Neither one is especially interested in hotel management, but they're both students of the supernatural: They've come to the Yankee Pedlar because it has a reputation for being haunted and they want to see for themselves if ghosts walk the halls before it's too late. In the Yankee Pedlar's last weeks of operation, the staff have been reduced to just two people, Claire ( Sara Paxton) and Luke ( Pat Healy). However, not many have been stopping by lately, and the owners have chosen to shut it down. The Yankee Pedlar Inn is a hotel in Torrington, CT, that's been welcoming guests for over a hundred years. However, there are several high-impact shocks among the delicate chills.A pair of self-styled ghost chasers hunt for spirits in a run-down New England inn in this subtle thriller from director Ti West. Like many ghost stories, it risks seeming tame by serving up subtle hints, false scares and ominous warnings - everyone is well-advised to stay away from the basement, but naturally circumstances decree that they are lured down there - rather than the full-on blood and thunder of outright horror movies. Quite apart from the film’s strengths as a spook show, it serves as a showpiece for the young actress.
THE INNKEEPERS CAST TV
Just as The House Of The Devil looked back to the TV horror films of the 1970s, this is at heart an old-fashioned ghost story, made the more piquant by Paxton’s sympathetic, funny, vulnerable lead performance. Claire initially takes the place’s haunted status lightly, and the early stretches of the film include much teasing between the young leads, which masks a deeper relationship that only becomes apparent when the supernatural begins to make itself manifest. It’s the last weekend before the place shuts, and there are very few guests - a runaway wife (Alison Bartlett) with a jittery child in tow, a former soap opera actress who is now a psychic healer (Kelly McGillis, held over from the producers’ Stakeland) and an elderly gent (George Riddle) who insists on a specific third floor room where he spent his honeymoon even though it has already been stripped of most of the luxuries. Twentysomething Claire (Sara Paxton, the lead of the Last House On The Left remake and soon to be seen in the eagerly-awaited Shark Night 3D) works the night shift at the Inn with Luke (Pat Healy), a fellow slacker who maintains a web-site devoted to the hotel’s reputedly ghostly resident, a jilted bride who hanged herself in one of the rooms.
This is at heart an old-fashioned ghost story, made the more piquant by Paxton’s sympathetic, funny, vulnerable lead performance. The film may be too unsensational for the explicit horror crowd, but stands a chance of connecting with the audience for ghost stories who have made hits of Paranormal Activity and Insidious. Using the real-life Yankee Pedlar Inn in Torrington, Connecticut, as a setting, it’s an entry in the ‘haunted hotel’ stakes which has included Stephen King-derived shockers The Shining and 1408 and benefits greatly from the prosaic creepiness of the location, which is located on an ordinary street with a coffee shop round the corner rather than in the more traditional middle-of-nowhere.
Like director/writer/editor Ti West’s earlier The House Of The Devil, this is a low-key, slow-burning supernatural tale in which a vivid, sympathetic female protagonist is progressively menaced in a distinctive locale.