Which is the reason he's spent most of his time lately building a website to showcase the inn's famous ghost, Madeline O'Malley, and try to make a name for himself as a paranormal investigator. Still, the pair presented in The Innkeepers is a far better-than-average representation of the form: Claire (Sara Paxton), in her early twenties, is a college drop-out who doesn't know what she wants and has thus ended up getting nothing much at all, working as a desk clerk at a struggling hotel, the Yankee Pedlar Inn of Torrington, Connecticut (a real hotel, really said to be haunted, and really the filming location of this otherwise entirely fictional movie) her co-worker is Luke (Pat Healy), an even sadder case, for while Claire is still young enough that a certain amount of fucking up is perfectly okay, Luke, who looks to be on the wrong side of thirty (Healy has more than 16 years on Paxton), has pretty much dead-ended, and when the Yankee Pedlar closes its doors for good after this one last weekend, he's got pretty much no prospects. Hopefully like them, anyway: our two protagonists are very much indie movie characters of the modern tradition, disaffected creative class sorts who are a little bit (or a lot) too keyed-in to internet culture to feel like actual flesh-and-blood people, and I know that I am not alone in wishing the entire population would be banished from low-budget cinema forever and always.
It gets that way through the sublimely old-fashioned tactic of making sure the viewer is invested in the characters, giving us a lot of time to get to know them and like them before even a lick of paranormal activity kicks in. And this brings us to The Innkeepers, about a pretty girl in a haunted hotel, which turns out to be a hell of a good ghost story and spooky campfire movie, with just enough depth of character and place that it's smarter than your average paranormal flick, and a significant improvement, to my eyes, on West's previous work. That might be overstating things a little, or a lot - his cultishly adored The House of the Devil is a zesty, skillful pastiche, but to my eyes, it is never anything more than a pastiche - but this much is certainly, undeniable true: the man has a real gift for assembling familiar elements in familiar ways and still making movies that are fresh and interesting and not nearly as worn-out as they feel like they're supposed to be. There are some corners of the internet where they'll tell you that writer-director Ti West is just about single-handedly reviving the horror genre.
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