Movie Reviews for Writers: The Haunted Hotel

This is a pretty neat little indie horror anthology. I use the word “horror” lightly because it really doesn’t resort to jumps scares or event super-dark atmosphere for its creep factor. It’s really more of a sort of haunted history with a movie attached to it. Some of the segments (as in any anthology) are better than others, but none really fall flat (at least for me). 

Two of the segments have specific writer-driven stories. The first features Charles Dickens as he is looking for ideas that will eventually become The Pickwick Papers. The other is a tale of a fictional contemporary horror writer who can’t write because of the fears he suffers. 

The opening short introduces us to a flustered Charles Dickens who is franticly trying to follow up his previous fan favorite with something new that has been promised to Mr. Sloane. He’s a man living in fear and trying his best to control his space to make it safe. “I had to move the bed, you see,” he says to no one, “so that I may sleep with my head pointing north. So, all will be well.” 

This piece of the anthology is a wonderful story of how we can attempt to establish a sort of pattern and norm for our work environments. And also how deviations, even just the shadow of a coat on the door, from those patterns and norms can feel bigger to us than they really are and pull us out of the stories we should be thinking of and putting down on paper. 

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