Fans of the Canadian horror anthology Slasher might want to check into Hell Motel this summer. In case you missed the news, “Hell Motel is a series from Slasher series creators Ian Carpenter and Aaron Martin.” Slasher fans will quickly notice a ton of familiar names in addition to the co-creators and director Adam MacDonald. The team is also bringing a good amount of the Slasher acting ensemble along for the bloody ride. This is why we were honored to be invited to a press roundtable with Jim Watson and Paula Brancati. Watson and Brancati are two of the Slasher alums you can expect to see in Hell Motel. They are also a fun duo on a Wednesday afternoon. 

According to Shudder’s synopsis: “Hell Motel sees a group of 10 true crime obsessives invited to the opening weekend of the newly renovated Cold River Motel, the site of a 30-year-old unsolved Satanic Mass Murder. History repeats itself when the guests get stranded and start getting knocked off one by one during a murder spree that grows exponentially more gruesome than the original with each kill.”

Andy (Watson) and Paige (Brancati) are two of the characters who have been invited to this murderous weekend. The first question we all wanted to know was what drew this pair into this series and made them want to explore these characters.

An Interview with Hell Motel’s Jim Watson and Paula Brancati

This roundtable discussion has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Paula Brancati explained: I so loved working with Ian (Carpenter) and Aaron (Martin) on the Slasher series, and they always write such incredible characters for me and for the entire team. I love being part of a world where the female characters are very voicey on the page. They’re not tropey in any way, as can sometimes be the case in the genre. So, for me, it was a very easy yes.

Brancati continued: Aaron Martin and I have worked together since Being Erica, and he and Ian always surprise me. They write stuff that’s incredibly dark and very funny. When I heard some of my old castmates, like Jim Watson here, were going to be a part of it…that also made the yes extra easy and special. So yeah, it was a lot of fun to come back with a lot of our old Slasher family to do Hell Hotel. A lot of that amazing crew that we’ve worked with so much. It felt like a bit of a summer camp.

When asked if they found anything difficult while filming, Jim Watson said: The interesting thing about the Andy character is that he’s approaching all of this as this sort of analytical skeptic. You know, he’s a PhD. He’s really going in there, and it’s that balance of anyone in that world. In that field. Any skeptic has to [have] a kernel of love or appreciation for the thing that they’re actually trying to disprove. So, there was this sort of element of battling the excitement of the moment with each of the scenes while also remaining grounded and being ready to point out the obvious to everyone. It was just this fun tightrope to walk, and I got to really work closely with our director, Adam (MacDonald). He and I were in constant conversation about, “Is this too much? Is this not enough?” That kind of thing.

Watson continued: It was great because it’s so rare that we actually get to really stretch those kinds of muscles. And you know, Ian and Aaron, they set this stuff up for us like Paula said. They give it to each and every character. There’s so much in there to work with. So, it was a lot of fun.

Brancati stated: Yeah, it’s very juicy material. As Jim was saying about Andy, and I think this is the case for all the characters, there’s a lot of textures. A lot of layers. We’re also shooting all of it out of order [because] they shoot all 8 episodes at once. So, that’s a unique situation. You’re shooting like a very long movie, so I’d say the most challenging part is the endurance. You know we’ve done that model for Slasher, as well.

Brancati explained: You have to be a bit masochistic to love this setup, I think, but I love it. There’s an adrenaline rush to it, in sort of building the puzzle. I think the challenge is shooting something from a later episode, perhaps at the beginning of the shoot, and then filling in that blank on day 50 of the shoot and making it work with decisions you made creatively at the beginning. I think that’s really fun and part of what’s very joyful about working with actors you love, like Jim and this amazing cast.

You know, Adam and Ian and Aaron, we’re all watching out for each other and vibing together. I think part of the challenge is part of what the joy of it is. It’s also a physical show. There’s a lot of stunts. There’s a lot of screaming and yelling, and you know, emotional stuff the characters go through. So, I think that’s like part of the challenge, but part of the joy. It’s a very cathartic shoot. 

Brancati laughed: I would highly recommend working through whatever you have going on on a horror set, my friends. Just scream it out…and go on vocal rest after.

When the laughter died down, the duo was asked about working with Emmy® Award-winner Eric McCormack, who plays a character people are going to love to hate this season.

Watson: For me, I mean, that was my first time working with him, and I mean, he’s probably heard this a million times. I grew up watching Will & Grace, and like, I loved him. He was this outlet, this voice, in a small town community of this other thing, and I just worship that individual.

Watson continued: So, getting to work and meet with him. My expectations were pretty high, and he just came in and was the most humble, sweetest, nicest person. And yeah, funny, like duh, he’s funny, but like, actually just a funny person doing schticky things, too. Like stuff that you’re like, ‘Oh, my dad would do that!’ But then, like when he does it, it’s hilarious, you know. He was just wonderful. He was just a shining star in a very dark and murderous environment.

Brancati: Yes, I feel the same. I worked with Eric on the last season of Slasher that we did, and I was a bit nervous to meet him because I, too, was such a huge Will & Grace fan. I was worried that I would call him Will on set. That show meant so much to me and my mom growing up, and he is everything you’d want him to be and more. He is such a delight! He’s such a Toronto boy. We went to see our friend, up in Stratford last year.

Our buddy, Dan Chameroy, is one of the stars of Stratford. We were like going to Swiss Chalet together and talking about Toronto hotspots and being like, ‘Yeah, he’s one of us.’ [Eric] is one of us, and he loves being part of our motley crew on Slasher. I feel like we’re doing this like, gritty indie, and he’s so down for that, and so playful as an actor.

Watson asked: You went to Swiss Chalet with Eric Mccormick? 

Brancati exclaimed through laughter: Let that be the headline! 

Soon after, the conversation turned to the true crime genre. Both actors were asked if they are fans of the genre and if they drew from any real people in the true crime sphere for their characters.

Watson: My wife and I love to listen to those podcasts that tell you about every horrific murder under the sun. That sort of approach, that storytelling, too, of true crime dramas, you know, it’s really an interesting thing to retell a story that is very familiar to people in a new and enticing way, and in some respects, that is what the creators of Hell Motel and Slasher, [are] really playing into. A genre that is well established, and they’re paying homage.

Brancati: Yeah, I’ve gotten into those too, Jim. Those are oddly comforting, and they’re crazy.

Watson: Yeah, which is very scary, that we’re comfortable.

Brancati: I’ve read this somewhere, I think women love them, – and Jim tell me, if this feels right for your lady. But it’s like we like knowing we were right. We’re right to be as worried as we are. I just want to feel validated.

We acknowledged that the show is fun but is also hard on actors. When asked how they take care of themselves during filming, Watson and Brancati explained they have very different methods.

Watson: I mean, I stretched. There was a lot of physical preparation for most days. Honestly, blood isn’t my thing. It does kind of freak me out a bit. We had an amazing props person who allowed us to really ask questions, and that really allowed me to get close to the instruments and things like that that we’d be standing around.

Watson continued: It was really just reminding myself that this is all pretend. That was the best approach for a lot of these scenes because some of the sets were horrifying. Like if I suddenly passed out and, like my buddies, dragged me into this room, and I woke up. I don’t know what I would do… that would have been immediate cardiac arrest. So, just really reminding myself that everything’s okay and I’d hold onto Paula tightly once in a while, and she-

Brancati: I would have a dance break now and again.

They both begin laughing. 

Watson: Oh no!

Brancati: Jim and I do this little dance break that was.

Watson: It was beautiful. It was.

Brancati: Gotta laugh because you gotta laugh. (A moment as she figures out how much of her dance she can do on Zoom.) I can’t stand for it but I would go, “Jim! Jim, Gaga.” I kind of (Brancati does some amazing Zoom shoulder work), but my hips would go. It was like I was suddenly in Sweet Charity, but he’d do it.

Watson: It’s the Gaga. That was really, the just…it killed me every [time].

Brancati: Absolutely no sense.

Watson: Yeah. 3 AM. 3 PM. It didn’t matter when.

Brancati: In the middle of the most intense scene.

Watson: (Laughing.) Yes.

Brancati: Full-time. That’s mental health to me. That’s how I would take care of myself and Jim.

When the laughter died down, Brancati also shouted out the Craft table for having well-timed grilled cheese sandwiches and charcuterie. While she admits she could have stretched more while preparing for some scenes, she stressed the importance of vocal warmups.

Brancati: Especially as I’ve gotten older, and I’m a singer, just being aware of the vocal strain. So, truly, just physically stretching my voice, I would do a lot. I would warm up a lot in the morning. I’d cool down at the end of the night. As we got to the end of the shoot. I was using different techniques, just kind of taking care of that because the voice does tell a lot of the story for this show for sure. To say the least.

You can see Jim Watson and Paula Brancati if you check into Hell Motel. The new Shudder show premieres in the United States on Tuesday, June 17th.

My fellow couch potatoes know how hard it is to find quality horror television. Too many series have no faith in their audiences, so we get overexplained to death. Many others run into issues with networks and can only give us so much blood and violence. These are a few reasons why my favorite Shudder series, Slasher, stands out from the crowd by avoiding those pitfalls. The last three seasons are criminally underrated, and I have been waiting to see what the team would do next. Luckily, the wait is over because Hell Motel is coming to a television near you this June. 

Hell Motel follows a group of true crime obsessives invited to the opening weekend of the newly renovated Cold River Motel. The motel is the site of a 30-year-old unsolved satanic mass murder. The group soon discovers that history might be repeating itself as they each begin meeting their grisly demise one by one. The series is the brainchild of creators Aaron Martin and Ian Carpenter.

Upon hearing that Martin and Carpenter were creating a new horror anthology and bringing most of their Slasher crew with them, I ran to my editor’s inbox to call dibs on interviews. I crowned myself the Hell Motel Lady of Horror Press and started sending emails. That is how I ended up picking Ian Carpenter’s brain about Hell Motel. I figured as co-creator, executive producer, and showrunner, Carpenter would be a great place to start looking for answers. We discuss what it was like reassembling so much of the Slasher squad for a new series, how the team manages to keep the audience guessing, and (obviously) haunted motels. Read on for a spoiler-free discussion about this new bloody series bringing mayhem, murder, and mystery to Shudder this summer.

An Interview with Hell Motel Co-Creator Ian Carpenter

Sharai Bohannon: You and Aaron Martin have been pretty frequent collaborators since Slasher: Solstice. So, I was giddy when I saw you were the co-creators of Hell Motel. What do you think makes this partnership work so well? What unique things do you think you both bring to the table?

Ian Carpenter: Great question, and it feels strange to answer it with him absent. I think it works well because we have lots of similar interests and loves (humor, crazy situations for extreme but grounded characters, a well-turned mystery, sweetness, meanness, and camp). I think our tastes have moved a little in each other’s directions, but an essential part of our creative chemistry is the ways in which we’re different.

So, we can surprise each other. That’s very present in our back-and-forth on scripts. Our humor has some differences, and we’ll each push different boundaries. It has reached a Lennon/McCartney state where the divisions are very blurry, and all the more blurry because we’re now great friends. I don’t know that I’d want to dissect it.

There are so many other familiar names behind the camera and familiar faces on screen. I think it says a lot about the culture you all created on Slasher that so much of the troupe keeps turning up (in Hell Motel and Guess Who). Are you at the point where you write with specific actors in mind already? Or do you write it and see where it might be fun to put the people who are returning?

It’s a bit of both. One or two actors will come up for one or two characters. We might write with them in mind, but then we also like to keep the characters clean of the cast. So, we let them live and grow independently. Then, when we get near the end of writing all the scripts, we start talking about who it could be. Sometimes that’s an unranked list of four great actors for one part, and you figure out, “Well, if we get So-and-So for this, Actor X would be a great foil for her in this part.” If I laid out the almost cast core Slasher actor moments (often impacted by scheduling), your mind, like mine, would explode. The crazy thing is that it always leads to actors in parts you then can’t imagine being played by anyone else.

Many of you have worked together for almost a decade between Slasher and Hell Motel. However, each season and each show provides new challenges and opportunities. What is one thing you learned, or maybe realized for the first time, about yourself (or your creative team) while working on Hell Motel?

It helps to have a witch, like Aaron’s mother, show up and make sure the weather does exactly what you need it to.

Motels are always interesting locations for horror. They are these big looming presences that become almost another character in movies like Psycho, Identity, Vacancy, etc. How did you and Aaron settle on telling a story that unfolds in a motel? What excited you about tackling something so location-specific with this new anthology series?

We’re both super aware of all the great movies set in motels, so it feels like a ripe location. There’s something about the vulnerability of everyone moving through those spaces, off-kilter because they’re out of their homes, in danger because they don’t know the kind of monsters who could be right next door, just like it is for all of us in real life. This really worked for the famous murder-site story we wanted to tell. You just know someone’s going to (if they haven’t already) Airbnb a home that hosted a terrible murder…

Many of us have a few stories about motels (or Airbnbs) that still haunt us (or make us itch). Do you have one that you’re willing to share? 

Nothing crazy. My wife is very interested in ghost hunting, so we’ve visited many haunted locations. I’ve had a door slammed on my back in a 100% empty room when I was by myself, a ball at a haunted school house moved non-stop, two feet in front of me. But having the entire Inn at the Falls in Bracebridge to ourselves, no other guests, no staff, felt crazy given its haunted history. For some reason, creeping around there at night, just the two of us, was way scarier than the other moments. As with horror, it’s usually the anticipation or fear of what’s going to happen that freaks me out. Actual activity kind of delights me…but, maybe I’ve been lucky with what’s happened…

Many people will show up thinking this will be a standard motel horror situation and be pleasantly surprised. There is already so much to unpack in just the first two episodes.  It’s diving into influencer culture, true crime fanatics, and an actor struggling to find her place after the industry has spit her out. It’s feeling like it’s leaning into the idea of trends and, more importantly,  what the things we make trendy say about us as a society. If I’m not off base (I’m only two episodes in), what are you hoping audiences take away from this? Do you think they’ll be able to see themselves in the mirror the show is holding up to all of us?

It’s exactly what you’re saying. We wanted to hold the mirror up to them, our fans, and ourselves as both horror fans and creators. Why are we drawn to these awful stories? What do we get out of them? I know many (or maybe even most) of us have our limits and no-go zones (like kids, animals, or SA). However, if that sense of morality or sensitivity or trauma, exists in us as viewers and creators, why is so much other awfulness okay? I’ve got lots of thoughts as to the why and what we all get out of it, but I’d rather hear our audiences’ experiences. And, make no mistake, I LOVE these kind of stories, but like all horror fiends, I get questioned all the time by friends and family who don’t like or understand the genre. So, it felt like time for us to do that from a fan perspective.

One of the things I love about Hell Motel is the examination of true crime content creators. It’s a very murky business, and mileage varies from person to person. It feels like we have differing viewpoints on the genre as a whole (and also the people who benefit from it). It’s a sticky subject but is also always trending. What inspired you and Aaron to go in this direction? Also, are either of you true crime fans?

We’re both much more interested in fictional crime and horror, but we dive into true crime and the fictional remakes that are trending these days. As creators, you’re always wondering about the factual hell that some people have experienced or wrought.

I’m leaning in for this journey that Paige (Paula Brancati) is on as a former scream queen who has been all but forgotten. I think that happens with women over the age of 25 in all fields. I’m rooting for her character to live just because she’s so relatable. I have to ask, is this character influenced by specific horror actresses? Or is it just kind of a general observation of what happens to women society decides are past their prime as soon as our frontal lobes finish developing?

Hard-core horror fans and creators are super loyal to the actresses who affected us all so much. But, for every Barbara Crampton and Jamie Lee Curtis, there are those unsung heroines who ran half naked, covered in blood on freezing cold nights, acting their guts out, who have just come and gone. Anytime I’m watching 70s and 80s horror, I’m looking up what happened to certain actors, and there’s lots of sad stories out there, like Robin Stille from Slumber Party Massacre. It was the pervasiveness of that brutal history, rather than one particular person.

You’re wearing a ton of hats at Hell Motel, and I noticed one of those positions is serving as the showrunner. We all know that is not a job for the weak as it requires you to be everything everywhere all at once. However, I think this scans for you because it’s something you’re pretty great at and seem to enjoy doing. So, what is your favorite part of this stressful title? What gets you excited enough about it to volunteer as tribute?

Thanks! I mean, to me, it’s the most creative position. Aaron and I have built this thing, and I want to see every inch of it reach what we think is its greatest potential. To make sure it’s what we intended and love. The best part is working with other artists, like Director Adam MacDonald, the amazing DOPs, Production Designers, Editors, Composers, Costume Designers, Hair, Make-up, and our amazing prosthetics team at Black Spot. The list, which is dangerous to start for fear of excluding people, goes on and on. The genre demands a lot from everyone on the crew. So, if I can inspire those people to take creative risks, to bring their A-game, to get them to push my boundaries and blow me away, it’s an incredible experience. And I count every last one of them as part of it. It’s a list with over 150 names on it. I’m grateful for all their involvement.

While we’re here, what is one thing you wish you had known before accepting your first showrunner position on Slasher: Solstice?

Because I had wanted to do it, I was studying it on every gig I had before Slasher. It was a study of leadership, and I asked the showrunners I worked with to expose me to anything I didn’t understand or know about. At one point, when I was between gigs, I thought, I don’t know enough about post [production]. So, I reached out to friends with shows and asked if I could shadow any of those moments. The only person who said yes was Aaron. And, pointedly, the thing he invited me to was the mix for the pilot of season 2 of Slasher. Having Aaron on the end of the phone when I started on season 3 made it all a little like showrunner school. I was really fortunate to have all of that experience available to me.

One of the many reasons I love your work is because you have mastered the art of the kill. Not trying to spoil anything, but what is your favorite kill this season? Is it possible to give us a hint?

Ha. It changed as we shot and edited, but in the end, there’s a callback kill just past halfway in the season. At night, in a rainy forest – and the victim’s performance and the direction and how it looks, all guts me.

It’s really special to me and beautifully emotional.

We live in a time where many movies and shows reveal everything within the first five minutes. However, part of the fun is figuring out the whodunnit. One of the things I love about what you and Aaron are doing in the slasher genre is this refusal to write down to your audiences. You’re making shows for smart people who do want to dissect the plot and dig into the themes.

So, first off, thank you for making smart TV. Secondly, how hard is it to stay ahead of your audience, who has watched horror forever and will overanalyze every single detail?

Another great question. It’s really hard, verging on impossible. With a whodunnit, that’s always present, right? I mean…if the killer comes out of the blue, it’ll dissatisfy everyone. So, you absolutely must have tips, and clues, and motivations that track, but if you tip it too much, that doesn’t work (though you can see we’re playing with that this season). This is where our execs at Shaftesbury, Hollywood Suite, and Shudder come into play.

They’re our first readers. A big plus with David Kine at Hollywood Suite and Nick [Lazo] and Sam [Zimmerman] at Shudder is they have an amazing story sense. Between Nick and Sam, they’ve seen everything in horror. A great note in our first season working with them that came up a couple times is, “Our audience will totally figure it out if this moment happens.” Our audience is next-level, and they’re combing through everything and assembling all the possibilities. But that kind of engagement is super exciting and motivates us even more.

Hell Motel premieres on Shudder with a two-part episode on Tuesday, June 17.