Ti West discovered a simple recipe for stellar independent ghost story filmmaking: Just add real ghosts.
Continuing his campaign to bring his mark of quality to the subgenres of cinema, West decided on ghosts for his latest movie. The inspiration came easy. The location he and his crew stayed at during the shooting of House of the Devil had been weirder than the fiction they were filming.
“Years later, when I thought to write a ghost story,” West said, “I thought, ‘Well, we kind of lived one.’”
Resolving to create The Innkeepers, West returned to The Yankee Pedaler. The eerie Connecticut location featured as more than the film’s setting. He made it the story itself, The Innkeepers illustrates the haunting of The Yankee Pedaler and its minimum-wage occupants, Sara Paxton and Pat Healy, trying to discover evidence of their hotel’s supernatural presences.
The haunted Yankee Pedaler
The cast stayed in the haunted hotel, and the stories they returned with suggest that being immersed in that uncanny atmosphere brought something special to the creative process.
“The Yankee Pedaler is supposed to be haunted in real life,” Paxton said. “A ghost didn’t jump out like, ‘Hey!’…but everybody had the same experiences. The lights would flicker on and off at night, the phone would ring and nobody would be there. The doors would fly open…and the window was closed.”
Healy was skeptical of the strangeness. Even still, Pat talked of how being submerged in the setting of the film informed his performance.
“In a hotel that’s reported to be haunted, even though I don’t believe in such things,” Healy said, “after three days, the wallpaper starts moving a little bit. Or the hallway’s dimensions start shrinking. I can see why people would think they had supernatural experiences. But that’s something that makes your job easier too.”
Pat Healy in The Innkeepers
Was West the catalyst of this creepy experience? His own take on the supernatural potential of The Yankee Pedaler had the artist’s remove to it.
“It’s kookier than it is scary, but it is strange,” West said. “Everything’s a little off. But I don’t really believe in ghosts.”
He wove the ghosts into the hype for the film in selecting his cast, though. When talking to Paxton, West said, “As I was trying to overhype her, I scared her. And then we got a call from her agent saying she doesn’t want to stay at the hotel.”
Everyone ended up lodged at the Yankee Pedaler though, for intense days together, but with a relatively relaxed 10-hour-a-day shooting schedule according to Paxton.
Such immersion can lend itself well to improvisation. With a lean shooting schedule, rehearsal time didn’t allow for much shift in the script. But Healy says that with the kind of lines West gave them, realism came naturally.
“I like the dryness of the humor of the character,” Healy said. “It’s written in a kind of rhythm I speak in.”
The quality of the conversation was “almost all on page,” Healy said. “It’s a very naturalistically written dialogue.”
The setting itself produced a few surprise moments, though. It’s one of West’s qualities as a director, his ability to seize on the spontaneous to bring more realism to his work.
“The ad-lib stuff is mostly physical,” Healy said. “There’s a moment with the two of us toward the end when I’m walking through the creepy basement and a string from a light bulb got caught on my glasses and I thought it was a spider web. I batted it away, and she asked what’s going on, and I say ‘spider web,’ and it’s clearly a light switch.”
On most matters, West is exacting. Details from color palette to sound design, cinematography to script, were applied with a highly critical approach.
“I’m particular about my color palette,” West said. “I had a very specific color the characters to be in, what I wanted the environment to look like…everything down the Schlitz can. As the movie goes on, everything gets darker, but all the lights stay on. So it was finding a way of creating that amber-y vibe.”
Sound design in particular stood out for The Innkeepers. In a film where the terror is often unseen, it’s a crucial component. West had full confidence in his mainstay talent, Graham Reznick.
“Graham Reznick’s like my secret weapon,” West said. “Sound design…is very underused in movies in general. Because you’ve got one image and 99 soundtracks. You can do so much with that. I don’t know why people don’t.”
He used it in ways that set him aside from the pack. “Another big thing about this movie was to not copy the trend of the ‘home video,’ found-footage, Paranormal Activity-type-thing. And I’ve never seen anything where you’re in the perspective of someone, hearing what they’re hearing and seeing what they’re seeing.”
Sara Paxton as "Claire" in The Innkeepers
The result is an exciting revival of a classic ghost film. Paxton related the outcome of The Innkeepers in thrilling terms.
“I was opened up to a whole new world,” Paxton said. “I wasn’t that familiar with indie filmmaking and this opened my eyes to my whole other view of filmmaking…this is something I’m really proud of.”
West’s talent left an impression on Paxton with his decisiveness and vision.
“Ti knows exactly what he wants to do and how he wants to do it,” Paxton said, “which made my job easier.”
She suits the role well. Horror film opened doors for Paxton with Last House on the Left. Her talents and girl-next-door presence could flourish in the resurrection of the more refined sub-genres of independent horror.
“Ever since I did Last House on the Left,” Paxton said, “a lot of roles started coming my way. It’s been a lot of opportunities. Before Last House, I’d never worked in the genre. I like doing all kinds of stuff.”
The Innkeepers could find a wide embrace. It certainly contains the talent to pull it off. West has never disappointed with the risk he takes or the passion and diligence he takes them with.
In a market where mainstream has played out torture-porn and found-footage horror is having its day, a revival of classic terror is surely due. The time for a film like The Innkeepers is now. And inspiration for eerie films is just waiting out there in the haunted corners of America.
As with HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (a movie I loved) it's a big build up for most of the running time until all hell breaks loose. But unlike HOUSE I think this film has more of a story that unfolds, although there are still a few loose threads by the end of the film, but they didn't bother me that much.
Special mention must go to Paxton and Healy, who are very likeable and have an easy, natural chemistry. No sudden gratuitous sex scenes or any of that bullshit.
If Ti West can avoid being sucked into the Hollywood remake machine and keep dropping confident little chillers like this on us then he'll really become a force to be reckoned within the horror genre.
I watched this and really enjoyed it.
As with HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (a movie I loved) it's a big build up for most of the running time until all hell breaks loose. But unlike HOUSE I think this film has more of a story that unfolds, although there are still a few loose threads by the end of the film, but they didn't bother me that much.
Special mention must go to Paxton and Healy, who are very likeable and have an easy, natural chemistry. No sudden gratuitous sex scenes or any of that bullshit.
If Ti West can avoid being sucked into the Hollywood remake machine and keep dropping confident little chillers like this on us then he'll really become a force to be reckoned within the horror genre.