A moment of genuine horror among camp
The show: Slasher: Guilty Party, Season 2, Episode 8 (Netflix) The moment: The mock-trial
Five former counsellors reunite at their old camp. Five years ago, they killed a friend. Now a parka-clad maniac is killing them.
Flashback to the fateful night. The counsellors — including Susan (Kaitlyn Leeb), Andi (Rebecca Liddiard) and Talvinder (Melinda Shankar) — are partying in the woods. The others lure Talvinder into a torchlit clearing. Ominous music sounds. “You’re on trial,” Andi says. “For being a nasty bitch,” Susan says.
“I felt sorry for you,” Andi says. “And you used that to have sex with my boyfriend.”
“None of that was Peter’s fault?” Talvinder challenges. “He had sex with me. He wanted to.”
“I never liked you,” Susan says. “And it’s not because you’re a terrible person. It’s because you’re nothing. Who are you? Can you even answer that?”
This show should be called Masher, for how it shamelessly mashes up key plot points stolen from other thrillers. There’s a personality dissociation from Fight Club; a guilty suicide from And Then There Were None; grisly clues in trees from The Blair Witch Project; not to mention Friday the 13th and every scary camp movie ever where the murderer finds the time to set up lurid dioramas of body parts.
Then this scene arrives, and it’s suddenly onto something real. Why is everyone mad at only the girl? And what is her crime? After all, she tried too hard to fit in. I wish they’d skipped the mash-up and done an original take on the way teenage herds turn on their weakest. Now that’s a horror story. Slasher streams on Netflix. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on pop-culture moments. She usually appears Monday through Thursday.