Jethrow Keane

I’ve never quite decided about the nomenclature for the fellas. Should it be “witch” or “warlock”? The former seems to demand a gender clarification, though to my mind “male witch,” like “male model,” connotes a slight raising of the eyebrows, as in, You’re a man and you’re doing this? Yet the convention persists. On the other hand, “warlock” strikes me as a tad pretentious. Do you ever see a warlock riding a broom? True, there’s “practitioner of the black arts,” if one really means to neutralize the gender, though that sounds like a line from an obituary. Meanwhile “wizard” (“sorcerer”) to me means “magician,” i.e., not someone you’re likely to come across in a coven.

Author Roald Dahl (see Oct. 5) stated unequivocally, “There is no such thing as a male witch.” I suspect Horror Hotel’s Jethrow Keane would beg to differ.

Titled The City of the Dead in Britain, where it was filmed, this 1960 horror classic, an early outing in the genre from the future founders of Amicus Productions, is rightly famous for delivering chills galore on a nothing budget. Set in America, the movie opens with a burning at the stake, the victim being one Elizabeth Selwyn (Patricia Jessel), with whom Jethrow (Valentine Dyall) has “consorted,” though he makes sure to declare otherwise.

Cut to the present and a college symposium, led by Prof. Alan Driscoll (the great Christopher Lee), on the persecution of witches in New England. Favored student Nan Barlow (Venetia Stevens) tells Driscoll she wants to do field work in the subject, and he obligingly steers her toward an obscure village called Whitewood, where guess who was barbequed in 1692. Of course Nan goes there alone, along the way picking up a mysterious hitchhiker named—Jethrow Keane. Ooh ...

Doings are afoot in Whitewood, needless to say, at the Raven Inn run by frosty Mrs. Newless, and I’ll give you three guesses who she really is.

“That’s not charcoal, it’s my cologne.”

 

Poor Nan.

History, as they say, repeats itself in Whitewood, including hitchhiking encounters with Jethrow Keane. Here he is again with bookshop owner Patricia Russell (Betta St. John).

“To see me is a special privilege reserved for just a few.”

 
This sort of folktale repetition is one of the qualities that make the movie so compelling. At least until the last act, when things get a little kooky. Maybe if they’d called this Shadow of the Cross, the resolution wouldn’t seem quite so random, or dependent on an effects budget that clearly was nonexistent. The truth is, any title would have been better than Horror Hotel or The City of the Dead, both of which (like “male witch” and “warlock”) seem to miss the mark.