Delayed Reaction: The Innkeepers

The Pitch: But what if the people working at the hotel already know it's haunted and are cool with it?
 

The last two employees of a known haunted hotel get one last scare in the last week before the hotel closes forever.
 
A true horror comedy is virtually impossible. That's kind of weird, because comedy and horror are really similar when you break them down. Both are about surprise. A scare and a joke both land when the audience is given something they don't expect, a shock or a punchline. The difference is how the surprise is processed: a laugh or a scream. The problem with combining the two is that they are trying to bring the movie in two different directions. Horror wants to keep things dark and serious so that the audience buys into the frights. Comedy want to keep the audience loose and happy. Jokes don't land if the audience isn't primed. That's why stand-up comedy shows have opening acts before getting to the headliners. The end result of virtually all horror comedies is a comedy movie that's making jokes about horror movies. Horror is kind of like vodka. As soon as vodka is mixed with something, the other liquid becomes the dominant taste. There are some exceptions, of course. Cabin in the Woods pulls it off pretty well.
 
The Innkeepers is a valiant attempt at threading the horror comedy needle. Most of it is a workplace comedy, not dissimilar to Clerks. It sneaks the horror into it by making it commonplace. The two employees (played enjoyably by Sara Paxton and Pat Healy) are looking to get scared even if they don't really believe they will be. The music score is in on the game. It's very playful and telegraphs early scares intentionally. Writer/director/editor Ti West lulls the audience into complacency. He never stops telling the audience that he's going to scare them, but he makes light of it and has so many false alarms that he's able to turn the tables late without it feeling like too big of a shift. It's not perfectly done. For how long the movie made me wait, I was hoping the payoff (scares) would be a little bigger.
A common storytelling device is something called Checkov's gun. The idea is that if someone loads a gun in the first act, then someone better fire it by the third act. In The Innkeepers, West employs something I'm calling "Checkov's Clue board". Not only does he give us a gun. He's also got a rope, a wrench, and a knife. The movie has a lot of detours: a former actress who is now a psychic, a mysterious old man who wants to stay in a room that is no longer open, a woman in a marital dispute. Not all of them pay off by the end. It's a nice trick to manufacture surprise and maintain tension, even when the movie is cracking jokes. The audience doesn't know which item will commit the murder: which dangling storyline will matter by the end? Interestingly enough, Cabin in the Woods uses the same idea, more literally, to pull off the horror comedy blend.
 
In the end, The Innkeepers wasn't quite funny or scary enough for me to really love it. It's the most I've liked Sara Paxton in anything. It was super easy to watch the movie. It's well enough made that I'm very likely to track more of Ti West's movies down.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend