Did you catch this Barbarian reference in Netflix’s Haunted Hotel?

Haunted Hotel, a new adult animated Netflix series, was released on September 19, 2025, and follows Katherine, a single mother who struggles to run a hotel that is haunted. She lives there with her two children, Ben and Esther, who have become accustomed to the ghosts that surround them. But since ghosts aren't great for the hotel business, Katherine is struggling with the lack of customers.

Her brother, Nathan, who also happens to be a ghost and the original owner of the hotel, assists her in managing it. Haunted Hotel has ten episodes and follows several creepy yet funny storylines. Episode eight, Aunt Rose, is about Nathan and Katherine's aunt, Rose, and as Netflix Geeked also points out, there's a Barbarian reference in it.

Barbarian reference in Haunted Hotel

In episode eight of Haunted Hotel, called Aunt Rose, we see Nathan and Katherine's aunt, Rose, visit them at the hotel. Aunt Rose isn't liked by Nathan, who insists on the fact that she's mean and made him feel insecure about his lips, which was the sole reason why he grew a mustache. Katherine, on the other hand, insists that while their aunt is mean, she's still family and should be treated as such.

When Aunt Rose arrives at Undervale Hotel, she immediately criticizes everything and everyone. We soon realized why Nathan dislikes her so much. When Aunt Rose finds out that people who die on the hotel's property become ghosts there, she wants to die there and decides to move in. She also says that the doctor told her how she's extremely sick and has mere days left. Nathan and Katherine do not want to be stuck with Rose's ghost all their lives and thus try to convince her not to intentionally die on the property.

Aunt Rose seems to get the message and says she's leaving, but when Katherine and Nathan notice how she left without her belongings, they guess that she's just hiding out until she dies. They then ask the ghosts to look for her all over the property, and when she's finally spotted in the sub-basement, Katherine and Nathan go to look for her there with a torch. They pass through creepy rooms and finally find her.

As Netflix Geeked points out, the Haunted Hotel scene of Katherine and Nathan walking through the sub-basement, looking for their aunt Rose, is a reference to Tess discovering the basement in Barbarian. In the 2022 film, Tess, the protagonist, finds out that she has double-booked a house for rent after she arrives at the house. She decides to share the house with the other guest, Keith, but soon discovers a basement and goes down it, and gets locked in by mistake. She then discovers a hidden passage leading to a room with disturbing items.

While Tess is rescued from the basement by Keith, she ends up in there again, and that's when the film gets dark, showing us what lurks under the house. The scenes of Katherine and Nathan and of Tess aren't the same in tone, as the first has comedic elements while the second doesn't.

Both the show and the film deal with creepy storylines, but not of the same intensity or kind. Still, the scene of Katherine and Nathan looking for their aunt Rose and coming across disturbing rooms is similar to Tess's accidental discovery of the creepy basement that has seen many horrors.

Haunted Hotel is streaming on Netflix, and Barboan is streaming on HBO Max.

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