9 Haunted Horror Movie Hotels We’d Hate To Stay In

From its iconic decor to friendly bar staff, The Overlook Hotel has a lot to offer tourists taking a trip through the mountainous Colorado Rockies. Unfortunately, visitors will also have to contend with rotting bathtub ghosts and an axe-wielding madman running around the place – not to mention the problems with the elevator.

While the Overlook Hotel might be fictional, if Stanley Kubrick's horror classic didn't put you off visiting, you can book in for a stay at the real-life inspiration, the Stanley Hotel, which allegedly inspired Stephen King to write the 1977 novel. Fair warning though, the Stanley is also allegedly full of ghostly activity.

One of the more underrated Stephen King horror movie adaptations, Mikael Håfström's 1408 stars John Cusack as Mike Enslin, a surly investigative author who makes a living writing about supposedly haunted locations across the United States. A cynic and skeptic, Mike doesn't actually believe in the paranormal until he books a stay at New York City's Dolphin Hotel in the notorious room 1408, despite hotel owner Gerald Olin's (an incredible Samuel L. Jackson) attempts to warn him that 1408 is simply, “an evil fucking room”.

It's not just the hideous decor that makes 1408 so evil, but also the ghosts, doppelgängers, the lingering spectres of traumatic memories and literal bending of physics that Mike has to contend with, all while trying to convince himself what he's experiencing is just a series of ever-intensifying hallucinations. While the Dolphin Hotel itself might be a perfectly normal hotel, 1408 easily takes the prize for worst hotel room on this list, and there's a lesson to be learned here; always listen to Samuel L. Jackson.

Before Ti West was slicing up adult film stars on secluded farms and remaking A Christmas Carol, for some reason, he was putting horror fans off a trip to Connecticut with The Innkeepers, a classic haunted hotel story with a real-life paranormal hotspot at its center. According to West, during shooting of The House of the Devil, cast and crew booked in for a stay at the Yankee Pedlar Inn, witnessing alleged supernatural phenomena that even the skeptic West found hard to explain.

Like any classic haunted inn, the Yankee Pedlar of The Innkeepers is home to a number of notorious creepy spirits, including a jilted bride making it her afterlife's mission to terrify any poor couple who might be honeymooning in the area. While the inn might have a historic charm to it, it's probably best for everyone's sanity and safety that it remains closed at the time of writing.

While the Bates Motel of Alfred Hitchcock's seminal horror-thriller Psycho might not have much to offer in the way of supernatural scares, what does lurk behind those iconic motel doors is just as terrifying. Not only can you not take a shower in peace, but the boyish charm of the owner quickly wears thin once you find out about his penchant for donning his mother's wig.

The Bates Motel is such an iconic horror location that it's been at the center of various Psycho spin-offs and sequels, not to mention cropping up outside of the Hitchcock-verse in Ti West's MaXXXine. If you're in the Hollywood area, you too can stop by and pay a visit to Norman's old hunting ground.

Love Halloween haunts? Then a stay at the Hotel Abaddon from Stephen Cognetti's indie found footage hit Hell House LLC is right up your alley. Sure, it was once owned by a Satanist who practiced dark cultish deeds in the basement, and sure, it's full of vengeful spirits, but my god, are the vibes impeccable.

While anyone with a passing interest in demonology would take one look at the hotel's name and nope out of there immediately, those less familiar might be enticed by the Abaddon's historic location and local reverence, not to mention the friendly clown who wanders the halls at nighttime. Overall, the Abaddon Hotel doesn't pose as much of a threat as some of the other stays on this list, as long as you visit during spooky season.

As a general rule, if you hear bloodcurdling screams from the back room of a motel you're currently checking in to, you should probably swiftly turn around, get back in your car and haul ass in the opposite direction, not do as Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson do in Nimród Antal's 2007 thriller Vacancy, which is head straight on into their new room and start unpacking. The second best time to get out of the Pinewood Motel would be upon the discovery of the snuff tape left in the VCR – and guess what Beckinsale and Wilson still do not do.

Jokes aside, Vacancy‘s Pinewood Motel makes for one of the most sinister entries on this list because the horrors that lie within are partially inspired by real-life instances of voyeurism in rundown hotels. The Pinewood itself is purely fictional however, as it was built entirely from scratch for the purposes of the film.

Everyone loves staying at a place where dinner is included, but the dinner of Motel Hell‘s Motel Hello is probably to be avoided. While Kevin Connor's slasher sendup might have initially started life as a Texas Chain Saw Massacre parody, Motel Hell has since gone on to become a cult classic, with the iconic pig-headed chainsaw killer still serving as a symbol for backwoods hospitality.

Motel Hello's proprietor Vincent Smith is first and foremost a farmer, with a special proclivity for sausages of the long pig variety. Food issues aside, Motel Hello probably shouldn't be on your list of places to stay if you're ever in the Santa Clarita area, where Motel Hell was shot, because frankly it offers little in the way of creature comforts, even if it does boast an impressive garden.

The titular hostel of Eli Roth's 2005 Millennial nasty classic Hostel is never named in the film, but it's easily one of the more famous lodgings in all of horror. While the hostel itself is pretty normal, low-budget backpacker fare, it's some of the clientele that make Hostel so horrifying, as the place serves as a bonafide buffet for members of the so-called Elite Hunting Group, a gang of wealthy psychos who pay to kill and mutilate tourists.

The hostel of Hostel isn't based on one specific real-life place, and especially not one in Slovakia, as a nationwide outrage to the film made very clear, Roth has stated that the inspiration behind it came from a conversation surrounding alleged ‘murder vacations' in Thailand. Probably not the best way to experience such a beautiful country.

With Damian McCarthy's Hokum still fresh in the release calendar, we're not going to reveal what exactly goes on inside the Bilberry Woods Hotel, but let's just say it's not somewhere you'll be wanting to stay on your next trip to Ireland. In Hokum, author Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) makes a pilgrimage to the remote inn to scatter his parents’ ashes, only to be shaken up by the staff’s tales of an ancient witch haunting the honeymoon suite take hold of his mind.

No stranger to crafting horrifying spaces (fans of McCarthy's feature debut Caveat are definitely still haunted by that dilapidated abandoned house), Hokum‘s hotel is pure nightmare fuel; claustrophobic, dank feeling and full of terrifying spectral visions, particularly that horrible rabbit man.