craig.duncan

This movie completely surprised me, something I've experienced only a few times in 50+ years of movie viewing. Saying even this much risks spoiling, so I will simply recommend this imperfect, entertaining, slightly edifying and enlightening, sometimes disturbing, barely known work of barely known makers.

Kudos to Eric Badros and Taylor Graham, and I hope to see much more from them.

I rated this IMHO under-appreciated movie a 10/10, not because I consider it perfectly written, acted, or produced (though I think these disciplines were done well) but because it almost perfectly appealed to an satisfied my personal, idiosyncratic likings of certain movies the supernatural horror genre, that being that it's possible to understand the events depicted in The Innkeepers as explicable entirely to misperceptions of an unreliable narrator, although misperceptions so extreme they border on acutely psychotic.

By personal disposition and choice, I don't believe in the supernatural, making me the kind of person sometimes called a Bright, a skeptic, an atheist, etc. For folk such as me, there are few ghost stories that don't require a great effort of suspension of disbelief to watch in a pleasant, engaged way, so one like The Innkeepers, where only the usual dramatic suspension of disbelief (ie: that the depiction is fictional, not factual) is necessary, is welcome, refreshing, and thoroughly enjoyable.

I also enjoyed the movie because of how it achieved – for me, at least – great tension, chills, and scares, with minimal photographic and sound elements. As I watched it, I felt I was watching a masterful display of storytelling art, rather than a more-common-in-the-genre exercise in latex prosthetics and makeup art.

Though it's perhaps unlikely that it will occur, if any fellow Brights read this, I strongly recommend watching this ghost story movie, pre-armed with my assertion that despite the seeming impossibility of this in a movie of this genre, it can be viewed as supernatural-free.