Hell Motel Review

Hell Motel premieres on Shudder Tuesday, June 17, with new episodes streaming weekly.

Hell Motel is, among other things, an homage to classic slasher movies: The latest miniseries from Slasher masterminds Aaron Martin and Ian Carpenter traps a bunch of people in a seedy motel with a bloody history and then waits for the killing to start. But it’s also a reminder that the movies it’s paying tribute to usually top out at 90 minutes long. Horror tends to overstay its welcome on TV, with the scares turning stale and the tension growing slack while we wait for the final axe to fall – and Hell Motel is no exception. It’s just difficult to keep this sort of thing going for eight hour-long episodes.

The premise is pretty good, though: Thirty years after a Satanic-flavored unsolved murder was committed on the grounds of the remote Cold River Motel, the inn reopens and its new proprietors invite a group of true-crime obsessives for an opening-weekend stay. This creatively assembled group of stock types includes an artist who makes installations of famous crime scenes, a woman who sleeps with serial killers (“One away from a dangerous dozen!”), a podcaster who survived a slasher-esque killing spree, a professor who studies the effect crime stories have on the psyche, an occult practitioner who communes with the spirits, and an actress who starred in a film adaptation of the motel murder. When two strangers show up seeking shelter from an incoming storm, it’s not long until the (inevitable) killing begins, and the guests wonder if whatever happened thirty years ago is happening all over again.

The familiarity feels intentional. Martin and Carpenter are messing around with what we know about this gory subgenre, and there is some fun to be had in the early episodes. The motel is playfully outfitted for the occasion, with dingy decor and a sign for “Pentacle” next to the one for “Gym/Sauna.” The guests arrive in a hearse. Once the storm rolls in, there’s a lovely soft hiss of rain over any scene without an instrumental score. All the characters are pretty annoying, but that fits the theme, since we’re not meant to care too much about them once they start getting picked off one by one. There’s even a jab in a later episode about slasher movies full of “two-dimensional characters so grotesque and idiotic one would hazard they deserved to die,” and, well…

These victims-in-waiting all deliver their lines as if they’re in a dramatic reenactment from a documentary about a famous murder, which would be a fun sort of meta element if we weren’t stuck with it for eight hours. And that’s the main problem with Hell Motel: As soon as the fun and games of the setup is over and the actual plot begins, everything that follows feels increasingly repetitive. Towards the middle of the series, we’re treated to multiple long arguments over who the killer must be – scenes whose main purpose seems to be filling time, since this makeshift jury never actually reaches a verdict before something else goes awry. Those bits are punctured and bookended by the requisite death scenes, which are appropriately bloody and gross (I’ll be thinking about one involving a bunch of nails for a long time), but even those feel rote after four or five episodes of basically the same thing.

Eventually, the momentum can’t be sustained. It’s hard to endure scene after scene after scene of people getting cruelly stabbed and hacked apart for this long – not because the violence is especially bothersome, but because it starts to feel samey. The slasher hardos might feel otherwise, and maybe this is the show for those fans who just want more, more, more. But Hell Motel ultimately doesn’t know what else to do with its premise. There are shades of well-loved horror series like Bates Motel and Hannibal here and there, and some vague thematic material about how easily people turn to violent acts when pressed hard enough. But these are gestures in a show that favors blood and guts over everything else. That’s fun for a while – but eventually you’ll wish you could check out.