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The new American Horror Story trailer is out, taking us down the halls of a strange, beautiful hotel. Here's what we know about the latest installment of this creepy show, set this season in Los Angeles.
FX anthology series American Horror Story: Hotel revolves around Detective John Lowe (Wes Bentley) who is on the case of the Ten Commandments Killer. His investigation brings Lowe and his wife, Alex (Chloe Sevigny), to the Hotel Cortez in downtown Los Angeles, which is owned by deadly Countess (Lady Gaga).
AHS' first season, Murder House, was also set in Los Angeles, revolving around a family that moves into a house full of dark surprises. Just as Murder House drew from several real-life elements—like a grisly tour based on Los Angeles' 'Dearly Departed' tour company, the Manson murders on Cielo Drive and the unsolved murder of the Black Dahlia—so will Hotel. Specifically, Hotel will draw parallels to downtown Los Angeles' infamous Cecil Hotel. We will also see a callback to Murder House in the form of Marcy, the realtor who sold the horrible house to an ill-fated family of that season.
Set to the sultry Brodinski track "Bury Me," the new trailer shows some series regulars, as well as some new faces, lurking in the halls of the treacherous Hotel Cortez.
Here's who we're going to meet in Hotel:
The Hotel Itself:
In real life, the hotel is actually a six-story set on the FOX lot, but the lore goes much deeper.
The Hotel Cortez is described as a 1930s Art Deco hotel, but designed as a maze with secret chambers and dead ends. This could be a nod to H.H. Holmes, a Chicago serial killer who built the World's Fair Hotel in 1893. His hotel was later dubbed a "murder castle," for its maze of rooms where he tortured and killed employees, guests and his own lovers. (Side note: There's an upcoming Martin Scorcese film based on Holmes' life called The Devil in the White City, starring Leonardo DiCaprio).
However, you can't talk about creepy L.A. hotels without mentioning The Cecil, located downtown at 5th and Main. It's since been rebranded 'Stay on Main,' and undergone some remodeling, but that hasn't erased its strange and terrifying past. In 2013, the body of 21-year-old Canadian tourist Elisa Lam was discovered in a water tank on the roof after she'd been missing for several days. The water tank was only checked after hotel guests reported funny smelling and tasting water. Surveillance video from that night showed Lam behaving bizarrely in an elevator, making strange hand gestures. Series creator Ryan Murphy said that he had watched the surveillance footage of Lam in the elevator while conceptualizing the season.
There was a surveillance video that went around two years ago that showed a girl getting into an elevator in a hotel that was said to be haunted … and she was never seen again.
The Cecil was also once home to two serial killers at separate times: Richard Ramirez, the Nightstalker, and Jack Unterweger, an Austrian serial killer who stayed there when he visited Los Angeles.
American Horror Story: Hotel will premiere on FX on October 7.
