Year:  1960
Rating: 7.0

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AKA - Horror Hotel (USA)

If you are driving down a foggy New England road in the early days of February near Candlemass Eve and you come to a fork in the road where a tall man is standing there barely visible asking for a ride if you are heading to Whitewood, say no and stay to the right no matter your destination. Some unfortunately don't follow this advice in this chilling and rather surprising black and white witch tale from 1960. It is a lean film and sticks closely to the bone.


Though set in Massachusetts beginning in the Puritan times and then jumping to modern times, the film is a British affair beginning with the director John Llewellyn Moxey (who just passed away in April 2019) and for most of the cast who all do accents that flitter about sounding American and yet not quite American. But the story was brought to the producers by an American - Milton Subotsky who a few years later was to form Amicus over in England. This film certainly falls stylistically into that Amicus/Hammer territory.


A young attractive female student is studying about early American witches under her dour dead-eyed professor played by Christopher Lee. He suggests that to work on her thesis that she go to a small town called Whitewood that burned a witch named Elizabeth Selwyn in 1692 but not before she cursed the town and made a deal with Satan. The very pretty and bubbly Nan Barlow (Venetia Stevenson) but as it turns out not too bright stays at the Raven Inn where the owner Mrs. Newless has a striking resemblance to Elizabeth Selwyn.


As Nan cheerfully asks questions the fact that the town is constantly covered in a deep fog, that the ancient blind rector warns her to leave, that all the people who live there stop and stare at her and look as if their faces have been run over by a lifetime of terror, the disappearing man and the mute maid in the inn who keeps trying to pass her notes doesn't seem to sink in.


At one point she reads to Mrs. Newless from a book on witchcraft that in the old days they would steal something from a planned victim of sacrifice and follows this up with "Oh, Mrs. Newless my locket is missing, have you seen it." No dear but I will look for it. Oh ok. Instead of running like hell she shrugs off her dress showing a lovely garter corset combination beneath. Just the thing for a young college student. Lots of great atmosphere with fog machines doing double duty, brisk story telling and good enough acting. Christopher Lee shows up from time to time to add some star power to the film having already appeared in Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy and Sherlock Holmes.