Slasher Season 1: Facetious & Fun, or Jejuning & Cliche

Julles Marquez, Staff Writer


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As a collective audience of horror, we tend to immerse ourselves in fictional scenarios involving a masked figure with a honed blade, slaughtering their prey with uncanny ease to commence a bloodbath of victims.

The stereotype has been used a multitude of times-and will be eternally and continuously used throughout horror cinema. Some antagonists relative to the masked figure are more interesting than others, and the assertion that they are can be countered with the Canadian anthology series, Slasher produced by Aaron Martin. The show can be see on Netflix, featuring a masked antagonist billed as “The Executioner,” a formal name used to identify a cold-blooded killer in Waterbury Canada. Face front with her past, Sarah Bennett, the protagonist, must confront her inner demons and discover the correlation between the bloodshed of victims and the teaching of the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth.


As the series begins, we’re placed on the Halloween night of 1988 where Rachel Bennett, Sarah’s mother, resides in her home pregnant with her husband Bryan Bennett. Waiting to contribute to the night’s annual festivities, Bryan hears the beckoning of the doorbell and answers to who he thinks is a close friend but in all actuality is the cold blooded killer known as “The Executioner”. Impaling Bryan from behind with precision, his friend escapes in hysterics as the only survivor. Rachel, horrified at the sight, tried to run until she slips into a pool of dark, crimson blood. Begging for mercy, we hear Rachel’s whales as the Executioner slices her abdomen open to yank out who we know as Sarah. Cradling Sarah with almost eerie tranquility the police come and arrest him, their eyes dimmed with fright and unease thus leading us to present day in Waterbury Canada.


Sarah Bennett and her husband move back to Waterbury in the house where both her mother and father were brutally butchered. As they’re newly acquainted with their environment, Sarah is faced with those of not only her past, but her mother’s as well. Meeting new people and reuniting with the old, Sarah begins to understand that everyone has a weakness and everyone has committed an unruly act that they incessantly keep and would like to keep until the day they die. The ugly side of the people residing in Waterbury is revealed through short segments that include who the person is and what deadly sin they have committed. The people who committed one of the deadly sins were given a brutal consequence, resulting in death from the second copycat killer, “The Executioner”. As the pile of bodies is commenced, Sarah finds more out about who she truly is in relation to killers, and why the two cold blooded murderers did what they did.


The show has a typically normal amount of blood and gore for the duration of the season. We see wicked images of iniquitous and violent scenes of death as the plot progresses, and we seemingly understand a little bit more about each character and the reasons as to why they sinfully and shamelessly committed such awful things. The more information and mysteries that are revealed in the town of Waterbury, the more we etch closer to the television set to pry our eyes open so we may continue watching. Other than the visuals and plot given to the audience, I believe that the show does a nice job connecting all the characters and subplots together into one big knot in order to tell the story adequately. Without the sufficient effort of tying in all loose aspects of the story, the show would have been hard to follow and frustrating to try to comprehend.

Slasher is telling about the types of sins people commit and how they must pay for them in compensation. To wait for so long in order to repent could lead to dire and inevitable consequences according to “The Executioner” and how he plays the role of the higher providence figure in Waterbury. Although the concept of Slasher isn’t entirely promising in regards to plot and the character arch in the beginning, one can see that as the show advances, the plot and the characters are adequately executed-no pun intended- and are all connected once the killer is revealed.