I caught a B&W movie from 1960 I hadn't seen or heard of before. Missed the beginning, but the onscreen TV guide listed it as "Horror Hotel." The imdb.com says that was the U.S. title. The original (British) title was "City of the Dead," I believe. Christopher Lee, always a favorite, was chillingly menacing as he sent a hand-selected student of his to her doom when he recommended a small New England town that she go to conduct research on witchcraft. There were many echoes or maybe even precursors of other films of this type. One could see the concept as similar to that behind "The Wicker Man," broadly speaking, and the innocent girl arriving in a small town with supernatural goings-on was of course the opening premise of our own DS with Vicki Winters. The town residents in robes accompanied by chanting and atmospheric music has no doubt been done countless times, but it was echoed about 8 years later in "Eye of the Devil." The haughty demeanored innkeeper seemed like a rehash of Mrs. Danvers from "Rebecca," and the cowered mute servant girl trying to help the heroine was a character type played by Sian Barbara Allen in "You'll Like My Mother" (a thriller, but not supernatural). The overall film structure also roughly paralleled that of "Psycho," and the discovery of the innkeeper's body toward the end was a nearly shot-by-shot copy of a scene from "Psycho." TCM host Ben Mankiewicz noted the similarities with "Psycho" in his commentary at the end but did not explain them other than to say that the source for "Horror Hotel" was an independent story and filming had begun on "Horror Hotel" shortly before filming began on "Psycho." A little online research shows, though, that "Psycho" was released in the U.K. several months before "City of the Dead," so they had obviously copied the "Psycho" scene rather than the other way around. Overall a movie well worth catching.
