Vacancy (2007)

Vacancy arrives from 2007, a year in which a horror film could still be about nothing but the terror of being watched. Nimród Antal's thriller strands Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson at a remote motel, hands them a videotape of previous guests being butchered in their very room, and then lets the hidden cameras do their quiet work. It is a lean machine, eighty-five minutes of escalating dread, and it carries no message whatsoever. The Boston Globe said as much at the time, noting the film had no agenda beyond keeping the audience in a state of nervous collapse. That is the entire program. There is no thesis hiding in the walls.

The cast is uniformly white, the setting is a stretch of American nowhere, and the screenplay concerns itself with nothing beyond survival. No economic argument lurks in the motel's peeling wallpaper; the proprietor is a monster, not a metaphor for late capitalism. Race, climate, and questions of identity go entirely unremarked. The bodies on screen exist to be threatened. When Beckinsale's Amy finally turns the tables, shooting the manager dead after a strangling attempt, we are watching the durable machinery of the final girl, a convention older than most of the audience. It signals endurance, not ideology. Nothing in the film articulates a position on anything.

This is, in its way, a relief. A thriller can simply be a thriller, and Vacancy is content to be one, competent and shallow in equal measure. Critics found the ending abrupt and the characters thin, and they were right on both counts. But the film never lectures, never panders, never reaches for a lesson. It wants only to frighten you, and it mostly does. We classify it accordingly: a zero on nearly every axis of contemporary social concern, and strangely proud of it.