People Are Just Discovering American Horror Story Is Linked To Netflix's Cecil Hotel Documentary
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If you're looking for something new and exciting to watch as lockdown rages on, then look no further than Crime Scene: The Vanishing At The Cecil Hotel.
While there are no shortage of events at the Cecil Hotel to deep-dive in to (there's been a number of suicides at the hotel, while serial killer Richard Ramirez made the Cecil Hotel his base as he went on a killing spree in the 1980s) this series particularly hones in on the mysterious disappearance of 21-year-old student Elisa Lam.
The case garnered international attention in 2013 when footage of Elisa behaving erratically in the hotel's lift went viral after it was posted online, seeing many internet sleuths try to figure out what happened. Elisa was found dead in the hotel's water tank shortly after she vanished. Her death is still unexplained but was ruled as a suicide.
Cecil Hotel's notoriety served as an influence to Ryan Murphy when writing American Horror Story's fifth series, Hotel, with the sad case of Elisa Lam in particular being especially impactful.
"I was always very obsessed with The Hotel Cecil that is downtown, which is where the Night Stalker [serial killer Richard Ramirez, who features in both the documentary and AHS] is rumoured to have stayed and where they had the video of the girl getting on the elevator [and disappearing]," he told Collider in 2015.
"That place has had its share of bad publicity over the years, but that was one. There was a surveillance video that went around two years ago that just showed a girl getting into an elevator in a downtown hotel that is rumoured to be haunted, and she was never seen again."
The fifth season stars Lady Gaga, and centres round Hotel Cortez in LA. There are further parallels between the two shows. In 1947, Hotel Cecil was linked to the murder of Elizabeth Short (AKA Black Dahlia), who was rumoured to appear at the hotel's bar shortly before she was killed in nearby Leimert Park.
This is fictionalised in season one of American Horror Story. Mena Suvari plays Elizabeth, who is drugged and assaulted by a dentist before dying of an overdose.
