Needful. Lonely. Ravenous.
The Shining. Rosemary’s Baby. The Exorcist. The Hotel Barclay was inspired by the masterpieces within the horror genre that preceded it, truly grand stories which understood that horror could be as elegant as it was terrifying, and that real terror is often found in the silences, the shivers of quiet between moments of action. It is in the terror of the quiet when the slow chill unfolds and the characters realize that something is indeed amiss and that they are irrevocably in its grip.
The Hotel Barclay is an online episodic horror series, inspired by films which orbited around the terror found in the foreboding. This series defines horror as circumstances which produce an overwhelming sense of dread. The terror that the characters experience in this series is seldom of the visceral, but most often of the existential and thus, the most inescapable, and ultimately the most macabre.
In many ways, each episode is identical, even though the cast and plot differs. One to several characters check into The Hotel Barclay. A vulnerability is demonstrated among them. The hotel preys upon that vulnerability, through the malevolent energy which courses through the hotel. This dark energy manifests in a canon of ghosts which walk the hotel’s corridors. The energy of particular guests will provoke the energy of particular ghosts.
And in their own way, each ending is always the same: one or more of the guests is retaken by the hotel, and we come to see this person was in fact, always a part of the hotel. The terror induced by the hunt that the hotel engages in can be seen as a delicate yet repulsive dance between parties. The terror the hotel invokes is both a siren’s song to the parties singled out as prey and a melancholy waltz. The hotel always leads and the hotel always wins.
