Red sun rising, in the skySleeping village, cockerels crySoft breeze blowing, in the treesPeace of mind, feel at easeA New England death harvest. Burned witches, sleepy village curses, churches void of patrons, and a sacrificial hotel for the soon to be deceased. The City of the Dead captures that small town evil so well, a little fog here… a character named Nan there… basically atmosphere of the highest order and exactly the sort of thing I look for in movies such as these.Anyways, I feel like this is the kind of movie Dario Argento and Stephen King would both love.Autumn has arrived my friends.
95On a foggy, moonlit night, a witch is burned, and a town is forever cursed for their prejudice. By turns 60s paranoia, romantic gothic, and magick within desolate, small-town Massachusetts spaces; The City of the Dead, also known as Horror Hotel, is nearly perfect in its styling and economy. This is sleepier than Black Sunday, and less talkative than a Tourneur/Val Newton production, but it lingers in motifs of disturbed mist, disembodied figures, haunted shadows, and buried secrets. B&W photography so pure, it takes on the nature of a nightmare, with its growing repetition manifesting in the form of a passenger endlessly seeking a chilly, autumnal destination, as inevitable as the leaves drifting to the bottom of the woods.
From beneath the fog, evil is revealed, and the ritual begins again.I’m in love with how this film looks. Drenched in a moody haze that pulls you into its shadowed mystery. Every glance, every word carries the weight of something sacred and secret, building a tension that feels almost ritualistic. The decay of the buildings set the stage and it mirrors the quiet collapse of the human soul. And the way Moxey threads all of this together, right up to the final scene of the film, feels pretty much flawless.The witchlike, familiar gothic setting merges with a labyrinth of fog. It manages to captivate with its roughness, yet at the same time, it exudes that alluring, freshly arrived 1960s classic horror vibe, perhaps even at its finest if judged purely by atmosphere. The film connects together two different stories and ends them with fire and I mean literally.The film also dives deep into its own shadows, and I’ve always admired when a story dares to dance with its darkness. There’s something genuinely powerful in how that’s handled here. Lee lights the spark, giving the story its structure, while Jessel breathes life and death into the gloom, showing it in the exact way that works for me the best. Every character feels deliberately placed, like pieces in an eerie ritual, nothing is wasted and nothing feels accidental. And despite its short runtime it never feels rushed. Instead, it says everything it needs to say.So the film understands the core of what works best in this kind of story. It's a product of its time and that shows but it also bridges histories, blending European and American influences. What it creates is something timeless, a drifting work unbound by place. At its best, that's exactly what the village in this film becomes. It’s a hard film to rate. I almost wanted to give it 4.5 stars, but the deeper I sink into it, the more a solid 4 stars feels just right in the end. so...four stars.80/100
