If you’ve ever complained about bad service at a hotel, consider yourself lucky you didn’t book a room at Hotel Infierno. In this 2015 Argentine drama-horror delight, the “continental breakfast” comes with a side of psychosis, the housekeeping never leaves, and the check-out policy is—shall we say—permanent. Directed by a team that clearly grew up watching The Shining while praying at church, Hotel Infierno is a wicked little gem that transforms a remote inn into a cathedral of guilt, religion, and homicide.
Welcome to the Middle of Nowhere (Population: Idiots and Murderers)
Our story begins the way most horror vacations do: with a storm, a broken road, and a couple too stubborn to admit they’re in the opening act of a cautionary tale. Federico (your standard horror-movie husband—confident, handsome, and catastrophically wrong) and his pregnant partner Vanesa stumble upon a lonely roadside hotel run by an elderly couple, Remedios and Jacinto. The hosts are friendly enough—if your definition of “friendly” includes veiled religious mania, repressed murder guilt, and family secrets that would make even Jerry Springer throw in the towel.
Vanesa, to her credit, immediately senses that something is off. It might be the creepy twins, Francisco and Lucila, who look like they crawled out of a Catholic nightmare. It might be the vibe of the hotel, which feels less like a cozy inn and more like a halfway house for damned souls. But Federico insists on staying the night, proving once again that in horror cinema, testosterone is the leading cause of death.
The Hotel California of Argentina
Hotel Infierno has the dusty, decaying soul of a gothic tragedy wrapped in provincial kitsch. It’s a story about faith gone rotten and motherhood turned murderous, all set in a place where time feels stuck somewhere between the 1950s and the apocalypse. Director Nathaniel Hendrickson (yes, that’s right—the same madman who gave us The Hollow One) brings an eerie calm to the chaos. Every flickering light bulb, every clap of thunder, feels like an omen from a God who outsourced miracles to the devil.
And what a devil this movie gives us—Remedios, played with unnerving serenity by a performer who clearly understands that “crazy” is most effective when it smiles politely. She’s the kind of woman who would bake cookies for the priest after mass, then bury him under the hydrangeas for doubting her faith. Her every line is delivered with the calm authority of someone who believes divine intervention comes with a sharp knife and a shovel.
Kids Say the Darndest Things (Especially Through a Ouija Board)
Meanwhile, the twins—Francisco and Lucila—are busy playing a homemade Ouija game, trying to talk to their dead father. At first, this seems like typical teenage goth nonsense. But soon, things start to click: they’re not just reaching out to any random ghost; they’re reaching out to their real father, the one their “mother” murdered and buried like a bad Yelp review.
The sequences of the kids contacting the beyond are deliciously eerie—flickering candles, shadows on the wall, and the gradual realization that the adults around them are hiding a biblical level of sin. It’s The Others by way of The Addams Family, complete with spiritual trauma and awkward family dinners.
A Faith-Based Slaughter
The big reveal—that Remedios murdered a pregnant woman years earlier to steal her newborn twins as her own—is the kind of twist that makes you both gasp and slow clap. It’s horrifying, yes, but it’s also so absurdly operatic that you can’t help but admire the commitment. She did it all for love. Well, love and a deep misunderstanding of the Ten Commandments.
The scene of her killing the woman is as grim as it gets: a pillow pressed over the new mother’s face, a twisted lullaby of religious devotion. Jacinto, her husband, kills the father in a fit of misplaced loyalty, cementing their unholy domestic arrangement. If Norman Bates had run a bed and breakfast with Annie Wilkes, this would be the result.
Years later, when Jacinto finally grows a conscience and threatens to reveal the truth, Remedios decides there’s no problem in life that can’t be solved with a good old-fashioned staged suicide. He gets the rope; she gets to keep her lies. Marriage is all about compromise, after all.
The Devil Wears Aprons
What makes Hotel Infierno such a delight isn’t just the violence—it’s the tone. The film walks a razor-thin line between melodrama and madness, never tipping fully into parody but never forgetting that horror can be funny when you lean into the absurdity of evil dressed as domestic bliss. Remedios treats murder like a household chore. She kills, cleans up, and offers her next guests a cup of tea. It’s hospitality, Argentine-style.
Even as the body count rises, the hotel never loses its charm. There’s a haunting stillness in the halls, the kind of quiet that feels alive. The cinematography leans into candlelight and storm shadows, turning every room into a confessional. You half expect a priest to wander in and ask for a mint on his pillow.
The Return Guests
The film loops beautifully, ending where it began—with another stranded couple, unsuspecting and polite, stepping into the warm glow of death. Remedios greets them with her disarming smile and the same offer she gave before: a bed, shelter from the storm, and free breakfast. It’s a cyclical horror—evil repeating itself endlessly, like a timeshare presentation that never ends.
There’s something poetic about it, really. Hotel Infierno isn’t about escaping horror—it’s about realizing that hell has excellent customer service.
Why It Works
What elevates Hotel Infierno above your average low-budget scare flick is its sincerity. It’s not trying to be ironic or meta; it plays its grotesque story straight, which somehow makes it funnier. The film’s commitment to its own madness is admirable. The performances, particularly from the actress playing Remedios, have that unhinged theatricality that Argentine cinema does so well—passionate, exaggerated, and one prayer away from collapsing entirely.
The movie’s pacing is brisk, its dialogue sharp, and its sense of dread surprisingly grounded. Hendrickson knows when to let a scene breathe and when to choke it (sometimes literally). The religious overtones add a twisted grandeur to the proceedings: sin, guilt, rebirth, and the terrifying notion that divine love might look a lot like murder if you squint hard enough.
Final Verdict: Five Stars, Would Die Here Again
Hotel Infierno is that rare horror film that feels both ancient and fresh. It borrows from Gothic tradition but filters it through a distinctly Latin American lens, where faith, family, and madness are bound together tighter than a rosary around a corpse’s hands. It’s part ghost story, part morality play, and part travel warning.
Sure, it’s gruesome, but it’s also strangely beautiful—like a prayer whispered in the dark by someone who’s definitely going to hell. The film reminds us that evil doesn’t always come roaring from the depths; sometimes it greets you at the front desk, asks how far along your wife is, and offers free breakfast.
So if you ever find yourself lost in a storm and spot a lonely hotel glowing in the distance, maybe keep driving. Because at Hotel Infierno, the service is killer.
Would you like me to follow this same style (positive with dark humor) for other Argentine or Latin American horror films too?
