It’s a simple but effective trick. Works for rock shows, and it certainly works for old, black-and-white horror movies. If you don’t have the budget for set design, just pump in the smoke machine! The City Of The Dead (1960; aka Horror Hotel) gets a lot of atmospheric effect through its one major street set being blanketed and swimming in fog.
Shot in the UK but set in Massachusetts with all the actors doing American accents, the film opens in 1962 in a small village called Whitewood where an accused witch named Elizabeth Selwyn (Betta St John) is being burned at the stake by her village. And yet, Elizabeth Selwyn is a witch, and swears to Satan for revenge. Cut to the 1960s and a plucky university student Nan Barlow (Venetia Stevenson) being influenced by her commanding history professor Alan Driscoll (Christopher Lee) to study further the subject of witchcraft. Nan ditches her drag of a boyfriend Bill Maitland (Tom Naylor) and square scientist brother Dick Barlow (Dennis Lotis) to travel alone to Whitewood for intensive research on her dissertation. Within the foggy village with villagers who stand silently and sternly in watch, Nan stays at The Raven’s Inn run by the severe Mrs Newless (St John). All is not what it seems, and the presence of modern day witchcraft soon rears its satanic head.
Directed by John Llewellyn Moxey with a great command of eerie mood and spooky style, The City Of The Dead is a fun, old-fashioned horror that still stirs some frightful moments, particularly its graveyard climax and its tense down-to-the-wire battle against a cloaked army of satanic followers. Of course, Christopher Lee is commanding and sonorous as the professor with a hidden agenda, and yet Patricia Jessel might steal the show as the rancoress Mrs. Newless (wait, does that sound like “Selwyn” backwards? Like Elizabeth Selwyn the witch?!I love that type of Nilbog stuff!). It strangely has aspects in common with Hitchcock’s Psycho released in the same year with its split structure of two protagonists, one investigating the other’s steps and its mirroring of a visit to a hotel with hidden secrets. Available to stream on both Kanopy and Tubi. Very satisfying proto-Hammer/Amicus British horror shenanigans in Americanised cloaking. Recommended.
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