Horror Aughts #6: ‘Vacancy’
And the coolest Hungarian director in Hollywood
‘Horror Aughts’ is a column in which I revisit scary movies from the 2000s that were big commercial hits at the time but have been largely forgotten ever since.
Growing up in the 90s and early 2000s in Hungary, Hungarian Cinema was practically non-existent. Ninety-nine percent of the films produced in my home country were unwatchable trash. This was due to the fact that most professional actors worked in theatres on a regular basis because film productions were rare and didn’t pay enough to make a living. Whenever these actors were cast in a film role, they played it as if it were a play. That usually resulted in a theatrical and overacted catastrophe. As young viewers, my childhood friends and I inherently felt the difference. So we dismissed virtually every movie that wasn't made outside our borders. You could call that teen rebellion, but mostly, we just knew that Hungarian Cinema was almost always dead on arrival.
In the early aughts, there were no exciting or bold directors to follow (sorry to Bela Tarr fans, but his overlong films were depressingly dull and physically painful to watch with our young brains). Then came Nimrod Antal — or, to us, Antal Nimrod. His debut feature in 2003, Control, was smart, hysterical, and uncharacteristically weird. We’ve never seen anything like it from a Hungarian filmmaker. He wrote the script with Jim Adler, but the Hungarian lingo (which is almost impossible to nail on film) clearly came from him. His unique vision was all the more admirable considering that he was born in Los Angeles, California, and only moved to Hungary after turning 18.
Oddly, he studied at the same Hungarian Film Academy that couldn’t produce one genuinely inspiring filmmaker before him. It didn’t matter, though. It was evident that Nimrod grew up on Hollywood movies — he loved Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and low-budget Troma flicks like Mother’s Day — which hugely influenced his directorial style. Control was gloomy and eerie, yet also intimate in a way that spoke to our national identity, depicting a close-knit group living in the underground subway system of Budapest. After his feature debut, however, Nimrod moved back to L.A. to pursue a more fruitful career than he would’ve had any chance to do so in Hungary.
Finally (pardon me for the long historical intro) that brings us to our latest Horror Aughts subject, 2007's Vacancy. Penned by Mark L. Smith (who also co-wrote The Revenant, whaddayaknow) and directed by Nimrod, Vacancy feels like the younger, and less brutal, brother to Bryan Bertino’s cult flick The Strangers. Well, at least in spirit. At the time, it seemed like your average slasher potboiler but it worked out pretty well for Nimrod. Another B movie and three years later he was awarded with the direction of one of the better Predator sequels. Re-watching Vacancy now, nearly two decades on, it’s apparent that the director had a knack for atmospheric and Hitchcockian thrillers with an emphasis on building suspense.
Side note: By his own admission, according to a 2007 interview with ComingSoon.net, Nimrod didn’t want to take on the movie at first because he'd thought the studio aimed for another typical gore-filled slasher of the time. After meeting with the producers, he quickly learned that wasn't the case and was happy to dive in as director.
Vacancy begins with the unusual pairing of Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale, playing a couple whose marriage is already in the toilet, when they get lost taking a shortcut from the interstate. Naturally, soon their car gives out too, and they have to pull into the first gas station next to a cheap motel. Cue a weirdly helpful stranger (Ethan Embry utilizing his inherent creepy vibe), a bizarre motel manager (Frank Whaley whom Nimrod was a huge fan of), a suffocating quiet at night in the middle of nowhere, and you get the setup of every other American slasher made in the aughts.
Once David and Amy realize they have to spend the night in one of the old, cockroach-inviting rooms as the only guests, it won’t take them long to get suspicious about what’s going on here. But just in case, there’s also a VCR with a tape left inside that reveals this is the location where sick bastards shoot their snuff films to sell them to other sickos. That’s right, the motel room is filled with hidden cameras, and our heroes are soon joined by the rest of the “cast," coming in wearing masks and filthy overalls to start their latest production.
Vacancy’s plot is nothing to write home about, but that’s where Nimrod’s keen ability to boil suspense using basic ingredients comes into play. Every unsettling knock, ominous shadow, and piercing flash of light is there to yank us into the panic and dread that rushes through Amy and David’s bloodstream like snake venom. Nimrod and his DP, Andrzej Sekula, create a bleak and stripped-down milieu from the get-go, focusing purely on the mounting tension. They make use of lighting and sound design masterfully, not just to prepare jumpscares but to immerse us in the mind of a victim overrun by fear and instinct.
Wilson’s David is the thinking brain here, and the actor manages to transform himself into the charming everyday guy, and eventually ordinary hero, without showing off or wanting credit for it. As Amy — who was meant to be played by Sarah Jessica Parker originally — Beckinsale also finds a balance between vulnerability, estranged spouse, and terrified victim. Their initially cold and distant chemistry develops potently throughout the movie, bringing them together again without feeling rushed or disingenuous.
Though Vacancy is light on violence and gore for a slasher, it more than makes up for it in overflowing suspense, effective scares, and gripping action scenes. The interactions (whether verbal or physical) with the killers are squeezed for every drop of intensity, offering a classic cat-and-mouse chase inside and around the motel, and the few twists the script holds arrive just at the right time to keep things hot and flowing. Given that the majority of the set was built on a Sony soundstage, it’s a small miracle that Nimrod was able to turn the entire movie into a high-octane pressure cooker. From a nearly two-decade distance, it’s evidently his merit that every technical part of Vacancy still works as intended and delivers an atmospheric chiller worth revisiting.
Though Vacancy didn’t exactly obliterate the box office in 2007, for a low-key B horror made from $19 million and change, it managed to bring in some more than decent numbers. Although its domestic performance was rather poor, in the long term, Nimrod’s American debut garnered over $35 million worldwide. More importantly, to me and every Hungarian film fan, it kept the flame alive that we finally had a Hungarian filmmaker not just to follow, look up to, and eagerly await his next project, but to actually be proud of.
If you enjoyed this essay, please consider liking and sharing it so it can reach a wider audience. As always, thanks for reading.
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Vacancy was one of the first horror films I ever watched (of the ones I *chose* to watch), and the historical background is so interesting. Thanks for sharing!