Michael and Shawn Rasmussen wrote the oft-maligned (yet beautifully rendered) final John Carpenter picture, The Ward, in 2010 and since then they have concerned themselves with blood stained institutions that will not give up their ghosts easily. They took their own directorial stab at the haunted hospital in 2013 with Dark Feed. Here, it is a bed and breakfast inn located in Massachusetts, somewhere in the vicinity of Ipswitch or Danvers, the latter famously known as Salem Village. Indeed, the 'Witch Museum' up the street is the primary tourism attraction of the region, not counting the verdant, foggy atmosphere that offers some of the best production value that little money can buy.
When Jessica and Dan, a cute, if rather vanilla, couple purchase The March Carriage Inn they seem naively ill equipped for the challenge of a major fixer-upper property. The previous owner, well into her dotage in that creepy silent-blank-stare horror movie kind of way, has let the property go to seed after her handyman husband passed on years ago. The state of the Inn is such that it cannot help but to appeal to that special kind of hubris only found in the young and the cheerfully stupid -- urban folks likely weened on home reno-TV and easy credit. I am speculating, only because the film is not terribly interested in backstory, even (paradoxically) as it has a penchant for too-earnest exposition sprinkled across its 90 minutes.
As Jess and Dan begin the arduous undertaking of restoring the property enough to re-open the place as both their home and their livelihood, Dan is called away to Chicago on business just as Jess starts hearing noises and we start to see odd shadows moving across the walls. Jess, now left alone on a very big, remote estate with her dog and to-do list, fails to notice the chiaroscuro, but does pick up on the unpleasant history and the gloom of her empty surroundings.
It is a tightrope-walk in general when it comes to making horror pictures: between allowing a film to slowly ratchet up its chills with the risk of losing parts of the audience to boredom or offering easy boo-scares and familiar genre elements -- "the calls are coming from inside the house!" -- to string people along for 90 minutes. The Rasmussens traverse things here sometimes with grace, others with awkwardness.
Not one, but two prologues, prior to the opening title card seems a bit excessive. Revelations will come later, but a certain Paranormal Activity grotty-VHS flavoured tease seems to be lacking in motivation. Perhaps I grow weary of often needless pre-credit hooks. I am, however, a sucker for the kind of slow-moving camera which tracks down hallways and peers around corners. The greatest asset of The Inhabitants is the patience and care showing off the senescent abode, both the modern, up to code living areas, and the secret plaster-y ancient innards; the passageways and props of subconscious nightmares. The actual real estate, owned by the film's producer, Glenn Cooper, was indeed built in the 17th century, and the film makes the most of it, from every conceivable angle.
The human element of the film, however, is sketched a tad too thin. Almost as if it were an attempt to remake The Shining without the character of Danny (thereby almost completely negating the family dynamic there), or perhaps mimic The Innkeepers without the ghost hunting and guy-gal buddy time. There is a video surveillance element in The Inhabitants which is used as a narrative device to move things along a little faster. That it is never discussed between pretty much the only two human beings present in the house, is an odd (too convenient) thing. For a film ostensibly centered around a building a home together, there seems to be little relationship at the center of it all.
Flirtation with dream-logic and possession share screen space with ghosts and witches and other things that go bump in the night. There may even be some even flirting with Shakespeare's Ophelia and Claudius (madness and poison). This is nearly enough to make an impact outside of the usual ticking off of genre conventions in this style of indie horror. I guess I needed The Inhabitants to be about something just a bit more than making shadow-play in a great old house.