Horror Hotel

This film remains under-rated and under the radar for it's atmosphere, cinematography, and editing (especially one great match-cut).

The film opens on the New England village of Whitewood in 1692. The Puritans are getting ready to burn a witch. What makes this different? For one, nobody was ever burned at the stake for witchcraft in what is now the USA - they hanged them. But burning is much more creepy and cinematic. Also, they happen to be burning an actual witch - Elizabeth Selwyn. At first she begs for help from Jethro, a puritan in the crowd. Jethro is asked if he knows this witch. He says no. As she is burning, Selwyn sends up a prayer to Lucifer that she will serve him for eternity if he curses Whitewood for her sake. Jethro sends up affirmations to Lucifer too. Note to Jethro - after this burning is over you might want to leave town because praying to Lucifer with a condemned witch is just not good form in a paranoid conformist society such as 17th century New England.

Cut to present day (1962) and a professor (Christopher Lee) is lecturing students on this particular incident on his series of talks on witchcraft. One particular student says she wants to do some field work on this subject, and the professor directs her to Whitewood and to the innkeeper of the town's inn. When the student arrives she finds it forboding, and small groups of people gather in the street and stare at her. A ghostly fog shrouds everything. Let's just say our heroine gets more than enough field work to satisfy her thesis.

Soon, back home, her brother and boyfriend get concerned and they head to Whitewood too. Let me just say that this is one of those horror fllms in which the characters refuse to acknowledge the clues/warnings that would turn most of us in the opposite direction, but then we would have no movie if everybody had their curiosity tempered by self preservation.

With cinematography by Desmond Dickinson that is wonderfully atmospheric and eerie with one of the great inspired endings to a horror film.

Eeriest scene to me? When the innkeeper at Whitewood asks the young visiting coed if she would like to join the other guests in dancing and you see them spinning and pirouetting about in perfect synchronization as though they are decorative mechanical figures dancing in a jewelry box.

I'd recommend this one today. It really holds up and the horror - though not graphic at all - is very effective.

A more than good b/w horror movie, based on witchcraft and satanism, with a very good cast and definitely a correct atmosphere. A young collegial goes to a small Massachussets town and find a coven of three hundred years old Satan worshippers. Maybe a little dated, but still more than watchable.

Having not taken much time to watch older movies of this genre, I was pleasantly surprised by how comprehensive the film was.

Black and white photography rarely seems to look this good, and has been one of the things that has turned me off such films before now. The visuals in City Of The Dead are so sharp and foreboding that they serve to accentuate the small town paranoia perfectly.

In terms of the characters, Patricia Jessel as Mrs Newlis and Christopher Lee as Prof Driscoll, are supremely sinister, whilst Venetia Stevenson as Nan Barlow, is hopelessly deserving of the viewers compassion as the witches prey!

I've come to love this film, not just for the sake of the film itself, but because it proved me so wrong in my assumption that most movies of this type/age are dull, it's incredibly watchable and tense.

Strangers rarely come to Whitewood...and for good reason. For it's inhabited with witches and warlocks...and Christopher Lee! He's absolutely menacing in his role of Professor Driscoll. Horror Hotel (aka: The City of the Dead) is a just an old fashioned horror story, it's even kind of creepy. I think this one is all about the atmosphere; a dark and rickety hotel located in an aging New England town that boasts an excellent use of fog that would make John Carpenter envious. It's something to be seen. Horror Hotel is slightly dated, but not too shabby. After all, "the basis of reality is fairy tales, and the basis of fairy tales is reality"

This movie has everything you would want in an oldie B&W horror movie. Start with Christopher Lee in a typically suave ambiguous role. Add old stories of witchcraft and the dead rising from their graves, naive young girls, creepy men standing randomly on the side of the road, an old priest keeping jealous watch over his ruined church, mist rising from the road, a suspicious hotel landlady (she looks a little like Judith Anderson in Rebecca). This one checks all the boxes and is well acted by all the major characters. Time well worth wasting.