I don’t know that the people that work there are that much like our characters, but they’re in the ballpark. Are they based on people you encountered at the hotel? I didn’t know that the people who work there day-to-day bear a striking resemblance to the two leads in the film. They let us back in and we moved very quickly. Then I thought, “Why not make a movie we lived?”The place let us be there before, so they were likely to let us do it again.

I was trying to think of how to do it cheap. So I found it really charming and interesting. At the same time, the place doesn’t live up to it. The people who work there are in their twenties…part timers. But what was charming to me about it, was that it’s this mixture of a historic, perhaps haunted building and totally bad ’70s renovation. The staff at the hotel believe it’s haunted. It just started off kind of goofy, but it became this thing where most of the cast and crew started to think there was something up with the hotel. We would go and shoot this satanic horror movie nearby, but the weirder stuff would happen back at the hotel. It was the cheapest and nicest place we could find and about 25 minutes from our location. What happened was we were making my previous film “The House of the Devil,” and we were staying at this hotel called the Yankee Pedlar Inn because it was the best option to put the crew up. Well the hotel that inspired the film is actually in the film. Can you tell it for those who aren’t familiar? The story behind the reason you made “The Innkeepers” is almost as good (and scary) as the film itself.

The innkeepers