Sun 30 Oct 2016
A Halloween Movie Review by Dan Stumpf: HORROR HOTEL (1960).
Posted by Steve under Horror movies , Reviews[7] Comments
HORROR HOTEL. Trans-Lux, US, 1962. First released by Vulcan Films, UK, 1960, as The City of the Dead. Christopher Lee, Patricia Jessel, Betta St. John, Venetia Stevenson, Dennis Lotis, Valentine Dyall. Written by George Baxt and Milton Subotsky. Directed by John Moxey.
You really need to see this.
Expertly done on a small budget, Horror Hotel opens in the 1600s colonial village of Whitewood, Massachusetts, with a witch (Patricia Jessel) being burned at the stake, calling down a curse on the place as her lover (Valentine Dyall) looks on. Jump cut about 300 years and we’re in a college classroom where Professor Driscoll (Christopher Lee) passionately relates the episode to a room of rather superannuated students. Some scoff, but pretty coed Nan Barlow (Venetia Stevenson) asks to do further research, and the eager-to-help pedagogue suggests with a sly look in his eye that she try poking around in an out-of-the way village… called Whitewood.
Nan’s boyfriend (Tom Naylor) and brother (Dennis Lotis) pooh-pooh the idea, but in no time she’s driving through dense, forbidding fog to the remote hamlet, pausing only to pick up a mysterious hitchhiker (Valentine Dyall again) before she arrives at the blighted hamlet, finds a rather dank and forbidding Inn, meets the landlady (Patricia Jessel again!) and sinister things start happening, slowly at first, but quickly building up to a grand and nasty finale.
Cinematographer Desmond Dickenson, whose credits include Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet and Michael Gough’s Konga, fills the screen with memorable creepiness; low-lying mist covers the ground and obscures the buildings, hiding the cheap sets wonderfully, and the camera shifts to odd angles at times, never arty but constantly surprising.
The players put earnest effort into their parts, even the stock types. Ms. Jessel evokes the spirit of Judith Anderson effectively, with maybe a touch of Barbara Stanwyck. Christopher Lee is a shade too patently fanatic as the sinister professor, but I saw a lot worse back in my college days. And Betta St. John does a wonderful horror-movie heroine, perky and terrified in equal measure.
The plot unspools quickly, with a few clever twists, and if Horror Hotel never hits the Classic mark, it doesn’t miss it by much. In all, a pleasantly terrifying way to spend an October evening.
October 30th, 2016 at 8:45 pm
Very close to a classic, and well worth seeing with something of a PSYCHO twist.
October 30th, 2016 at 9:07 pm
Definitely a must see for me.
October 31st, 2016 at 1:03 am
Ordered the British cut at Amazon. $5.95 plus shipping. Supposed to be much better quality than earlier versions. After your reviews I couldn’t refuse at this price for new. Thanks for the heads up indeed!
October 31st, 2016 at 2:13 am
It’s a great example of low-budget British film-making of the era. In effect it is an early Amicus movie, with a number of the usual suspects. It does feel very studio bound, but that isn’t really a problem as it adds to the rather nightmarish stmosphere. A talented cast of British thesps have a very good go at trying to convince us that they are American. Director John Moxey would later on make the classic TV shocker THE NIGHT STALKER, as well has having a distinguished career on series TV. I don’t know what it was in the atmosphere of Whitewood, but it seems to have rubbed off on some of the people who made this. Both Moxey and Dennis Lotis are still alive, both aged 91!
October 31st, 2016 at 8:12 am
Hands down the best horror movie about witches ever made. Saw it on TV as a teen and it’s stayed lodged in my brain forever. Would watch it whenever I saw it listed in TV Guide. It disappeared from TV for a very long time after the late 80s, resurfacing only very recently in its original format. I watched the British original for the first time only two years ago, and realized the US version I saw on TV all those decades was almost a different movie so much had been cut out of it.
October 31st, 2016 at 12:02 pm
I’ve always liked Betta St. John. Quite pretty.
One thing the movie never points out, but observant viewers can catch, is the witch SELWYN and the innkeeper NEWLESS are practically the same spelled backward.
September 6th, 2020 at 11:06 am
[…] honed his skills in the supernatural genre with The City of the Dead, aka Horror Hotel (reviewed here earlier on this blog by Dan […]