Slasher Season 1 Wrap Up

Slasher is one of those shows that wound up in my Netflix queue because it sounded fairly interesting. While similar to the Scream series, Slasher is a so-so take on a similar theme.

The series starts out on Halloween Night in 1988. A man opens the door to a man dressed as an executioner who he assumes is his best friend. When his friend shows up though, both wonder about the other man. After slashing the friend, the executioner brutally kills both the man and his pregnant wife.

Years later, the baby that the executioner actually cut out from the woman, returns to town. Sarah moves back with her husband Dylan to start fresh. Dylan quickly gets to work as the new editor of the local paper, while Sarah makes friends and opens a gallery to display her artwork. We learn that a young woman went missing five years ago and that her mother once owned the space the gallery now occupies.

It doesn't take long before the executioner returns, or at least a reasonable facsimile of him. The executioner starts offing people based on the seven deadly sins. He takes down a nosy neighbor, who it turns out, murdered her husband after learning that he was involved in a pornography ring that included Sarah's mother. He takes out some other not so nice people, including the wife of Sarah's best friend and her partner, who she had an affair with, because they saw the missing girl the night she went missing and did nothing to help her, despite seeing that she was clearly drunk.

Of all the deaths, the best death is a tie between Brenda, Sarah's grandmother, and Justin, the partner/husband of her new gay best friend. Justin does cocaine laced with rat poison and literally convulses and bleeds from every orifice in the middle of a charity fundraiser before dying. Poor Brenda gets a cinder block tied to her ankle and pushed into the water. Well, they were all kind of evil, so I guess they deserved it?

The problem with Slasher is that the creator admittedly drew too much inspiration from American Horror Story. Anyone who watched a full season, let alone all the seasons, knows that Ryan Murphy doesn't know how to edit himself. Slasher suffers from the same problem. There are just too many stories going on at the same time.

Slasher starts out as a show about a girl returning home to the house where her parents both die. She then learns that her mom was an amateur porn star who slept with almost every man in town and that her biological father was the original executioner. We then find out that Dylan was obsessed with the story of her parents before they met and actually sought her out because of her connection to that story.

There's also the missing girl, who it turns out was abducted by a cop in town. Straight out of Room, he kept her locked in his basement with his mentally impaired wife upstairs while he had sex with her and eventually got her pregnant. To make things even worse, Dean McDermott, aka Mr. Tori Spelling, plays the cop.

I really liked the first few episodes of Slasher and looked forward to finding out who the new executioner was and the back stories of each person he murdered. As more stuff came my way though, I started losing interest. Here's hoping if it gets a second season that it focuses on just one story.