http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HellHotel

— Foxglove, Death: The Time of Your Life "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."

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Know the Haunted House? Well, this is similar: 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. Then there's knowing you're far from home where no one will notice if you disappear.

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

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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.

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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 (which, curiously, uses another obscure song as its Title Theme Tune, but one called "Hotel Hell" instead of "Hell Hotel") in which he solves the problems of ailing hotels, though some of the hotels featured may be approaching this level. There's also the equally obscure haunted house of the same name from Universal Studios' 1997 Halloween Horror Nights. Also, not to be confused with when Hell is a hotel, which is Mundane Afterlife.

Examples:

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Advertising

Spoofed in some of Verizon's many "dead zone" commercials.

Anime and Manga

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 apparently once you sign in, true escape is impossible . Well, not quite true... the Guests could have escaped, but they deliberately chose not to as they couldn't bring themselves to face reality.

. Well, not quite true... The Voynich Hotel has a lot of fun playing with this, as the title hotel is on a wartorn island populated by witches, undead witches, yakuza, ex-yakuza, yakuza ghosts, luchador hotel managers, suicidal chefs, Mafioso, assassins, drug dealers, government agents-turned-drug dealers, overly-curious children, demons, tigers, and a perverted robot detective.

Comic Books

Inspector Canardo: The desert motel in The Girl Who Dreamed of the Horizon doesn't look too bad, aside from being worn-down, but Canardo doesn't take long to figure out that the two owners have been disposing of several visitors to steal their belongings. It turns out they bit off more than they could chew when they killed a member of Rasputin's gang to take the drugs he was transporting.

Shade, the Changing Man: Hotel Shade has 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.

One Story Arc in Spawn involved a Hell Hotel, caused by the residents of an Apartment Complex being freed of personal restraint by The Violator .

. Superlópez: The aptly named "Hotel Pánico". López, Luisa and Jaime have to spend a night there when surprised by a storm on the road, and plenty of scary things happen to them. which leaves all its staff jobless. Eventually, Superlópez discovers that the whole thing was an idea of the owner, who wanted to spread the rumor of the weird incidents in the hotel to attract thrill-seeking customers, so this results in the closure of the hotel

Film  Live-Action

Gamebooks

The Give Yourself Goosebumps book "Checkout Time at the Dead-End Hotel". For starters, the mint on your pillow makes you a ghost. Somehow.

Horror Hotel from the lesser-known Plot-Your-Own Horror Stories series, is, unsurprisingly, all about this.

Literature

Live-Action TV

Music

Roleplay

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.

Theatre

Hell in No Exit is a hotel. A rather normal looking hotel, at that. Except that roommates are specifically chosen to drive each other crazy, and they're locked in there forever. But not really. The door isn't locked, but nobody has the strength of character necessary to leave, even when the door just pops open at the end .

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 two or three whole "wings" from the front of the building and sent an elevator (plus its five occupants) to another dimension in 1939. That tends to look bad on any hotel's record. It's gotten an "Attractionistas" souvenir doll, Holly, a creepy bellhop.

A real example, the "Legendary Years" wing of the Pop Century Resort 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 remained left behind, the only thing complete being the parking lot. In 2012, the empty resort finally opened as Disney's Art of Animation Resort, making this a subversion of the trope.

Video Games

Webcomics

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

Web Original

Inverted in Hazbin Hotel, which is a literal hell hotel meant to reform the damned.

Season 2 of Marble Hornets opens in one, although its creepiness doesn't become apparent till a few episodes later, when Jay realizes that he and Jessica are the only customers in the hotel. Just when he decides to leave, Masky shows up.

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.

The Cultoholic team have inflicted this upon each other as part of forfeits for failing inter-office challenges. In particular, Adam was sent to spend the night in the lowest rated hotel in Britain; he found used no2 canisters in the bedside table, blood (and more...) on the mattress, his bedroom door had no catch OR lock, and he was awoken at 1am by a couple loudly fornicating in a nearby room.

Western Animation

Real Life