A new horror-mystery-thriller from Terror Films and director Julio Maria Martino, Country of Hotels tells the stories of the desperate souls who pass through the doors of 508, a room on the fifth floor of an anonymous, decaying hotel.
We are taken on a surreal and blackly comic journey down its lonely corridors and behind its outdated furnishings and stained surfaces. The story plunges us into the ever-turning carousel of haunted lives who check in and out of this sinister establishment.
Says director Martino, “When we were making Country of Hotels, we worked hard to create an environment which was relentlessly oppressive and claustrophobic, occasionally punctuated by moments of dark humor. An enclosed world in which an unseen, unnamed and mutable threat lurked behind hotel room doors and down long lonely corridors. A threat which might manifest itself suddenly and at any moment. In visualizing this world, I felt we were trying to create something highly idiosyncratic and very different from the outward appearance of most people’s daily lives. Indeed, Country of Hotels was meant to be about an alternate reality – what happens if you step into a decaying, dilapidated hotel, lose your mind, and never leave. However, increasingly over the past few years, people’s daily existences in many parts of the world have come to resemble this experience. As in Country of Hotels, computer and television screens, together with the sounds of our own voices, have become our closest and most reliable companions; and the person knocking on our door brings with them a potentially deadly message.
Saying all of this, I don’t wish to imply that this film is a prediction of “pandemic lockdown” but the more I consider people’s responses to it the more I realize that, in the past few months and years, it has fundamentally shifted from fantasy, towards reality.”
Siobhán Hewlett, Matthew Leitch, Adam Leese, Michael Laurence, and Charles Pike star in Country of Hotels, written by David Hauptschein, available on digital platforms May 26 from Terror Films.
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