The Cutprice Guignol

There’s no dodging it: this ending was just not good.

And I hate nothing more than writing that, because I love Slasher and have enjoyed so much of Hell Motel as a part of that universe, too. While I have my favourites, there’s been no season of the show that I’d skip on a rewatch – every one has something (usually plenty of things) that I find myself coming back to, whether that’s the sense of fun, the twisty-turny mystery, the kills, or the loving homage to the horror genre, these creators have consistently come up with TV that I truly adore. Hell, Slasher’s previous season Ripper was a standout for me, one of the best the show has ever pulled off, and I was seriously excited about what Hell Motel had to offer as a result.

But what we’ve ended up with, at the close of this finale, Grand Guignol (which I can only assume is a reference to I, your most humble blogger on her most humble blog), is a real missed opportunity that underserves the entire season in retrospect. This episode starts off as a kind of epilogue to the murderous weekend we saw inflicted on our characters over the course of the season, and right off the bat, I was down to clown – I really enjoy stories that explore the odd emotional ground of what happens after the traditional tale has drawn to a close, and, while it was a bit slow, Grand Guignol kicked off well. Andy has shifted his focus from horror to comedy and Paige is back on the horror movie grind in the rebooted version of the Doomed Service series, with the two reconnecting shortly before the premier of part one of the new horror trilogy (and, yes, the roasting of the awful real-life Halloween reboots was there for me specifically, I can only assume).

But the meat of this episode (pun intended) takes place on the night of the premiere, and what we actually got there was just…not what I needed it to be. The setting itself (not dissimilar to where I took school assembly twice a week) lacked the grandness that I was craving for a finale like this, especially after how gorgeous the staged sections in Ripper were; the slightly self-indulgent love letter to the horror fans both on-screen and off was fine, but felt a bit too warm and fuzzy for the critique of the overlap of horror and true crime that this season has been so focused on. When you love a genre to death like the creators of this show so obviously do, it can be easy to slip into indulgent territory as you throw in as many references as possible for your audience to nod along knowingly with (not something I am immune to – look, here comes a reference now!), and that’s where these segments landed for me.

And then there’s the actual climax of the story, which focuses on Paige and Andy facing off against each other as Andy is (sort-of) revealed as the killer. After an episode that seemed mostly focused on pointing in the direction of Paige as the ultimate wrong-doer, exploiting Kaitlyn’s death to further her own career, Andy reveals himself as the child of the original victims of the Cold River killings, and that he’s been picking people off as…punishment for the exploitation of his mother’s murder? I’m not even entirely sure all of this hangs together properly, with Andy discovering the bloodied heart in Paige’s room at the end of last week’s episode, and the actual reveal is clunky as hell, less a dramatic whipping back of the curtain and more getting tangled up in it instead.

It’s a good motive on paper, but it serves more as a sting for the end of this episode than as an earnest attempt to explore the themes that have underpinned Hell Motel as a whole – there’s been a really interesting (and frequently effective) throughline in this season regarding the uneasy places where real life and fiction overlap in terms of horror, and this could have been an amazing way to pull it all together. Show us the impact of growing up under the shadow of such a catastrophic and well-publicized loss, the grief and anger of watching people exploit it, the guilt of eventually joining their ranks yourself, even as an academic. What we got instead is a confusing, small-scale reveal that fails to bring together the plot and the themes in the satisfying conclusion this story deserved, and I felt pretty deflated by the time the last machete had clattered to the ground.

Which is a shame, because I thought the tiny sting that closes out Grand Guignol was pretty goddamn brilliant. Katie McGrath, returning from Slasher’s first season, auditions for the role of Paige using the very dialogue that we just saw her share with Andy in her final moments. It’s a creepy, unsettling, meta way to bring home these themes, one that puts Slasher fans squarely in the firing line for the exploitation of this genre, and, if it had come as the sting to a stronger finale, it would have been downright perfect.

So where does that leave Hell Motel as a whole? Despite this ending, there was still a lot of this season I enjoyed – I thought Blake’s episode was a standout, and Floyd and Shirley served as some of my favourite new characters for this show’s universe in a long time. Even when this finale is a little less fresh, I think this season will land towards the bottom of my rankings for the show; there was just so much here that I felt went unexplored, especially when it came to characters like Kawayan and Adriana, and the tantalizingly interesting themes never came together in the way I wanted them to.

With that said, I would love to hear what you make of this episode and this season as a whole in the comments below! If you’d like to deep-dive Slasher with me again to compare against Hell Motel, check out my series here! If you fancy supporting my blog, and get access to exclusive content, please consider supporting me on Patreon, or if you’re interested in my fiction work, check out my short horror story collection!

(header image via Amazon)