12 Cabins 12 Vacancies: The Haunted Hotel In Cinema 

This was a fun video and interesting. Thank you.

"I live in the weak and the wounded ... Doc!" Another amazing video!

i've just discovered your channel and watched every video today while i should have been doing homework! i love video essays but you might have the strongest voice and some of the most unique tastes i've ever come across. i love love love your content and the films you chose to analyze are just fascinating, including this set. i cannot wait to see more, and discovering you right now when you have just 3k subscribers really makes me feel like i'm getting my foot in the door. hope all is well! and thank you for these wonderful videos :)

Once again... Excellent work! Joining the chorus of praise and appreciation. Your analysis of these films is really impressive.

you make the best video essays about horror i see pretty much anywhere, thank you

Only just discovered your video essays (the prospect of more videos to watch over lunch about Lynch, House of Leaves, and Night in the Woods is a very good one) and I'm happy I have. I was going to bring up 'The Innkeepers' (even before I noticed that footage from it was used in the essay): that's a film I feel has been overlooked by many, but that I love as a kind of "warm" inversion of The Shining -- the space of the lonesome hotel offering somewhere to attempt to hide from inner anxieties, as opposed to a space where they violently fester and mutate.

I adore the sort of, organic train of thought you have in these videos. I've recently been obsessed with channels like renegade cut and Lindsay Ellis which take a more macro, socio-political take on movies, but here it feels more personal, psychological and human. Also, your voice is so relaxing!! I'm glad to have stumbled upon your channel! Keep up the excellent work!

Your editing is practically godlike, your writing is interesting, Horror is my favorite genre (so I’m glad a lot of your videos are based on horror), and you get bonus points since The Shining is my favorite movie of all time ;)

I just found your channel through your NitWs video, and I'm glad I did! Your work is fantastic and intensely under appreciated, you should be getting 100k on every video, at least. Thanks for posting!

Astute as ever. Always food for thought. The haunting of hill house contains all of this. Long live intelligent horror and character based scary movies.

It's delightful to see Session 9 included here. What a memorable setting in that decrepit and decaying building. I was working at a Blockbuster Video store when I saw this title on a shelf in 2004, and something about it made me give it a try. My partner and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It wasn't your standard horror fare. The entire film is essentially a palpable sense of foreboding that builds to a crescendo as the story unfolds. The film-makers didn't even need to add a bit of violence at the climax (gore, bloodshed and violence don't scare me in the least, they just startle me); the movie was genuinely frightening and creepy with just sounds and tone and background score and setting. There are quite a few moments in Session 9 that elicit chills; one in particular is when the youngest of the crew is alone and sees that the long row of bare light bulbs above him is quickly going dark, one by one, forcing him into blackness. Poor Jeff. Some viewers will notice that during the movie when the carton marked "Evidence" is sliced open by Mike (he's such a curious Pandora, that one), we hear something that could be the sound of a breath escaping. Or it might be my own twisted brain creating that illusion. Not sure. I loved the reel to reel audio recordings and how warped they sounded from age and deterioration-- that's another effect in Session 9 that adds to the uneasy vibe. And the script keeps us waiting with bated breath to discover who Simon will be in this scenario. Simon for me is a supernatural entity in that building who is biding his time and waiting for someone new to "play with". As luck would have it, Gordon comes into the asylum, and he is already damaged and has done something nefarious after having snapped mentally. Each of these men have either a secret or a deep fear, and the Danvers Institution seems to have ways of working on those things. I'm a big haunted house aficionado when it comes to movies ... whether it's in The Others, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, Monster House, Burnt Offerings, The Orphanage, The Conjuring or Beetlejuice, I love 'em.

Your videos are so dope, it's shocking to me that you have so few subscribers but I'm sure those numbers will grow, video essays seem like they're really hard to get right but your editing is super smooth and impressive, and the points you argue and works you tackle are all super interesting and refreshing. Thanks for the quality content!!!

This video was truly fascinating and so well written/edited. This channel is a goldmine for someone like me, and I can't for the life of me figure out why it took the overlord's algorithm so long to recommend it.

masterful editing and writing

All of your videos are unbelievably well created. Well writen, great visuals, great pacing, everything! This is one is no different. I hate to see that you're videos are not getting as much attention as they should, but it will come eventually. Just keep at it! Amazing stuff, and PLEASE keep up the good work!

The part about people's perception of hoteles being temporary (and that this temporary nature is typically unusual) helped me realize something; with the recent popularization of streaming, reaction videos, and so forth, I've been wondering why we all enjoy seeing others experiencing things, and this perspective you shared about most people's discomfort with temporary residency gave me an idea that may help answer that. First, let me give some context, I've moved all my life, as far back as I can remember my family has moved, even as a solo working adult I moved frequently, and even now as a married woman I've continued moving and introduced my husband to the experience of not just moving, but doing so often. The idea of being in one place for a lifetime is completely foreign to me and I struggle to imagine in its entirety what that must be like. That said, I never was able to experience that uneasy perspective you described with relation to a hotel being unusual, so there's something valuable for me to gain in seeing what you (or any other person other than myself, who can pull from experiences different than my own) as a lense to see creative works through which will allow me to experience it from within someone else's shoes. Since we cannot know what we don't experience, we try and fail at fully rendering an extrapolation of what it might be like to have someone else's prior experiences as a frame, as our own construction of such a frame is inherently incomplete. Perhaps something appealing about seeing others' interpretation of experiences is that it gives a complete, unflawed frame to view through, so that something we may have missed can come into view. My own lack of viewing residency as permanent resulted in a frame which obscured the underlying theme of this movie from my view, so it never had anything which tied it all together; however, having now seen through your own frame, I can now see that essential component that was instructed from my view, and have a newfound appreciation for this creative piece of cinema. Thank you so much, not only for helping me make sense of The Shining, but also for helping me to better understand the appeal of examining the experiences of another person through said person's own frame of reference.

absolutely adore your essays and come back to them often as entertaining these ideas is basically my favorite thing in the world. thank you

your older videos deserve more credit you always hit hard with your takes

Another good one! I watched this in a hotel coincidentally, and now I'm a tad afraid to sleep.

Marienbad, so totally underrated. Thanks for throwing down on this one.

I’m so excited to see what you have in store for 2018! This is my favorite channel on RU-vid right now

This video was super good! I sent it to a friend teaching an undergrad course on haunted houses in literature.

Session 9, yay! Great video, Grace. I'm excited to see what the new year will bring us, in terms of video content from you.

01:06 incredible cut

This was absolutely superb!

everything I've seen from you has been brilliant, thank you!

Awesome vid, Grace!

Regarding the Shining: After thinking this over again and again I'm just going to say it: I think Stephen King - and I like him as an author - just has shit taste in movies.

one year already! your videos are amazing, keep it up!

Simon from Session 9 is a malevolent genius loci of the asylum. He’s not the ghost of a former patient. He is the spirit of the asylum building. Basically, the “vibe” of the place with malevolent intentions and influence and a common name to personify him. Born from a place of pain he “lives in the weak and wounded”. He lives inside Mary and the Danvers Asylum and has now made contact with Gordon, a man struggling with stress. Simon introduces himself during those hypnotic moments of life where we run off autopilot, but only in times of personal crisis. An asylum like Danvers is a penultimate location for such a sinister entity to reside and even collect victims.

Great essay :)

Wow the ending gave me chills.... your editing is fantastic. I showed your channel to a friend of mine, we're both studying media (in particular film) and we are big advocates of using film to study film. Not just write papers but make video essays as well... (and use them for papers/video's if they are academic enough) We talked about making video essays for a long time but your videos really inspired me to actually start. Now we're meeting every week, figuring it out as we go. Do you have any tips for us as beginners? Also I noticed you're using footage from Alias Grace. I loved that series, even did a paper on it (an intersectional analysis)... I was wondering what you thought of the series? Might be a nice topic for another video essay? :)

With hotels and Session 9's mental hospital, I'm stealing a little from Contrapoints here but similar to how grand hotels in mid 20th-century movies were often places of "haunting," in part because they were these grand resorts (Contrapoints mentioned Victorian mansions in particular, but these grand resorts have similar historical arcs) that started to decay around the time that they were filmed (50s-70s), in the early 2000s we were in a situation where we had a lot of mental hospitals that were abandoned as a part of Regan's 1980s austerity measures to public health, and so they (in part because they're cheap locations) became a quasi-common setting in movies (like Session 9 and the opening of It Follows comes to mind) and especially presented as "haunted" settings for emo music videos in the early 00s. (Billy Talent's "Try Honesty," First to Last's "Note to Self") And I think a little bit of slight-of-hand happens with these movies because we see all these institutions coded as "ghostly," where it originates from some past that is so far-off it's impossible to mark, but in reality the circumstances that caused the decay is far more recent than we want to admit - most kids watching those "spooky" emo music videos were alive when those mental hospitals were abandoned. Especially with Session 9, to go back to your argument, the "haunting" is looking at spooky, empty "liminal" spaces that we feel like "should" be occupied. Well, to be blunt, it _should_ be occupied by people in need, but it not used for that utility anymore.

Your channel is amazing!! The next nerdwriter1!!!

Absolutely fantastic! new sub

SEVEN HUNDRED AND SEVENTY SEVENTH LIKE! WOOHOO!

I know it doesn’t match the tone, but I was *really* hoping to see clips from Bob’s Burgers Shinning episode XD

I've watched this a couple times, and I can't tell if I am understanding you correctly. I've not seen Last Year at Mairenbad, but I'm fairly familiar with the others. Are you suggesting a connection between the fractured identities that occur, and the settings these films take place in? Meaning one begat the other? Or are you implying that the films are different because they use the settings combined with the fractured personalities to relay the sense of being haunted? My take on the three I have seen was that the setting was also a character in the films, as much as the actors, but I've never seen the Bates Motel as being haunted by Norman, for instance. It just seemed to be a convenient catalyst for his voyeuristic behavior, as Norman is more haunted by his mother than anything. The Shining implies an evil place that exists here, but also out of time. Session 9's plot revolved more around how humans deal with the extremes of stress, and how Gordon becomes influenced, it's suggested, by the same entity that possessed Mary after losing his grip on sanity when his life becomes cluttered with too many common stressors...like a new child, a dangerous job, and the need for money to survive. The only connective tissue I see between these films is that they all rely on a place that is intrinsic to the unfolding narrative and the disassociation that each of the characters experience as they move through their stories. Is that what you are getting at here? That the "ghost" that haunts these places and people only appears once their enter into these spaces? Your references to mirrors makes me wonder if you are also suggesting that the places begin to reflect the disconnect these characters have with themselves and reality..? And it's late. Happy New Year! Thanks for the thought food.

I want to watch The Shining so bad, but I hate being scared and watching horror films :'(

could you release the transcript for this video? Your insights are always really great but I have a hard time absorbing all of the information leading to the larger point.

Hey!?! I was wondering if you'd consider reviewing Mark Z. Danielewski's THE FAMILIAR?

You should do a video on Little Nightmares!

what's the film at 5:20 ?

corker of a video, this.