Known as “a place where serial killers let their hair down”, the Cecil Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles likely won’t make it to the top of your travel list post-corona. But Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, the upcoming Netflix documentary series based on the gruesome real-life events that went down there, may just take over your life come February.
The streaming platform is going deep on an unsolved murder mystery: the 2013 disappearance of Elisa Lam, a Canadian tourist who vanished one night, only to be found dead in one of the hotel’s water tanks.
The trailer flicks through several disturbing headlines related to the violence, suicide, and murder that the Cecil became known for. “People called it Hotel Death,” says one interviewee. Guests would “come back covered in blood, and no one’s got a problem with that,” exclaims another.
In one portion of the trailer, detectives are reviewing the last-known CCTV footage of Elisa before her disappearance — a clip which later went viral, and birthed a legion of internet sleuths. They note her erratic hand movements, and wonder aloud about the mysteriously stopped elevator: “It makes people wonder, ‘Is there something evil going on here?’” Tell us now, please! We have a right to know!
The true crime docuseries will premiere on Netflix in just a few weeks on 10 February. For now at least, we have this extremely creepy trailer. Enjoy the terror!