'Hell Motel' Ending Explained And Serial Killer’s True Identity

The ending of Hell Motel was centered around the final confrontation between Andy and Paige. After surviving the Cold River Motel massacre, Paige was asked to return to the Doomed Service franchise as it was being rebooted. Andy went back to teaching about genres and storytelling in cinema. They both got busy with their lives. It was only when Paige finished shooting for her movie that she reunited with Andy, talked about their past, and even got physically intimate with him. Since she was starting a new chapter of her life, Paige wanted Andy to be a part of it. Hence, she invited him to the screening of Doomed Service: DNA. Things started off well, with Paige’s audience welcoming her back to the franchise and the genre with raucous applause. But it was all downhill from there. Why? Well, let’s find out.

Spoiler Alert

Before starting the screening of Doomed Service: DNA, its director, Aaron, brought in the actress who’d be playing Caitlyn’s daughter in the in-universe franchise, Paula. The camerawork and the editing during that announcement pretty much indicated that Paula was here to stay while Paige was on her way out. Paige, and everyone else who was at the screening, got the confirmation when her character was beheaded by the villain, Baphomet. Paige was under the impression that she’d be there throughout the trilogy spawned by this reboot, but that scene proved that her role was done. Paige left the screening, and Aaron went after her to explain that this was the plan all along. Paige would serve as bait—nostalgia bait—to bring in old fans to support the franchise, while Paula would carry the franchise forward. Paige said she would sue Aaron, but Aaron couldn’t care less about it. This plot twist is a commentary on the age-old method of pandering to old fans of an IP by promising to bring back all the characters they loved and then quickly replacing them with new ones to get younger fans hooked. 

And when that doesn’t work, they try to find some kind of middle ground by having the older and the newer characters coexist onscreen so as to entertain every generation of viewers. We’ve seen it happen with Scream, Halloween, The Shining, Candyman, Hellraiser, Saw, The Exorcist, The Omen, and I Know What You Did Last Summer. This is a really tricky topic, though. Producers think that people won’t like to watch actors way past their prime on the screen for too long because the wrinkles on their faces will remind fans of their own mortality. We can scoff at that ageist perspective all we want, but when we see actors in their 40s and 50s trying to recapture that old magic, we begin to wonder whether bringing them back was a good idea. But then you look at how these actors haven’t found much success beyond the franchise they were associated with and think that maybe it’s alright that they are employed. While we do all this mental gymnastics, we forget to question the lack of originality in entertainment, which is both a result of producers not backing original projects and audiences not showing up for the rare original projects that do manage to get greenlit. It is a sick cycle, and as long as we keep getting baited via nostalgia, actresses like Paige will keep being misused so that producers can make a quick buck.

After Doomed Service: DNA ended, instead of cutting to the end credits, home videos of Caitlyn and Joey started being projected onto the screen, followed by videos of all the people who were killed at the Cold River Motel, including Caitlyn. Aaron tried to get into the projector room to stop that, but was killed by an unknown assailant with a machete. As he bled onto the stage in front of the movie screen, the viewers ran out, leaving behind only Paige and Andy. After an intense round of finger-pointing, Andy finally admitted, in not very explicit terms though, that he was Caitlyn’s son (the writers of Doomed Service weren’t all that wrong for creating a daughter of Caitlyn) and he wanted revenge on everyone associated with Cold River Motel because they were treating his mother’s death like a theme park attraction. Hemmingway, Portia, Ruby, Blake, Crow, Kawayan, and Adriana—all were guilty of profiting off of Caitlyn’s death. While he didn’t get to strike Adriana and Kawayan first, he sure as hell finished the job. No, there wasn’t anything supernatural going on; no Baphomet, no Devil, just plain old human-on-human violence.

Now, call it bad luck or a cruel joke, but Andy never got to know that Shirley and Floyd were the ones who had actually killed Joey and Caitlyn. So, they never became a part of his revenge saga. They were killed by Paige instead. Now, I suppose if the police hadn’t shown up on time on that fateful day, Andy would’ve killed Paige too, put the blame on her (especially since he or someone else had already placed Portia’s heart in her room), and called it a day. Since that didn’t happen, he had to wait for the opportune moment. I don’t think he had abandoned his plan to kill her, because she was cosplaying as his mother again. And he didn’t want to kill her unceremoniously because he had an eye for theatrics. Which was why he chose the movie screening as the perfect place to close Paige’s chapter. Yes, I do think that Andy suffered from some form of the Oedipus complex; or else why did he have sex with Paige, the actress playing his mother in a movie? When Paige called that out, he felt so embarrassed that he began degrading her and demeaning her. Sure, Paige was guilty of profiting off the death of a real-life person, and she should be criticized for that. But to hurl sexist slurs at her moments after having sex with her showed how awful Andy was as a person. I mean, Andy didn’t exactly have the best upbringing. He was the child of a broken marriage. Then his mother and her new husband got killed by two cultists right after getting married. After that, his father was harassed by the media until he supposedly died of depression. So, I understand why he’s so unstable, but that doesn’t excuse his killing spree and his abusive language. 

In Hell Motel episode 8’s ending, Andy decided to conclude his mission of killing everyone that profited off of, or tried to profit off, the horrible incident that happened at the Cold River Motel by murdering Paige. He lunged at the machete that was in Aaron’s body, but before he could get to it, Paige grabbed the machete and drove it through Andy’s chest, thereby sealing his fate. While all this was going on, the people who were there to attend the screening of Doomed Service: DNA must have dialed 911. The police showed up when the machete was in Paige’s hand and Andy was taking his last breaths. To prevent Paige from using this to resurrect her career for the second time, Andy mustered all his strength to paint Paige as a serial killer. Paige took too long to drop the machete, and the officers, who were trigger-happy anyway, got swayed by Andy’s screaming and riddled Paige with bullets. Paige and Andy passed away, looking into each other’s eyes and promising to meet in hell. Andy had embarked on this journey to send a message that it was wrong to exploit true crime as a genre in the world of entertainment. And while he managed to drive a few grifters into an early grave, he forgot about the millions of people who have already turned true crime into an industry. 

Hell Motel’s ending revealed that the entirety of Andy and Paige’s conversation had been recorded on the phone of one of the guests who had attended the film screening. After listening to it, they must’ve shared it with a production house, and they didn’t hesitate to greenlight a movie based on the events leading up to the altercation between Paige and Andy. We even saw Katie McGrath, from Slasher: The Executioner, playing an aspiring actress who was about to be cast in the role of Paige, i.e., the person whose whole career was built atop the bones of Caitlyn. Sure, it was a full-circle moment, but I guess that brief scene also showed how soulless we have become due to capitalism. We are so eager to make money off of everything that we respect nothing. We claim that true crime is supposed to educate us about the horrors that humanity is capable of. But do we actually learn anything from it or treat it like a drug that we need to keep consuming until reality catches up to us and we die? Things are currently so bad that I hope that I become a statistic in a newspaper instead of a story that can be bastardized by “artists” and then sold for mass consumption. Anyway, those are just my thoughts on the ending of Hell Motel. If you have any opinions on the same, feel free to share them in the comments section below.