LA’s Cecil Hotel is an ominous place for historically established reasons, all of which receive the spotlight in Netflix’s upcoming true crime series, Crime Scene: The Vanishing At The Cecil Hotel. The project hails from Ted Bundy-obsessed director Joe Berlinger — he directed Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile starring Zac Efron as Ted Bundy and created Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes — who’s now tackling a different and also sinister mythology. His new project hopes to launch a documentary franchise that will dive into mysteries surrounding locations where infamous crimes took place. In this first season, the Cecil Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles gets profiled for its many untimely deaths and being a refuge of sorts for serial killers (including Richard Ramirez, who recently got the deep dive treatment in Netflix’s Night Stalker).
In particular, this series digs into the 2013 disappearance of a college student, Elisa Lam, at the notorious building, which is surrounded by Skid Row. Internet sleuths mobilized and stirred up a media frenzy, and what’s even more chilling is that this is only one of the hotel’s countless sinister happenings over the years. From the synopsis:
For nearly a century the Cecil Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles has been linked to some of the city’s most notorious activity, from untimely deaths to housing serial killers. In 2013 college student Elisa Lam was staying at the Cecil when she vanished, igniting a media frenzy and mobilizing a global community of internet sleuths eager to solve the case. Lam’s disappearance, the latest chapter in the hotel’s complex history, offers a chilling and captivating lens into one of LA’s most nefarious settings.
Crime Scene: The Vanishing At The Cecil Hotel streams on February 10.
