Friday, May 25, 2012

The Innkeepers

In their effort to try to push the gore envelope as far as they can, far too many of today’s horror movie makers forget that one of the keys to making an audience truly scared is, strangely enough, comedy. Get the audience on the edge of their seats with a few tense moments, break the tension with a laugh or two and then – WHAM! — hit them with the big scare. Ti West, director of The Innkeepers, gets it. As scary as the movie is – and it’s pretty darn scary – West never forgets the cardinal rule that an audience has to honestly care about the people in the movie. If you want the audience to feel real fear at what’s going to happen next, the characters have to be more than mindless meat bags waiting to explode.

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