try a different type of movie for today’ review. For a long time, my wife and I have owned a double-dvd set of old, public domain horror films. I remember enjoying some of them many years ago, but I can’t recall a single detail about any of them. I watched the first of the features, 1960’s Horror Hotel, which is probably the oldest movie ever reviewed for “31 Movies for 31 Days” (certainly my oldest, the previous one being 1968’s Night of the Living Dead). The plot centers on the town of Whitewood, Massachusetts, which was the site of a 1692 witch burning. A student at a nearby university is studying the local history of witches, and is encouraged to go visit the town by her professor. Naturally, spooky stuff happens. She ends up being sacrificed, and both her brother and her boyfriend decide follow her trail to Whitewood’s lone hotel to investigate her disappearance. That is where a final showdown takes place, involving the Satanic coven of witches who have cursed the town for centuries.
I found Horror Hotel to be a charming, if ultimately toothless diversion from the more modern horror films I’ve been watching. I would be happy to have it playing in the background of a Halloween party, where the black and white imagery would set a nice seasonal tone. The town of Whitewood is always covered in a blanket of fog, and features a creepy cemetery that would not be out of place in one of your more enterprising neighbors’ yards in October. The plot never deviates from its expected course, and the “twist” at the end is telegraphed in the first ten minutes of the movie. It’s tough to know how much to dock a film like this for playing it so straight, though. You can’t subvert common horror conventions before they have become common, after all.
I’ll give the movie points for its final sequence, which has some visual panache and at least a modicum of danger. There are a lot of expository scenes in the early going, however, that make it a bit of a chore for even the short run time. One thing I found fascinating is that there is a scene mid-way through the film where we see our heroine changing clothes in her room. Given the era, it was far less revealing than what many women wear throughout the entire run-time of most horror movies, but it was still a girl in her underwear for no real reason. My mind went to countless similar scenes that exist in more recent horror movies, purely to get in a little T&A. Apparently, mindless titillation is a requirement for the genre that dates back sixty years or more. Despite its age, I found that Horror Hotel hit most of the same beats I would expect out of a similar movie that had been released this year, albeit in a more rudimentary manner. It’s funny how fervently you can love a genre that ends up giving you much of the same, just re-packaged in countless, bloody ways.
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