Week of Review - Vacancy

We are 3 installments into this shorter Week of Review as American Horror Story: Hotel looms ever near, rumbling towards us all like a kind collective, television based prostate cancer.  Today I’ll be looking at another 2007 horror film, because apparently that was just a really good year for hotel horror.  However, unlike Saturday’s 1408 today’s topic skews much more in line with the key trends and themes of horror in the mid-2000s.  As much as I like to talk about the amazing 4-year period of 2007-2010 as the time when the 2010s truly began I’m thoroughly aware that change doesn’t happen over night. 

As I mentioned 2007 was a horror landscape dominated by the twin success of Saw and the blossoming trend of horror reboots.  Texas Chainsaw and Amityville Horror had both come out in 2005 and made a ton of money with Rob Zombie’s Halloween picking up steam to complete the hat trick that same year.  Haunted house movies wouldn’t pick up again till the twin success of Paranormal Activity and Indisious and zombies didn’t fully enter the mainstream till 2010.  Combine all this with the still lingering impact of Eli Roth’s Hostel, also from the truly terrible year of 2005, and horror was in bad shape.  Which makes it all the more impressive that Vacancy, which conforms to all the horror tropes and standards of the day, is really good.

Vacancy could charitably be described as the gritty modern take iteration of an age-old urban legend that’s punctuated the American consciousness since the rise of motels and road culture in the ‘50s.  The basic outline of the story is that a married couple’s car breaks down on a lonesome country road and the two are forced to stay in the sleazy and run down nearby motel.  However, upon entering the motel it quickly becomes clear this is the sight of sinister goings on as the couple is forced to fight for their lives against a cadre of masked killers.  As I said, it’s an age-old story that’s been around for as long as we’ve needed to take up residence in the false comfort and artificial normalcy of motels and the idea of killers using a motel as a hunting ground is hardly new.  What sets Vacancy apart is that it’s simply a very well written and excellent execution of that fairly simple idea.

As I mentioned Vacancy dives deep into the well of trends that informed most mid-2000s horror flicks, predominately in terms of visual identity.  Hits like Texas Chainsaw ’05, Hostel, and Saw made horror film makers really rethink the visual aesthetic that informed the worlds their films took place in.  You look at the ‘90s or most of the 2010s and there horror movies take place in what’s a ostensibly a fairly direct recreation of real life but in the mid-2000s everything was as dingy, grimey, and generally filthy and run down as possible.  Normally that approach can be off-putting, like in Zombie’s Halloween films where it made the whole proceedings seem unreal and removed from possibility.  In Vacancy, however, the approach is used to great effect as the filthy rundown look goes perfectly with old motel setting.  The Pine View motel seems like a place you’d never want to stay unless you absolutely had to but also a place that’s creepily reminiscent of a real rundown motel you might find on any given meandering shortcut. 

The other major trend of the era was what’s come to be called torture-porn.  This was the idea that a horror film’s central driving goal should be copious amounts of gore and putting the characters through as much pain as is humanly possible.  The idea was that we, the audience, weren’t intended to root for the normal people in these stories, we were meant to cheer for their sadistic, gruesome deaths.  I’ve always maintained that the prevalence of this trend was overstated by critiques at the time but it was undeniably present, however Vacancy neatly subverts the idea with a very clever twist.  What initially clues the couple in to things being wrong at the Pine View is that they find a tape in their room that depicts someone else being murdered in that same room.  It’s slowly revealed that the reason these killers are targeting the couple is to film their deaths and sell the video as snuff tapes.  It’s a brilliant idea that completely flips the script on the very idea of torture porn, making the kind of people who are desperate for more pain and gore into the straight up villains of the film.

At the heart of all this cleverness, however, is simply how well Vacancy writes and directs its two leads.  Luke Wilson plays the man David and Kate Beckinsale plays his wife and the two work together perfectly.  Their written as a married couple on their last legs after a personal tragedy has put an incredible strain on their relationship but unlike a lot of similar situations their relationship feels more real, genuine, and most of all meaningful.  You invest in the couple’s romance because you see how the two work together and how their tragedy is tearing them apart, and the story of them escaping the motel killers goes hand-in-hand with the two trying to overcome their circumstance and rekindle the connection they so clearly share.  It’s most similar to The Strangers, the 2008 film that basically set the tone for all future slashers, only much better written. 

Going back to that Strangers comparison the motel killers in Vacancy are actually much more believable antagonists than the titular Strangers.  The strangers were certainly menacing but the film constantly passed off their incredible luck as actual planning and their unstoppable nature became ludicrous by the end of the film.  In Vacancy you can believe these killers are a force to be reckoned with because they’ve been at this for a long time, to the point the hotel has been set-up as a legitimate hunting ground for them with secret pathways and overrides and everything.  Additionally the motel manager Mason, played by Frank Whaley, who is a delightful face for their antagonism, leads them.  The in the field killers are your standard masked, silent killers that serve to make the motel legitimately threatening while the manager adds a gleeful amount of insanity to the proceedings for an added amount of flavor. 

Vacancy is one of those weird little miracles of film that I’m always pleased to stumble upon.  It’s the kind of film that occasionally comes along to remind you that yes, the system does work, and even something that is a complete product of terrible trends can still be a really great and enjoyable film.  I highly recommend checking it out, especially if you’re like me and like your horror films with a bit of genuine romance mixed in.  Tomorrow, we stop playing around and broach one of the two biggest names in this subgenre though probably not in the way you’d expect. 


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