The hotel in writer-director Stewart Thorndike's Bad Things doesn't look particularly menacing. Comley Suites has nothing on the foreboding Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick's Stephen King adaptation The Shining, which seems to be Thorndike's main influence for Bad Things. The nondescript roadside hotel is the kind of place that travelers would pass by without a second thought, stopping only if they can't press on to somewhere better for the night. Yet it's the hotel's stark blandness that gives it an eerie quality perfect for the unsettling atmosphere that Thorndike creates in Bad Things.
Like the Overlook in The Shining, Comley Suites is closed for the winter, and while it's not nearly as remote as the Overlook, it's still mostly cut off from the outside world. The Jack Torrance figure in Bad Things is Ruthie Nodd (GLOW's Gayle Rankin), who's just inherited the hotel from her late grandmother. Ruthie's mother wants her to sell the place, while Ruthie's girlfriend, Cal (Hari Nef), hopes that they can take it over together, using it as a springboard for their future as a couple. The conspicuous absence of Ruthie's mother, along with ominous references to Ruthie's troubled childhood, is just one sign that things are about to go very wrong at Comley Suites.
Ruthie and Cal arrive along with their friend Maddie (Rad Pereira), who also happens to be Cal's ex, and Maddie's companion Fran (Succession's Annabelle Dexter-Jones), who previously had an affair with Ruthie that Cal is struggling to forgive. Even without any supernatural elements, there's plenty of tension among these volatile characters, who are theoretically on a weekend getaway but don't seem to be having much fun. Ruthie is also planning to meet with prospective buyers for the hotel, even as Cal continues to argue against selling it.
To that end, Cal sends Ruthie a link to video lectures by a supposed hospitality expert (Molly Ringwald), whose presentations sound vaguely menacing and vaguely sexual. There's a lot in Bad Things that is both vaguely menacing and vaguely sexual, and for a long time, Thorndike coasts on that sense of unease. The characters discover the hotel's history, which includes five deaths in the past 30 years, and they wander through the empty hallways and common areas with the sense that something is always lurking around the corner. Thorndike often lingers at the end of a scene for an extra beat or two, holding her camera on empty spaces that become infused with dread.
Eventually, the specters emerge, and Fran is the first to see ghosts of past guests, including a pair of joggers who are a clear homage to the twins in The Shining. The long tracking shots down quiet hallways also echo Kubrick's visual style, and Comley Suites even has its own forbidden room similar to the Overlook's infamous Room 237. Fran is the first to start seeing apparitions, and she quickly cracks, begging the other three to leave the hotel and return to the city. Part of what's creepy about Bad Things is that these characters have essentially trapped themselves since nothing is actually preventing them from calling a ride-share and driving away.
The toxic dynamic among the four characters is what keeps them from leaving, and the various jealousies and secrets feed into the escalation of violence. Just as the Overlook feeds on Jack Torrance's alcoholism and resentment, whatever presence exists in Comley Suites feeds on the grievances among its four inhabitants, turning them against each other in increasingly extreme ways. Bad Things begins with a playful tease of Ruthie wielding a chainsaw, only to use it to cut a branch and free the group's car, but it's a guarantee that the chainsaw will return in a much less helpful context later on.
Ruthie's sleep apnea mask also becomes an unlikely but effective source of terror, and it's surprising that those masks haven't been more extensively utilized in horror movies. Thorndike excels at creating haunting imagery like that, which makes Bad Things consistently nightmarish even as it devolves into surreal incoherence in its final act. Rankin conveys Ruthie's depths of hidden trauma without having to spell out every bit of motivation, and Ringwald is seductively sinister as the hospitality guru who may be a manifestation of the characters' fears and/or desires.
As a queer riff on one of the best-known horror stories, Bad Things ends up feeling a little undercooked, but its immersive visual style and strong performances carry it past Thorndike's uneven plotting. She makes smart use of the single location, finding new rooms and corridors to trap the characters in as they lose their grip on reality. It may not be as elaborate or ambitious as The Shining, but Bad Things mostly succeeds on its own more modest terms.
Bad Things premieres Friday, August 18, on Shudder and AMC+.