Ti West, the 34-year-old writer-director of The Innkeepers, has spent the past several years steadily toiling his way through the ranks of horror filmmaking. His little-seen apprenticeship cheapies (The Roost, Trigger Man) led to a disowned, freelance gross-out job (Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever) and then finally a name-above-the-title breakthrough with 2009's The House of the Devil, which showed a quantum leap in West's control over his material and proved the thesis that, to mangle a Godardism, all you need to make a scary movie is a girl and an old building.
The Innkeepers, another marked refinement of technique that runs with the same idea, takes place almost entirely on the premises of the Yankee Pedlar, a three-story turn-of-the-last-century hotel located on what might be the Main Street of any smallish, down-on-its-heels Northeastern city. It's the Pedlar's last weekend of operation, and the skeleton crew of Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) is sleeping over, trading off shifts at the front desk. Since the hotel is nearly empty, however, Claire and Luke devote most of their attention not to the guests, but to investigating supernatural goings-on in the hotel. With a mike cued to EVP frequencies, the pair tries to collect solid evidence of haunting-via-suicide-case Madeline O'Malley, whose ghost Luke claims he has seen wandering the halls.
West's Devil, which followed its female protagonist, Samantha, through an evening of housesitting, created rising tension out of banal incidents (discordant family photos, unopened doors, a pizza delivery) that weren't particularly menacing by themselves, but imbued with sinister, uncanny implications made for a suffocating slow burn. This was fueled largely by a viewer's teasing knowledge of horrors just outside Samantha's view, a privileged vantage that Innkeepers does away with. In a genre lately given to gluttonous effects, West is the rare minimalist. Here, our almost complete POV identification with Claire is established early; when she puts on headphones, the soundtrack becomes muffled. Innkeepers stretches Devil's withholding further, creating a blank canvas of non-events against which the slightest incident, like a piano key that pounds down by itself, takes on an undue significance and becomes something monumental.
Of course, something does eventually happen, but the throttling shift of The Innkeepers' last act would be too little, too late if West hadn't already found traction in his movie's routine world. Paxton, the fine-featured, dimple-chinned blonde who managed to shine through the murk of the remade Last House on the Left and Shark Night 3D, gives a performance that's spunky and charming without being cloying. The dynamic between Claire and Luke is clearly written: She's straight out of high school, teenage sulkiness moving directly into an adult's no-prospects despair. Luke is maybe ten years older and ten years sadder, camouflaging a hopeless crush on Claire with affected older-brotherly forbearance while she blithely overlooks it.
The Innkeepers also has a good eye for the details of crummy shift work, including a bit of nicely played physical comedy involving humping trash into a dumpster, which will be horribly familiar to service-industry vets. In another scene, Claire and Luke, beer-buzzed and bored, act out a burlesque of the hotel's ghosts, to exorcise the tension. This bit of nose-thumbing into the dark recalls a similar defiant release in Devil, where star Jocelin Donahue Jazzercised her way through foreboding corridors in a safe bubble of Walkman noise. It's this youthful denial of vulnerability that makes West's slow-sidling haunted-house movies work. He understands the kidding way that his audience approaches horror and seems to play along with that jokey imperviousness — until rudely tearing up the all-in-good-fun contract and gouging us with actual pain.
The Innkeepers is so loaded with false scares and cautious treading toward nothing that when freshly spilled blood suddenly flashes on the screen, the shock is really alarming, a return to the scrambling, clambering fear of death that is at the center of these silly flicks.
Stay tuned for a Westword interview with Ti West at showandtelldenver.com.
