Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel (Season 1)

Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel (2021) is a true-crime docuseries you can watch online on iFILM — four Netflix episodes about a downtown Los Angeles hotel that has carried an ugly reputation for decades.

In January 2013, Canadian student Elisa Lam disappears inside the Cecil without a trace. The last record of her is grainy elevator footage: she jabs at the buttons and seems to hide from someone who isn't there. The clip floods the internet, and thousands of amateur detectives pile in. Alongside the search, the series digs into the building itself — cheap rooms, residents living on the edge, and two serial killers who once stayed there.

Director Joe Berlinger, the man behind the Ted Bundy film and Paradise Lost, cares less about what happened to Elisa than about how online sleuths nearly destroyed an innocent man while chasing the case. It plays more as a study of mass obsession than a haunted-hotel mystery. Stream all episodes of The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel online on iFILM.