Horror finds the right setting in a hotel
Hotels are a haven for horror in our pop culture and urban folklore, from Stephen King’s Overlook Hotel and the Bates Motel, to Canada’s grand railway hotels. Their unique history make it all too easy for guests to envision a psycho in the shower or spectral twins in the hallway.
“A hotel room is both a foreign space and an intimate space,” says Canadian director Brandon Cronenberg, who set a pivotal scene in 2012’s Antiviral in a hotel.
“We might sleep there, bathe there, have sex there, but it’s also somewhere unfamiliar and uncontrolled, and that creates a sense of vulnerability. Who’s to say there aren’t hidden cameras in the bedroom? How do we know the owner won’t come in while we’re showering? What if he has a knife?
“It’s easy to imagine that something terrible is happening in the room next to us, or that one of the other guests is hiding a dark secret.”
TV’s American Horror Story: Hotel opened its doors to viewers on Wednesday, and throughout the first episode, the drama’s non-linear format proved ideally suited to explore the setting’s diverse dangers.
In offering refuge to a revolving cast of strangers, all separated by thin walls, hotels are the perfect setting for vice, violence and voyeurism, says Dave Alexander, editor of Rue Morgue, a Canadian horror magazine.
“Hotels in both fiction and real life are places people go to do things they can’t do at home, and often that includes things such as adultery, murder and suicide ... You have this really interesting space, this pseudo home where people go to do bad stuff — and a place where strangers intersect.”
The older the hotel, the higher the ghoulish guest count.
“A hotel is like a labyrinth of secret history,” Cronenberg said.
“There is something delicious about the idea that a sordid moment from that history might resurface in the present, perhaps literally, in the case of a supernatural story.”
Hotel horror is primarily a modern North American phenomenon, but genre experts say it’s closely connected to Gothic literary tradition, from Mary Shelley to Bram Stoker.
Iconic, grand hotels — from Ottawa’s Château Laurier to Quebec City’s Château Frontenac — are the “haunted castles” of the New World, says Winnipeg-based fantasy and horror author David Annandale.
“They are old by the standards of much of our cities,” Annandale explains. “And in a hotel, we almost get history on fast forward because we can get so many stories going through them.”
The Shining’s Overlook Hotel, with its grandiose size and sublime setting, cemented the macabre archetype among today’s storytellers, Annandale says, calling hotels “the ultimate haunted house.”
It doesn’t end there, though. This continent’s vastness and car culture combined to create a new setting for travellers’ terror: the motel — its rooms offering more anonymity, and an inconvenient door to the outside.
“Much like Jaws made people think twice about swimming in an ocean, Psycho has certainly made a lot of travellers think twice about staying in a motel,” says Daniel Edward Craig, a B.C. mystery novelist and former hotel general manager.
In fact or fiction, motels serve as a cheap location for people to “do things that are forbidden,” by either law or morality, says Tim Blackmore, a professor of information and media studies at Western University.
“If you’re going to find a dead body (in a story), you’are probably going to find it in a motel somewhere.”
In AHS: Hotel, the Hotel Cortez is the kind of place where guests don’t get the chance to order room service because they’re unwittingly on the menu. Its bloodthirsty modern proprietor is The Countess (Lady Gaga), but it was constructed by serial killer James March (Evan Peters) — equipped with secret rooms, hidden passageways, peepholes and torture chambers.
Demeter-St. Clair believes March’s character may be inspired by serial killer, H. H. Holmes, who designed a lodging — and secret death trap — for migrants and guests drawn to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.
With that type of reality backing our fears, hotels have become home sweet home for things that go bump in the night. And as a setting for horror, real or imagined, they offer endless possibilities, Annandale says.
“Behind every door there’s a story, and the stories change every night.”