Followed 2018

DropTheMike, Matthew Solomon, a controversial vlogger who vanished after visiting the Lennox Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, drives this narrative by broadcasting a single, unbroken screencast that captures every twist of the weekend. The film opens with the promise of a big payday: a sponsorship offer of $250,000 if DropTheMike can rack up 50,000 new subscribers. With that lure in mind, he heads to a hotel notorious for tragedy—tens of suicides and murders have marred its founding, and the latest chilling incident involves the burned corpse of Meghan Kim, a Korean tourist, discovered in the boiler room after suspicious elevator footage shows her behaving erratically in the hotel’s elevator. Meghan Kim, Sarah Chang, becomes a haunting touchstone for the story as the camera follows Mike’s every move.

The first major pivot comes when Mike sits down with Wallace Fleischer, an author who uncovers a dark history tied to the Lennox. Wallace, John Savage, points to David Olmos, a serial killer and Satanist who once resided in the Lennox during the 1980s. The revelation sets the tone for a weekend that will blur the boundaries between online spectacle and the haunted real world. The next day, Mike relocates with his team—Nic, the editor; Chris, the religious director of photography; and Dani, the sound and camera operator who also happens to be Mike’s close friend and unspoken love. Nic, Caitlin Grace, takes a room nearby to edit the vlogs, while Mike, Dani, and Chris settle into a top-floor suite—the very room where Olmos once carried out his murders—creating a claustrophobic nerve center for the chilling events to unfold.

As the crew settles in, they set their sights on the basement, intent on reaching the boiler room. They run into Tony, the security guard, Christopher Ross Martin, who surprisingly reveals himself to be a fan of DropTheMike and offers to fetch the basement key. Tony’s warmth soon yields to something more ominous, and the encounter hints at the hotel’s pull over the living—and the dead. Mike starts digging into the legends of the Elevator Game, a ritual that supposedly opens a doorway to another dimension when performed in an elevator. He tests the ritual alone and encounters Meghan Kim’s ghostly presence, a moment that unsettles him but he brushes off as fan obsession rather than a warning.

Back in the hotel, a sequence of nerve-jangling moments heightens the sense of danger. A Skype call from Jess, Mike’s fiancée, reveals her pregnancy and injects a personal stake into the peril. The mood shifts as Chris checks on Nic and discovers her in a disturbed, self-harming state, a stark sign that the hotel’s influence is more intimate and insidious than the crew anticipated. Soon after, they glimpse a decapitated ghost roaming the corridor, prompting a chase that drives them to the rooftop where a sinister altar lies in their room—an animal’s tongue laid out on a platter, a macabre centerpiece that cements the hotel’s occult history.

On the third night, a ghostly child—the so-called Ghost Boy, Thaddeaus Ek—haunts the halls as the team pushes deeper into the nightmare. Their investigation leads them to Room 440, a space that seems to bend reality: when Mike steps toward it, he’s suddenly teleported back to the top floor. The hotel’s lore expands as Wallace reappears via a return call, explaining that Room 440 belonged to a detective who, after murdering his wife, dragged his two sons to the Lennox. The detective killed the elder son, chased the younger into the boiler room, and was himself killed by a maintenance man who encountered the son. This grim history overlays the present with a sense of fate and repetition, and as the tension escalates, Chris is attacked by a ghost from his own childhood, forcing the crew to confront the personal prices of this haunting.

With reality bending around them, the crew experiences further danger from the hotel’s residual threats. Dani is traumatized enough to leave with Chris, while Mike tries to pull Nic back from a dangerous edge, halting her from jumping out of her window. He delivers Nic back to her mother and sister, Kate Romero, Nic’s Mom / Mrs.Eply, reinserting a fragile sense of family into the chaos. In a moment of grim resolve, Mike returns to the basement, retrieving the key to the boiler room and ignoring a plea from Jess to come home. He starts a livestream, hoping to document the truth and perhaps redeem himself, but a garbled call from Wallace hints at a deeper, sinister truth: Mike is the biological son of the very detective who once terrorized this hotel.

The descent into the boiler room intensifies the film’s dread. Mike discovers the missing drone where Meghan Kim’s corpse had lain, and a laptop shows the livestream in real time alongside Tony’s occult-notebook entries. Ghosts swarm the corridors as a dead body appears and Mike flees the hotel in a panic. Back home, he attempts to pivot toward something more meaningful—announcing a hiatus from vlogging and proposing to make a documentary about homelessness—yet the house is suddenly overtaken by shadowy figures. Tony and Meghan Kim’s presence returns in a devastating form, delivering Mike his fiancée’s severed head and signaling the end of an ordinary life.

The film closes with the unsettling aftermath of Mike’s disappearance and a final, eerie postscript. Terrifying echoes spill into the online world as the TerribleTyler channel is introduced, and a chilling final moment unfolds when a message from Mike appears on his own account: “Can’t wait to meet you, Tyler.” The viewer is left with a blurred face on the laptop camera, the implication that the horror remains, just beyond the reach of the screen.

In the gallery of characters who populate the Lennox Hotel, the story threads together the ambitions and vulnerabilities of DropTheMike and his crew. The film uses the hotel as a living character—its history, its ghosts, and its occult rites all feeding into a single, inexorable pull toward the unknown. Across the cast, the performances—from Matthew Solomon as DropTheMike to Sam Valentine as Danni, Tim Drier as Chris, Caitlin Grace as Nic, John Savage as Wallace Fleischer, Ethan Alexander as David Olmos / Hacksaw Man, Christopher Ross Martin as Tony the Security Guard, and Terumi Shimazu as Meghan Kim’s Mother, among others—renders a growing sense of dread that lingers long after the final frame. The result is a haunting meditation on obsession, fame, and the price of peering too deeply into a place where history refuses to stay buried.