Halloween with Flickhead: The Hot L Whitewood

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“Whitewood!” The name can still make me shiver. It was the destination of a modest but serious university student named Nan Barlow, who, we later find out, harbors a yen for cheaply erotic, ten-dollar-hooker Frederick’s of Hollywood nighties, right down to the garter belts. Sadly, that jarring moment in Horror Hotel (1960) when she peels off her robe flew over my pointy head; along with the delightfully deranged expression on Christopher Lee’s face as he sacrifices a dove. We’re talking over forty years ago when it played regularly on New York TV, I was under twelve, and never made the connection it had with Psycho (1960), released just three months earlier. Both begin with a doomed heroine who’s killed off mid-way through the picture and replaced by an investigative, chilly sibling. It all takes place in Whitewood, Massachusetts, where Elizabeth Selwyn was burned at the stake for witchcraft three hundred years earlier. She’s played by the criminally underused Patricia Jessel, who died way too young at forty-seven from a heart attack in 1968. The original British title was City of the Dead, which a lot of purists now call the film even though Whitewood wasn’t a city but a village; and the people living there weren’t really dead but damned. So it’s like a village of the damned, but not like that Village of the Damned. Besides, Horror Hotel just sounds cooler than City of the Dead. I probably saw it on WPIX-TV’s Chiller Theatre…



…which later ‘screamlined’ its intro to this…