JuicyTalk
While Shudder’s darkest horror anthology show isn’t as famous as some of the biggest horror shows on network TV, the series deserves to be credited with the dubious distinction of being the most disturbing small-screen show ever made. Even though Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries have inspired some incredibly popular TV staples like Diagnosis Murder, Murder She Wrote, and Death in Paradise, the small screen as a medium has always struggled with horror’s slasher subgenre.
There are slasher shows, but they have a hard time making the format work on TV for various reasons. Mainly, the fact that traditional slasher movies kill off almost all their main characters in quick succession doesn’t gel well with the longer runtimes of TV shows, where viewers are expected to get more emotionally invested in the main characters. The few shows that directly carry the traditional slasher movie narrative structure over to TV-length seasons, such as MTV’s Scream or Harper’s Island, face mixed responses as a result.
Compared to police-centric procedurals like Scarpetta or CSI, these shows spend time establishing their main characters across various episodes, then kill them all off before the finale. This tends to leave reviewers wondering what the point was, something that 2015’s Scream Queens sidestepped by making the characters comedic caricatures who weren’t particularly worthy of emotional investment. However, fittingly enough, given its title, it is Shudder’s underrated anthology Slasher that has found the perfect workaround for this issue.
Shudder’s Slasher Is A Genuinely Scary R-Rated Horror Anthology
From its first self-contained season, released in 2016, Slasher has always been aware of the fact that the show is stuck in a strange catch-22. Slasher needs viewers to care about its characters so they will continue to tune in, but the show also needs to kill off almost all its characters to live up to the title’s promise. Slasher works around this by coming up with what could only be called some of the most disturbing storylines ever seen on mainstream TV.
Even compared to ultra-dark supernatural mystery thrillers like HBO’s The Outsider, Slasher is on another level. This is a series where a random episode is apt to reveal that a seemingly normal side character has a helpless person secretly imprisoned in their home, or that an irritating comic relief character is actually an unrepentant abuser who also ends up being savagely abused himself. Slasher is breathtakingly dark, with every season featuring at least two or three moments that are jaw-dropping in their disturbing invention.
The Anthology Format Is Uniquely Perfect For Slasher’s Story
Compared to the very gory, but undeniably silly American Horror Story or the unabashedly comedic camp classic Tales from the Crypt, Slasher is easily the most mean-spirited anthology horror show ever. Tales from the Crypt did have a tendency to end its stories with nasty last-second reveals that killed off even the most morally virtuous characters, but the series was also hosted by a decomposing puppet. It was clearly never meant to be taken too seriously, as even its darkest episodes had a playful sense of humor.
In much the same way, the sheer ludicrousness of American Horror Story and its winking, self-aware writing style takes much of the bite out of its nastiest shocks. Even producer Ryan Murphy’s Bret Easton Ellis adaptation The Shards, a serial killer thriller that drops the goofiness of American Horror Story and Scream Queens, is nowhere near as grim and unrelenting in its brutality as Slasher.
The Shudder anthology feels like Game of Thrones if every episode were the Red Wedding, or The Walking Dead if every outing of the show ended with that one unforgettable drawn-out death that split the fan base. This is because Slasher makes perfect use of the slasher movie’s traditional narrative structure, wherein the movie focuses on a group of characters getting picked off one by one.
This approach means that it makes perfect sense for an anthology show to tell a slasher story, since the series can start anew with a fresh set of characters every season. The only downside is that the show and its viewers can never get too attached to its characters. MTV’s Scream, Scream Queens and American Horror Story all fell down when they kept certain characters alive from season to season, refusing to embody the ruthlessness of the slasher as a subgenre.
Even slasher movie franchises have fallen victim to this same mistake, with the Scream movie series keeping its central heroine alive for so many sequels that new versions of Ghostface struggle to elicit even a tired gasp from longtime fans. In contrast, eager to prove it is even bleaker than the Stephen King series It: Welcome to Derry, Slasher has no qualms about killing off its kindest, most sympathetic, and most likable characters, with some seasons even leaving no survivors behind in their finales.
Slasher’s Brutality Is Unmatched In Recent Horror TV
While this may seem like an exaggeration, it is fair to say that no other show on TV is quite as disturbing as Slasher. The three-season procedural Hannibal is the only one that even comes close, thanks to its intense gore and psychological complexity, but even that classic doesn’t have the pitiless, downbeat approach of killing off all its main characters in almost every season.
Furthermore, where traditional horror anthology shows like Night Gallery might have a message underlying the story of each episode, Slasher completely disregards this writing style in favor of sheer mean-spirited invention. As noted above, the show’s kindest characters are often given its nastiest and most drawn-out deaths, so any attempt to glean some meaning from its story is futile.
Slasher is a truly nasty, dark show that strips away the heightened silliness of American Horror Story, the moralizing of earlier horror anthology shows, and the likable survivors of shows like Scream and Scream Queens to offer a rare slasher series that feels like a real slasher movie. Of course, this also means that the Shudder series is a violent, cruel show.
While it will delight a lot of hardcore horror fans who feel most shows in the genre don’t go far enough, Slasher is not for the faint of heart. Compared to even Netflix’s dark psyschological thriller Mindhunter, the Shudder show lacks any attempt at philosophizing or analysis of its murderous monsters. Instead, Shudder’s Slasher is a horror show that exists solely to disturb the viewer, and in this aim the series succeeds admirably.
