HORROR HOTEL

Aka: The City Of The Dead
Director: John Llewellyn Moxey
1960

Although movies about Satanists are a dime a dozen today, one of the first films to accurately portray Satanism is the 1960 classic, Horror Hotel. This excellent exercise in atmosphere -- about a New England town ruled by a coven of witches -- falls just short of greatness thanks to an excessive. reliance on horror movie clichés (e.g., sinister residents of said town staring ominously at the hapless protagonists). Yet while the lack of subtlety and refinement relegate the film to the ranks of entertaining spook shows (rather than genre classics), the four-star level of weirdness earns Horror Hotel a place alongside the most memorable cult movies ever made. On top of that, it sports what may be the best, most terrifying (happy) ending ever seen in a horror film -- a genuine tour-de-force that is so powerful in its imagery that it almost single-handedly erases any reservations one has about the rest of the movie.

And it is strange. Horror Hotel is one of those lucky films whose missteps and limitations somehow magically fall into place, creating a weird alternative universe -- a sort of Twilight Zone in which the incredible seems completely natural. To begin with, there is not an actual exterior location shot anywhere in the movie, which was filmed entirely on studio sets, creating a claustrophobic sense of being cut off from the world at large. The "normal" world of college and homes is scene only in interiors, mostly brightly lit and cheerful. The film's second major lucky break lies in the fact that it is an English production set in New England. The British cast strives with varying degrees of success (Christopher Lee best among them) to affect mid-Atlantic accents, and the result is a stilted artificiality that almost makes the film sound dubbed. However, as with the unreal (or surreal) exteriors, the strange vocal inflections only increase the off-balance sense of being set apart from the real world, adding another layer to the perception that we are trapped in a dreamy, imaginary landscape.