Blood and Water

F*****g rich people. (Unmarked Spoilers)

Slasher is a Canadian anthology series that takes the slasher movie format and expands it to eight episodes. Each season is a self-contained story with a different killer, though it implies that The Executioner (Season 1) and Guilty Party (Season 2) at least occur in the same universe. The show’s also gone through multiple networks, most recently switching from Netflix to Shudder. Unfortunately, they’ve also gone from releasing the whole season at once to the first couple episodes one day, the rest over the following weeks.

This new season, Flesh & Blood, concerns Spencer Galloway (horror master David Cronenberg), the wealthy patriarch of this highly dysfunctional family. During a family visit to their private island, he announces that he’s reinstating the family game, with the prize being his whole fortune. And these games can get really hairy, involving bear traps and nail spikes. Though would you expect anything less from he of the exploding heads and acid vomit?

 Complicating matters is a masked killer who seems modeled after the island’s ghost story, the Gentleman. Like the Druid, the slasher in Solstice (Season 3), the Gentleman shows a knack for theatrics and irony. For instance, Merle (Jefferson Brown) loved to fish, so he ends getting strung up on a hook and gutted like one. Spencer was a heartless b*****d who gets acid injected through his PICC line, melting his heart within seconds. Yes, they kill Cronenberg off within the first two episodes, but he’s probably going to stick around through flashbacks throughout the season. 

Previously, each season of slasher has kicked off with a murder or murders, which subsequently drive the plot the rest of the way through. Instead, Flesh & Blood starts with Vincent (Judah Davidson), one of Spencer’s grandchildren, kidnapped. A kidnapping that may or may not be an inside job given the abductors knew where he’d be after Birgit Vogel (Patrice Goodman), the housekeeper, sent him and his brother Theo (Joshua Reich) off to pick seashells. However, that has yet to be confirmed. 

Could the killer be the Gentleman of legend? Probably not, as the show has thus far avoided doing anything that fantastical. Unless they pull a meta twist, the killer’s going to wind up a normal human, whose identity will be revealed in the second-to-last episode, with the finale containing lots of dramatic irony as the survivors unknowingly interact with the killer.

So who is the killer going to be? Well, adult Theo (Alex Ozeroy) is being played up as the only blood relative who’s not a piece of s**t, which means he’s probably going to end up the biggest one of all. Well, excluding Jayden (Corteon Moore), who ends up getting killed second. A recently returned, adult Vincent (A.J. Simmons), has also been built up as a suspect. Spencer’s doctor Dr. Persephone Trinh (Jeanannne Goossen) also seems a tiny bit suspicious, but only time will tell who it ultimately is.

No matter who the Gentleman ends up as, is there anyone to stop them? A final girl, perhaps? Well, Brigit’s daughter Livinia’ Liv’ Vogel (Sydney Meyer) seems to be headed in that direction. Especially after it turns out she’s a Galloway too, which was strongly implied in the first episode, but only confirmed in the second. Out of the season’s large ensemble, Liv winds up a little generic due to being largely out of focus. Though Slasher is usually pretty good about fleshing out its characters, they’ll probably get to her in time. It’s also mentioned that Liv was in the army, which could provide an interesting twist on the archetype, similar to survivalist Erin (Sharni Vinson) from You’re Next (NSFW). Assuming she doesn’t get killed off, too, of course. 

Much like American Horror Story, Slasher has the practice of reusing the same actors across the seasons. Brown, our unfortunate first victim, has appeared in all the previous ones. Brown saying “f**k me with the chainsaw” references how his character got killed in Guilty Party. And why did Brown get killed again so quickly this time? Because moments before, he had sex with Grace Galloway (Rachel Crawford), Spencer’s second wife.

Slasher provides a twist on the old death by sex trope commonly found in the genre. On this show, you can have sex and survive. Sarah Bennet (Katie McGrath) from The Executioner has sex twice, one of which was with the killer, and she makes it. However, you can’t be a “slut.” Just ask Kit Jennings (Robert Cormier) and Cassidy (Genevieve DeGraves), who are the most promiscuous characters on Solstice, and they’re both killed off in the first episode of the season.

Of the two episodes that have been released thus far, O’Keeffe Galloway (Breton Lalama) has said that they’re non-binary in both of them. I sincerely hope that they don’t do that in every episode as the show goes on. Because not only is announcing a character trait instead of displaying it bad writing, it would also get annoying very quickly.

Like I said before, Slasher is the only tv show I’ve seen to translate the slasher genre from film to television successfully. While Flesh & Blood isn’t without its flaws, it still manages to be a great start to the season. Though I’m a little annoyed over how I can’t just binge-watch the show like I had its predecessors, I will keep checking in to see where it goes from here.