Hell Hotel



""Hotel rooms are lonely. All the craziness that you avoid in the day-to-day business of life come to you in hotel rooms and eat your mind. The people they find dead in hotel rooms wouldn't have killed themselves at home. Hotel rooms don't care if you live or die.""

- Foxglove, Death: The Time of Your Life

A hotel that is scary. Often, it's abandoned, and if it isn't, you have a good chance of being killed by your host. Similar to Abandoned Hospital and Inn of No Return. The No-Tell Motel may be one.

This trope stems mostly from the fact that many hotels, even the really nice ones, have an underlying disturbing feel. Like hospitals, they're insanely clean and kept in perfect order, giving the entire facility a sterile, inhuman atmosphere. Every room and floor is identical or near-identical, like a lavishly furnished chicken coop. It's so quiet, the employees are always smiling or out of sight, and the rooms are always tidied up when you're not looking. And those... tiny chocolate mints...

While hotels are certainly disturbing by themselves, it gets even worse when they're NOT what a hotel should look like (dirty, disorganized, etc.).

Sometimes characters in a series aren't completely stupid. They know something is wrong with this hotel - maybe the guy at the front desk is more than a touch creepy, or they've overheard the townspeople talk about how they hate outsiders, or that the hotel is supposed to be almost fully booked but no one is around.

But they all know that they don't have a choice. Staying in a hotel with a lockable door is much more preferable than taking their chances sleeping in the car, or maybe they don't have a car at all. Maybe they even outright know that something might try to get them during the night, but staying outside is pure suicide. Either way, they're taking those room keys with a quiet sense of dread.

Characters with these suspicions are usually smart enough to remain wary as they settle down for the night, but sometimes they'll completely forget and decide to take a long shower.

Title is the name of an obscure They Might Be Giants song. Like, obscure even for them.

Not to be confused with a Hotel Hellion, or Hotel Hell, a Gordon Ramsay series in the style of Kitchen Nightmares in which he solves the problems of ailing hotels, though some of the hotels featured may be approaching this level.

Anime

 * Gregory Horror Show takes place inside "Gregory House". The caretaker is trying to keep the guest there for all eternity, the other guests and staff alternate between trying to maim/kill the guest and drive them to insanity, and Gregory's mother wants to steal and eat the guest's soul. Oh and
 * Actually, that's not quite true...

Comic Books

 * One Story Arc in Spawn involved a Hell Hotel, caused by the residents of an Apartment Complex being freed of personal restraint by.
 * Hotel Shade had this quality, as lampshaded by Kathy and Lenny before they knew they were doomed to fight madness there. It didn't help that the first living tenant was a serial torture-killer, or the second one appeared to be a raving lunatic (he explained that he was a writer; they weren't reassured.) Corpses animated from the nearby graveyard, because that was the only way the Angels could communicate with Shade, but no one had any idea what was animating the hotel staff.

Commercials

 * Roach Motel™, a line of Black Flag™ bug traps, plays with the "cockroach motel" and "they check in, but they don't check out" tropes extensively.
 * Spoofed in some of Verizon's many "dead zone" commercials.

Film

 * The Place of which Torgo takes care while The Master is away.
 * The Bates Motel from Psycho.
 * The Hotel Earle from Barton Fink. Starting with the name.
 * The Overlook Hotel in The Shining.
 * Perhaps uniquely, the entire layout of the Overlook Hotel - once you notice it, anyway - is a startling case of Bizarrchitecture in film, by design. Stanley Kubrick laid the set out intentionally to mess with viewers' (and actors') perceptions.
 * Room Fourteen Oh Eight. Good lord, 1408, but only Room 1408. The rest of the Dolphin Hotel is quite nice.
 * The hotel in The Lost Boys
 * The hotel from Vacancy.
 * The hotel in Silent Hill is where the Big Bad is staying.
 * Identity was set in a motel no character could leave.
 * The Hollywood Tower Hotel in the Made for TV Movie Tower of Terror, based, of course, on the Hollywood Studios ride.
 * The Crosses the Line Twice shootout finale of The Punisher: War Zone takes place at one of these.
 * Motel Hell, where
 * The hotel in See no Evil, inhabited by an Ax Crazy serial killer with a penchant for ripping out people's eyes.
 * The abandoned desert motel from Resident Evil Extinction.
 * The eponymous B&B from Dead and Breakfast: home to Sealed Evil in a Can that touches off a Zombie Apocalypse.
 * The Red Inn, name of five movies (between 1951 and 2007). In that hostel, the customers are killed at nighttime and their money stolen while the bodies are buried in the garden.
 * Exactly where Barbara goes to look for help in Dagon.
 * Hostel

Literature

 * Both from Stephen King, The Overlook Hotel in The Shining (King describes the place as follows: "This inhuman place makes human monsters.") and Room 1408 in the Dolphin Hotel.
 * 1408 is a semi-subversion. Only one room is actually a portal to something hellish, the rest of the hotel is quite pleasant and the manager tries his damnedest to make sure no one but he and a select few of the staff go into that room.
 * The Talisman, co-written with Peter Straub, had two of these, one at the start where Lilly slowly died of cancer and then one at the end where the Talisman was held.
 * The sub-trope of "only one room" being haunted is even older, going back to F. Marion Crawford's short story "The Upper Berth" where the haunting is not just in just one cabin on a ship, but mostly confined to the upper berth, leaving the person in the lower berth alone. Published 1894, this sub-trope is thus Older Than Television and almost-but-not-quite Older Than Radio.
 * There's the motel at "the centre" (the central point of the continental United States) in American Gods. That's a pretty creepy place. It is abandoned, but not technically haunted.
 * Parodied in the animal fantasy novel Welkin Weasels: Vampire Voles!, in which Scruff, for a prank, tricks Maudlin into thinking that their host is a serial killer.
 * The Gilman House, in H.P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth.
 * Even more so in the game, Dark Corners of the Earth, where the innkeeper's diary reveals that he routinely tortures and murders his customers for lulz.
 * The Hotel Denouement in A Series of Unfortunate Events is a variant. Although it's not especially creepy or unpleasant for the guests, the protagonists are employed there (under the bizarre or nonexistent child labor laws of their universe) as concierges. The hotel is organised by the Dewey Decimal System for reasons which aren't explained until much later, and no index exist (the staff seem to be expected to memorize it). Also, the children are not given breaks, even for sleeping, they just have to kind of doze at the concierge desk.
 * The Right Inn, where a very set-in-his-routine salesman passes out from the sheer horror.
 * Frank Herbert's short story Gambling Device.
 * There is a short story about a family that comes across this...the hotel is mostly empty, save for the husband/wife duo that runs the place, and the husband tries his hardest to warn people away from it, but is constantly cowed into submission by his wife. Turns out there's nothing supernatural about it...but anyone who signs into the hotel is taken one specific room And this was in a book aimed at children.
 * Sarah Monette's short story The Devil in Gaylord's Creek features one of these.
 * Inverted in Jean-Paul Sartre's play No Exit. Rather than have a hellish hotel, Hell itself is a hotel, a fairly normal one at that, in which the furnishings of the room and the people you are assigned to live with are designed precisely to drive you crazy. Also an Ironic Hell and Self-Inflicted Hell.
 * The Percy Jackson and The Olympians series has the Lotus Hotel and Casino, a modernized version of the Island of the Lotus Eaters from The Odyssey. People go in, get sucked into the awesome food and activities, and lose all track of time —when Percy, Annabeth, and Grover finally escape, they discover that what seemed like a few hours to them was in fact five days outside. Most people aren't that lucky, and they end up trapped for years.
 * The Give Yourself Goosebumps book "Checkout Time at the Dead-End Hotel". For starters, the mint on your pillow makes you a ghost. Somehow.

Live Action TV

 * The trope naming song is inspired by "A Nice Place To Visit", an episode of The Twilight Zone.
 * The Hyperion Hotel on Angel was abandoned and haunted for several decades by a demon that fed off people's fear. Later a vampire and other assorted beings killed the demon and took control of the hotel themselves - but since they're the heroes, it probably doesn't count anymore.
 * Supernatural:
 * The episode "Playthings" featured a haunted hotel.
 * The episode "Hammer of the Gods" featured a hotel that had been taken over by pagan gods as a trap for the Winchesters, and had locked the surviving guests in the larder.
 * Cirque Du Soleil's Widget Series Solstrom had an often-humorous version of this as the setting for an episode, "Howling Winds". An aging hotel is suddenly transformed into a Haunted Castle-esque one with a vampire waiter, an ogre bellboy, etc. -- but a pair of newlyweds on their honeymoon, being Sickeningly Sweethearts, don't notice what's happened until it's far too late. Meanwhile, the confused owner tries to conduct business as usual despite the fact that he's slowly turning into a wolfman. Even Death takes a holiday here!
 * The Candlewick Inn from Harper's Island.
 * An episode of Newhart had Dick and Joanna traveling through a very rural area, only to stop at a small motel. The M in the Motel sign had burned out, prompting Dick to call it "Otel Hell".
 * The Sunshine Motel from The Lost Room could be considered this.
 * The Criminal Minds episode "Paradise" had a small roadside motel which was run by a serial rapist and killer, who would trap patrons in their room and psychology and physically torture them before beating them to death.
 * Parodied in the "Jolly Boys' Outing" episode of Only Fools and Horses. The Trotters become stranded in Margate, but cannot find anywhere to stay the night, so they end up in a terrifying-looking guest house which in Rodney's words "looks like The Munsters' weekend place"
 * The Doctor Who episode "The God Complex" takes place in one.

Music

 * "Hotel California", by The Eagles. The "Hotel" is apparently an allegory for the Southern California music industry of the late 1970s, or drug addiction, or a mental hospital where "you can check out any time you like but you can never leave", or who knows, just Southern California. On the surface the song describes the tale of a weary traveler who becomes trapped in a nightmarish luxury hotel that, at first, appeared inviting and tempting.
 * Elvis. "Heartbreak Hotel" was long believed to have been inspired by a Miami Herald report of a "lonely man" ending his own life at a hotel – perhaps by jumping from an upper-story window. (This claim has presumably now been debunked.)
 * The video for "The Ghost of Stephen Foster" by the Squirrel Nut Zippers, features the unbelievably creepy "Hotel Paradise", with Betty Boop-style animation. Think of it as Max Fleischer presents Fourteen Oh Eight.
 * The video for "The Kill" by 30 Seconds to Mars is a direct homage to The Shining—specifically, Kubrick's film version. In the video, the band members wander the corridors of an otherwise deserted hotel, encountering various ghostly inhabitants before respectively coming face-to-face with.
 * In the same vein, the video for "Spit It Out" by Slipknot is also an homage to The Shining. The band wanders around the hotel, encounters the twins, and gets lost in a human maze.
 * The song "Vertigo Motel" by Dog Fashion Disco.
 * Homer and Jethro's song "Hart-Brake Motel," parody of Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel."
 * The music video for Opeth's song "Porcelain Heart" takes place in a hotel that looks eerily like the hotel from Silent Hill 2.

Mythology

 * The dubious hospitality of Procrustes, in Greek Mythology, makes this one Older Than Feudalism. Procrustes would force his guests to lie down on an iron bed, which would prove either too short or too long for them. If the bed was too long, he would stretch the guest to fit it; too short, and he would literally cut them down to size. Procrustres then got a big taste of his own medicine when he tried to do this to Theseus. One version had Theseus simply chop Procrustes to bits with an ax; other versions claim he made the evil innkeeper fit his own bed. No one ever said whether he was too long or too short, though

Theme Parks

 * The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror at Disney's various theme parks is built on this theme. "The Hollywood Tower Hotel" allegedly lost a lot of business after a bolt of lighting removed three "wings" from the front of the building and sent an elevator (plus its five occupants) to another dimension in the later 1920s/early 1930s. That tends to look bad on any hotel's record.
 * A real example, the "Legendary Years" wing of the Pop Century motel at Walt Disney World was abandoned in 2002 due to 9/11 related tourism dips. Since then, the economy roared and now once again whimpers, and in all that time the structures remain left behind, the only thing complete being the parking lot.

Video Games

 * In Fallout 3 the Statesman Hotel. It is filled to the brim with Super Mutants, Centaurs, and mines. You can come here for an optional sidequest to save the Riley's Rangers.
 * The Homestead Motel from Point Lookout is closer to the trope. There are three explorable rooms. 1D holds a dead Chinese spy killed before he could start his mission. 1G holds the skeletons of two bank robbers who died in a gunfight with each over about how to split the cash. Finally 1K holds a Clown Masked serial killer's bloody satanic altar...made of body parts.
 * Fallout: New Vegas brings us the El Rey Motel. Every bit as ramshackle as the Statesman, but populated with angry drug addicts instead of Super Mutants.
 * There's only one luxury hotel on Super Mario Sunshine's Isle Delfino, and it's haunted. Great.
 * The hotel in the game Gregory Horror Show for the PlayStation 2 wasn't exactly haunted... But the guests in the game definitely made it hell.
 * In Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines the player character must exorcise the two ghosts trapped in the Ocean House Hotel.
 * Also, the Los Angeles Sabbat have taken up resident in the abandoned Hallowbrook Hotel, which the player character must also visit close to the end of the game; while most of it is a decrepit ruin used only for sheltering the Sabbat mooks from the sun, the basement has been converted into a slaughterhouse for their leader, Andrei the Tzimisce, filled with mutilated bodies and thick puddles of blood. This is also where
 * What really makes the first hotel scary is the cleverest element about it. It builds up the tension throughout your progression through the building, relying on atmosphere and environment along with the build-up of this brutal murder story to make the player psych him/herself out. It keeps building and building, and you're waiting for something to happen—some monster to pop out and fight you.
 * It worked. As a game reviewer, this troper has played a lot of scary games, but that hotel is the only time I've almost jumped out of my seat because of it.
 * The setting of Trilby's Notes, the third chapter in the Chzo Mythos series. Not particularly scary on its own, but just wait until the protagonist goes on the worst acid trip ever in the hotel...
 * Half-Life 2: Episode 2 provides a variation with its frighteningly intense Inn battle.
 * The very aptly named Hotel Horror from Wario Land 4, complete with Ax Crazy ghosts.
 * The Murder Motel game on early 1990s dial-up BBS's, "a death-match-style door game...in which the player checks into a hotel and tries to find and kill other players, while eluding death himself." MMORPG-like in structure, but primitive, as the amateur bulletin board systems of the era mostly ran on residential telephone lines (no more than one or two people could typically use the system at once) in text mode.
 * Hotel Mario. If you need instructions on how to get through the hotels, check out the enclosed instruction book.
 * One of the last levels of Duke Nukem 3D is named "Hotel Hell".
 * In EarthBound, the Threed hotel briefly becomes one of these when it is overrun by zombies.
 * Let us not forget the Lakeview Hotel from Silent Hill 2, the final area of the game and the location of The Reveal.
 * The Victory Hotel in Dreamfall is particularly jarring if you played the original The Longest Journey, since it was formerly the friendly, cheerful safe haven for April...
 * The Innsmouth hotel in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. Not only is the hotel falling apart and owned by a decidedly creepy host, but Jack has a
 * The Sedgewick Hotel in Ghostbusters the Video Game, not in the first time when you're sent there, but when you visit it the 2nd time around...
 * The Haven Hotel from the indie adventure game, Downfall, where the main character, Joe Davis, finds out that his supposedly schizophrenic wife, Lucy's, visions of terror about the hotel is suddenly a bit too real.
 * The Apple Inn of Resident Evil Outbreak, which was both packed with monsters and on fire.
 * Stage 3-3 from Purple is a hotel that is riddled with spikes, inhabited by bats, has very low quality rooms and it has only one toilet which is the only way to access the second building. Who would be this sadist is a question for anyone.
 * The Old Chateau and Canalave Inn,, in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl.
 * The indie adventure/hidden object game Phantasmat has the delightfully-named "Drowned Dead Hotel", perched on a cliff above a flooded town, complete with requisite creepy owner and residents.
 * There's a fake haunted hotel in the Golden Saucer in Final Fantasy VII, where Cloud and his party can rest up.
 * In TimeSplitters Future Perfect, there's an arcade-mode map that's set in a creepy, run-down hotel with flickering lights, a misty outside 'arena', and the recommended AI-controlled characters are mostly zombies. And the music makes it so much worse...
 * Urban Rivals the Berzerks reside in the Red One Hotel where its occupants are afflicted by some gas that turns them into red skined hyper aggressive people who'll pulverize anyone in arms reach.

Web Comics

 * Hell Hotel obviously. A hotel is owned by the Devil's runaway son. Played for Laughs

Web Original

 * Nan Quest features a Hell Hotel that's both a Timey-Wimey Ball and an Eldritch Location, trapping unsuspecting guests into a Pocket Dimension that's also home to a number of Eldritch Abominations known as the "Uninvited Things" which, apparently, aren't all on the same side.
 * Survival of the Fittest version 2 had one of these. It became one of the bloodiest places in the game - no fewer than fifteen students met their ends somewhere within it. Escapades taking places there included (and were not limited to): murder (duh), castration, evisceration and necrophilia. The V2 hotel was not a fun place.
 * Season 2 of Marble Hornets opens in one, although it's creepiness doesn't become apparent till a few episodes later, when Jay realises that he . Just when he decides to leave.
 * From the same mythos: the Halloween 2011 episode of Tribe Twelve lands Noah in one. Unlike Jay, Noah barely has time to unpack before the creepiness starts (considering all the crossovers that have been going on lately, it's possible they're meant to be the same hotel).

Western Animation

 * Every hotel ever visited by the Scooby Doo gang. All of them were scary but for twenty-plus years none of them had real monsters. Unless Sonny and Cher count.
 * Samurai Jack once had one with a possessed family that Jack wandered into.
 * The Hotel Cabal from Gargoyles. Not actually haunted, but filled with death traps designed to drive prisoners insane and impossible to leave without one of the special keys.
 * An episode of Legion of Super-Heroes, "Fear Factory," featured a space-station version that was a lot like a mysterious mansion, with the butler and being invited to dinner.
 * One of Chuck Jones' Looney Tunes cartoons, "Claws For Alarm", has Porky Pig and his pet cat Sylvester staying at a ghost town hotel populated by murderous mice. Sylvester is aware of the horrors, but being a pet, is mute and can't communicate it to his oblivious master.
 * Katz Motel from Courage the Cowardly Dog. Staffed by what is the cruelest villain in the series, Katz. You'll be fed to spiders by morning.
 * An episode of Martin Mystery had a luxury hotel being haunted by the ghost of its founder.
 * The Cobweb Hotel in a Fleischer Studios short. Well, it's a Hell Hotel to flies, anyway.
 * An episode of Garfield and Friends, "The Sludge Monster", is set largely in a hotel haunted by the titular being.
 * The motel that Taz and Bushwacker Bob stay at in the Taz-Mania episode "A Midsummer Night's Scream". The desk clerk is an Expy of Peter Lorre.

Real Life

 * H. H. Holmes' "Castle". Complete with secret passages and a Torture Cellar.
 * The "Bloody Benders" of Kansas (historically, 1871-73) were notorious as operators of a guest house who murdered and robbed their paying clients.
 * There are many real-life haunted Hotels, like the famous Hotel Coronado, but if any of these are creepy or not seems purely subjective.
 * The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles was like this for many years, as it went out of business after Robert Kennedy's assassination there. It was often used as a police training ground, as depicted in S.W.A.T.