Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The first season of Slasher, Netflix‘s under-the-radar horror series, brought us a masked copycat killer who terrorized a small town with a history. While the murder mystery of The Executioner may have left some viewers feeling a little unsatisfied, the anthology series takes us to a whole new setting for Season 2, titled Guilty Party. Rather than a sinister suburbia, Guilty Party brings us to a classic slasher setting – a summer camp.
We start at Camp Motega five years ago, where a bunch of rambunctious teens drink and laugh in the back of a pickup truck and smash watermelons with a baseball bat at a picnic. These wild camp counselors seem to be having the time of their lives, but things take a morbid turn when they lure one of the girls into the woods and tell her she’s on trial for being a “nasty bitch”. They later drag her through the woods to hide her body, but when she wakes up and tries to crawl away, they drag her back and stuff her (now presumably dead) into a pile of rocks.
At present, they’re all respectively miserable in their own lives. They bid their significant others farewell for a winter weekend getaway, but it soon becomes clear that they’re not going for a weekend of fun – they’re going to retrieve the body and make sure that they didn’t leave any incriminating evidence behind. What begins as a tense weekend between former friends and the camp’s current inhabitants – a group of hippies who have seemingly created their own family – soon turns into a bloodbath as someone (or something!) terrorizes them all.
While Guilty Party could easily fall victim to a series of genre tropes (and on occasion, it does), it finds strength in its character-driven storylines. Rather than just watching them get picked off one by one and wondering what gloriously demented fate awaits this -ahem- guilty party, we instead become invested in their lives, relationships, and futures. The utilization of a classic slasher setting like a summer camp and having them return in the dead of Canadian winter ensures that many of the twists and turns come as a total surprise.
The performances from the ensemble work incredibly well together; even when given the cheesiest of lines (“This isn’t a democracy! It’s murder!”), the actors deliver with conviction and really help you understand just how high the stakes are here. Don’t expect them to go light on the gore, either; from the very first murder, you’ll be watching through your hands and wondering just how much worse things can get (and, oh, boy, do they.) What more can you ask for? We’ve got characters to root for, deaths to cringe at, and plot twists to make your jaw drop. This blast of a binge might just subvert all your wildest expectations – and it’s here just in time for Halloween.
