[Warning: Spoilers for Season 1 of Hell Motel.]
How’s everyone doing after that finale? What did we just watch? With the first season of Hell Motel in the books, I bring you the final installment of my interview series with some last hot takes on the season and the finale from series creators Ian Carpenter and Aaron Martin and star Paula Brancati.
First, dialing it back to Blake’s flashback episode, “Guts and Glory,” if you thought that was a different animal from how Slasher did its flashbacks and flash forwards, you’re not wrong. Martin says that was by design. “At some point, I can’t remember when, we thought, ‘What if we make the majority of the episode the flashbacks, which we’ve never done before,” he shares.
“In that episode, it’s almost like its own horror movie. And it was really fun for us to break out of the format that we were used to using. It’s also a classic slasher movie, unlike the series, because we’re not trying to understand the killer. That killer’s just a killer and he’s slaughtering everybody, whether or not they deserve it.”
“The aesthetic is different. The shooting style, the palette, the music, it all shifts and, and there’s a pace to it that’s very different,” Carpenter points out.
Previous seasons have done the semi-reveal at the end of episode seven and then episode eight turns what you thought you knew on its head. Here, the episode is a bit of a coda, with some distance on the massacre. “It’s almost, again, like its own series. It’s completely separate from the rest of the season. I liked switching that up because we don’t always do it that way,” explains Martin.
Carpenter and Martin very coyly share that the Hell Motel whodunnit is a choose your own adventure situation. If you think it was Paige, great! If you think it was Andy, great! If you have no clue whatsoever and have to rewatch the whole thing, great!
“We’re not saying anything. And it has been very interesting, the journey as we go along. There have been shifts,” Carpenter says. “In the script form, readers favored one character. But as soon as we started shooting, [the perceptions] really started to shift to different directions.”
“We planned it from the start. And if you look at Paige, she decapitates somebody with a shovel. She’s very good at killing people. So maybe it is Paige…,” teases Martin.
For Brancati, the finale had some epic emotional swings, including that calm-after-and-before-the-storm scene on the couch where Andy and Paige are essentially interviewing each other about what they think happened without tipping their hands — a scene that was almost 20 pages of dialogue.
“It was like a 17-page day. Everything in Paige’s apartment we shot in one day. I think we were still figuring it out. From what I remember in the scripts, there’s definitely nothing that says to anyone reading that it’s Andy or that it’s Paige,” she shares.
“We didn’t even rehearse it. We were shooting long, long takes. And so it felt like we were feeling it out together. It was very thrilling. Those days as an actor are really, really, really fun. And the light bulb you’re working with, in my case, like a dear friend. Jim [Watson] is one of my favorite team partners I’ve ever had in anything.”
“You’re also sparring and trying things, and it’s very playful. And our crew is very generous and everyone’s working really hard at a high level. All the departments make sure it’s all coming together. So I hope it translated. It was cut by Jason Deschamps, who’s an incredible editor who I love so much. He did the short I directed called Junior’s Giant and many Slasher episodes.”
“And he was texting me during that edit, ‘Ooh my God, I’m cutting the scene on the couch right now!’ So I hope it was stressful to watch.”
That final confrontation between Paige and Andy is both physically and emotionally brutal, and Brancati shares that there was a lot to unpack in what Paige was already cycling through as the push and and pull of her career was being yanked away yet again when she realizes in the room she no longer has a role in the franchise, and now the seeming idyll with her fellow survivor was anything but.
“I had to do that [concession] speech so many times and you feel that aging out that happens with women and the recutting of the movie. It was effective, and it happens all the time. That’s why it lands,” she says.
The on stage confrontation was intense, and another marathon of dialogue. “When Breton’s character is killed and we have that final face off, it was another 10-page scene, I think. Another mini-play, and it was really exciting. We were both very clear on what the agenda was, what each other’s perspective was. We didn’t talk about it a lot with each other, but it was very exciting to shoot.”
“There was also a lot of ambiguity to it. I think that’s what makes the writing exciting. You’re not getting that traditional killer monologue and you are left with questions about both of their morality.”
“It’s challenging for me to not bring in my perspective as a woman in this situation. [When she realizes Caitlyn was his mother], Paige is doing the math, [and even though there’s never any indication that sexual violence occurred with the murders], she is thinking, ‘Did you kill all these people and just sleep with me today?'”
“I was saying to [director] Adam [MacDonald], and I think Ian, ‘A woman is immediately [wondering] whether he’s been raping some of the victims. He just had sex with me. There’s no way for it to not feel violating. And is he gonna do that to me now?’ That’s the immediate thing I think as a woman in that position. So I think she feels disgusted and terrified [and she’s fighting for her life when she kills him].”
Brancati has appeared in every season of Slasher and now, Hell Motel, so of course we asked who was her favorite character to play. “My immediate reaction is Violet in season three, Solstice. I really love that season. I love all the seasons in their way, but in terms of that character, I found Violet to be really a challenge and really exciting writing,” she recalls.
“And it pushed me. She had such polarizing opinions from fans of the show, which I love any character that can do that. Similarly to Viviana last season. I found all the women I’ve got to play that Ian and Aaron have written for me to be very interesting and a lot of duality. But Violet, our little Vi, that bad YouTuber who wishes she was a Kardashian, she really is near and dear to my heart.”
To add the cherry on top of the meta sundae, our final final girl is the Slasher OG, Katie McGrath, and Martin explains how that happened. “Because we were doing this whole idea of looking at ourselves as horror creators and we have a movie within a movie within a movie already, we thought that after the events of the season, that in this fictional world, they would make a movie of it,” he says.
“And in our perfect world, the person who would ultimately star in that movie would be our Katie McGrath. So I, on a whim, reached out to her and said, ‘Hey, would you ever wanna do anything with us?’ And she immediately said yes. She was amazing. She was so gung ho to do it. It was so great to see her again, and she did it online from Dublin.”
Season 1 of Hell Motel is streaming now on Hollywood Suite in Canada and Shudder and AMC+ in the US. As a reminder, you can catch Slasher: Ripper and Slasher: Flesh and Blood on Hollywood Suite and Shudder. The first three seasons of Slasher are still on Netflix. And all our coverage of both series is here.
Photos courtesy of Anthony Fascione for Shaftesbury TV/Shudder.
