We’ve all been there, right? Driving through a small town in western Tennessee at 1AM, eyelids so heavy that it would be irresponsible to keep going, so you decide to finally stop for the night. But wait, all of the major chain hotels are at max capacity from a regional NCAA basketball tournament. So, you decide to take a chance on the dimly lit L-shaped motel on the outskirts of town, but hey, $39.99 a night ain’t bad. As soon as you enter the room, you notice a tiny door behind the bedside table, cracked open just enough to see that it leads somewhere, and isn’t used for storage, then you securely move the table up against it. You nervously lay in bed through the early morning hours staring at the ceiling as you hear every scratch, shuffle, and breath through the paper-thin walls. You finally doze off when the 1980’s-era alarm clock violently pulls you from the start of some much-needed rest. You wake up with a couple strange bruises, maybe a couple strange bites, a sore back, and before you get the hell out of dodge, you notice the little door behind the table is cracked open again. You nope right out of there, never to return.
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So, why are these Podunk hotels so anxiety-inducing and nerve-racking, often depriving us of sleep when we need it the most? Because horror films have been using them as plot devices and settings for more than 60 years in a variety of ways. The subject comes and goes, be it ghosts, serial killers, satanic cults, or demons, but the root of the fear stays the same. Hotels in horror always bring two things to the table. The fear of isolation (which our new writer Steph Cannon just did a great article on!), and the fear of false comfort and security in someplace unfamiliar.
Obviously, we can’t cover every hotel horror film ever made, but let’s start with some heavy hitters that were among the first in 1960. Beginning with possibly the most famous horror hotel movie ever made, Alfred Hitchock’s Psycho. This film broke the barriers of fear when it came to not only invasion of privacy, but also betrayal of trust and security. Sure, Norman Bates was severely mentally ill, but regardless was presented as someone likeable and trustworthy, and he attacked when Marion Crane was at her most vulnerable, while in the shower. This set a standard in future hotel horror that there was no place a character could let their guard down. Similar themes were used in John Llewellyn Moxey’s The City of the Dead (1960), where a young college student researching witchcraft in a small Massachusetts town is blindsided by almost the entire population being involved with a witchy cult.
The 1970’s had a smattering of underrated hotel horror from several different regions, mostly in the whodunnit realm. Private Parts (1972) was an American film that mixed horror with black comedy, as a woman tries to figure out a murder mystery in her aunt’s rundown hotel. Inn of the Damned (1973), an Australian western-horror film, followed an 1890’s sheriff as he investigated why locals were checking into a local inn, but not checking out. British film Don’t Look Now (1973) starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, followed a grieving couple to a hotel in Venice, and combined psychics, premonitions, ghosts and serial killers. One of my favorites is Eaten Alive, Tobe Hooper’s follow-up to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where a sickle-wielding hotel owner in East Texas murders his patrons and feeds them to his pet crocodile.
The 1980’s started off on a strong note with Stephen King’s The Shining, a film directed by Stanley Kubrick that took the isolation part of hotel horror to the next level. The Torrance family was shut into a deserted hotel and their way out was cut off by a blizzard, but also, inhabiting ghosts were slowly causing the family’s patriarch to go mad with murderous rage. 1980 also gave us Motel Hell, a favorite mine, about a brother and sister who own a hotel and turn their patrons into delicious snacks. This film also delivered the classic line, “It takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent’s fritters.” Fun fact: If you want to hear more about this film, go listen to Episode 2 of The Horror Geek Podcast relaunch!
The serial killer idea was dominant throughout the 1980’s, especially with the surge of slasher flicks. New Year’s Evil (1980), Ghostkeeper (1982) and Mountaintop Motel Massacre (1983), just to name a few. One of my favorites from this decade was Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond (1981), an Italian film about a hotel in Louisiana doubling as the gates of hell. Check this one out if you want some awesome practical effects.
The ’90s were a little bare of the sub-genre, though a mini-series of Stephen King’s The Shining was released in 1997, and though a little cheesy, is closer to the source material than the 1980 Kubrick film and liked more by King himself. In 1998, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer released, taking main characters from the first film, and conveniently isolating them in a Bahamas resort. I think you can skip the ’90s altogether.
Hotel horror started to make a stand again in the 2000’s. Psychological thrilling horror took it’s turn with the creepy whodunnit murder mystery Identity (2003) and Vacancy (2007). Ghosts made a comeback with a highly underrated performance from John Cusack in Stephen King’s 1408 and William Friedkin’s Bug (2006). Though the stories don’t revolve around the hotel themselves, some particularly frightening hotel scenes happen in one of the few films where Robin Williams plays a villain, One Hour Photo (2002) and Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects (2005). Possibly the most well-known hotel horror films to come out of the 2000’s were Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and Hostel II (2007), about backpackers in Europe visiting a hostel, being drugged, and waking up in a facility built for torture.
Though the sub-genre of hotel horror has been pretty quiet over the last decade, there are still a few bangers. Ti West’s The Innkeepers (2011) features an old-fashioned creepy ghost story in an old inn, and Vincent Garcia’s The Damned (2013) focuses on a possessed girl trapped within a secluded inn’s basement. The most notable recent release is Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep (2019), the sequel to The Shining that ends up back at the abandoned Overlook Hotel.
So, there you have it, an entire sub-genre of horror dedicated to the isolation and fear of the unfamiliar, but don’t worry, hotel murders and hauntings aren’t as common as movies make them out to be…but bed bugs on the other hand? Let’s just say, I would consider driving the extra hour to that next Holiday Inn. Hit us with your favorite hotel horror movie!
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