Seen wandering through the grim fog and pale moonlit wilderness of the Swiss Alps as a tiny speck among the trees and rocks, a man (Don McKellar) reaches his isolated hotel destination only to find there are no rooms available for the night.
It being Christmas, some time in the space between the two world wars, even if he could procure another carriage (his previous ride abandoned him in the midst of the deep snow) the likelihood of finding lodging at the late hour is zero. The suspicious and strangely accented hotel porter (Ben Petrie, ubiquitous on Canadian screens in 2025) makes him an offer of dubious ethical quality.
Another guest, an Englishwoman amateur mountain climber, has not returned to her room for several days, and the staff suspects she has fallen to tragic ends. Might the gentleman want to take the chance of staying in the (possibly) dead woman’s room until morning, at double the going rate of course, until other arrangements be made?
In the cinematic space of implacable, supernatural horror, there are been numerous adaptations of the works H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe, titans of the genre in the late 19th century. Their contemporary, no less lauded or prolific at the time, Algernon Blackwood, was a master of the chilling ghost story. His protagonists often slowly go mad from loneliness and isolation, abandoned or stranded in either society or in the wild. Blackwood has rarely been adapted for the big screen, outside of Val Lewton’s undisputed 1942 classic, Cat People, which was only loosely inspired (and uncredited) to Blackwood’s Ancient Sorceries.
Canadian filmmakers seem to want to remedy this. Seth Smith (The Crescent, Tin Can) has been developing a feature film adaptation of The Willows for some time now (I hope it gets made). But beating him to the realisation on screen is film curator, scholar, and documentarian Kier-La Janisse (House of Psychotic Women, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched). Her narrative film debut, albeit at not quite a short, not quite a feature, 30 minutes in length, The Occupant of The Room, is an old-fashioned-styled chiller about an fussy English professor, and mild insomniac, put into the situation of having to live (if for only a few hours) among a disappeared woman’s personal belongings.
There is something about the shadow of the Christmas season, the flipside of a charitable and joyous (but often stressful) holiday, where the suicide rate peaks, and loneliness is put into sharp relief. Janisse is no stranger to Yuletide horror, as she has literally written the book on it. She is also paying homage to Lawrence Gordon Clarks 1970s BBC strand of Christmas Ghost Stories, 30-minute adaptations of horror stories taken in by the Brits on their televisions (or teles) over roasting chestnuts and burning logs in the fireplace, to warm away the chills, of subversive counter-programming.
McKellar plays the man who feels, what he describes across the hotel intercom to the front desk, as a melancholic residue in the space, the most depressing room imaginable. (He is offered the option of a brandy, instructions to turn up the radiator, and a firm goodnight.)
The actor has aged nicely into roles like this, from his off-kilter everyman performances in Canadian classics such as Roadkill, Last Night, and waydowntown, and is perfectly cast. Offering practically a one-man show -- beyond the hotel staff, and absent-present notion of the Englishwoman -- he glances out the window, adjusts the curtains and the bed sheets. All the while working up the courage, if not to conquer his insomnia, then to go through her things: A lock of her hair in the wash bowl, a magic-lantern projector with previous photographic slides of mountain adventures with her dog, and a locked wardrobe.
This is all handsome and quietly effective, lensed at a wide downward angle, somewhat like prison surveillance, by cinematographer Karim Hussain (Infinity Pool, TVs Hannibal,) observiing the man pacing, fussing, and roaming in his mild transgressions, anxieties, and guilt. Things comes to evocative, animated, life when Janisse puts us into the man’s abstract inner-terror via a spectacular sequence in black and white.
Done with ragged sheets of ripped paper, it is eerie and energetic. A bird's-eye view of the indifferent wilderness is juxtaposed onto the man's face staring out the window, both the moon (or is it the sun? An eclipse?) as well as his eyes are absent; a negative blackness that shimmers with the animation.
Disturbing and beautiful, this sequence vaguely alludes to the animated 1982 British children’s classic The Snowman, even if it, along with the heavy strings here on the soundtrack, offers a more dark and cosmic vibe. The Occupant of the Room does the spirit of Algernon Blackwood, and for that matter the tradition of Clark’s Christmas horror strand, a solid tribute. I hope this short film becomes a catalyst for more of Blackwood's work to make it to the screen.
[Full disclosure: I have worked previously with Kier-La Janisse with her as my editor for a chapter in Spectacular Opticals’ Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s. The Occupant In the Room played at Toronto After Dark as part of the Canadian Short Film Showcase.]