“Slasher: Flesh & Blood,” the eight-episode fourth season of the horror anthology series, will unleash a brand new carnage-filled murder mystery starting this week on Shudder. Series creator Aaron Martin and showrunner Ian Carpenter have assembled a cast of new and familiar faces under the direction of Adam MacDonald (Pyewacket, Slasher: Solstice). Among those new faces is none other than horror master David Cronenberg.
Flesh & Blood centers around the dysfunctional, wealthy Galloway family gathering for a reunion on a secluded island. Bad blood and tension already exist among them, mainly when their competitive nature gets triggered. But then a masked killer begins to pick them off in gruesome ways, one by one. Cronenberg plays the Galloway patriarch, Spencer, a practical-minded businessman to the point of callousness.
How does one entice Cronenberg to be a part of a series with a reputation for fun, creatively brutal kills? It turns out, you ask and offer him a meaty role he can’t refuse. Martin and Carpenter approached him, asking if he’d play the part of the family patriarch. “As an actor, I’m always flattered when somebody is actually interested in working with me, so I read the script. I read the first episode, and I thought, yeah, I really want to do this. We did a FaceTime- Ian, Adam, and I- and we just had a quick chat. I said, ‘Look, this is a major character. He’s a pivotal character in the whole thing and a very powerful character. If you think that I could play that, given that you’ve seen stuff that I’ve done before, then I’m happy to give it a go because it’s a challenge.’”
Cronenberg is no stranger to acting in horror, but Spencer Galloway offers a part outside of the norm for the filmmaker. He explains what drew him to Spencer, “It’s not the usual scientist or a doctor that I end up playing, but rather a very passionate, powerful, difficult character who is a patriarch of a family and very demanding and critical of his children. I get to yell, I get to be angry, and things that, as an actor, I don’t often get to do, if ever. So, I was excited, and also, he’s major, major character.”
From Spencer’s very first introduction, it’s clear that much of the Galloways’ dysfunction stems from the top. Cronenberg doesn’t view him as a villainous character, though. “Naturally he doesn’t think he’s an evil or a bad guy. Yes, he’s being demanding of his children, but it’s for their own good. He feels that they have potential that perhaps they’re not living up to, so he thinks he’s helping them. And I think a lot of tyrants, both political and personal, would be surprised to hear people say that you’re evil or at least a bad person or a negative kind of presence in people’s lives. He thinks he’s a positive presence.”
As abrasive as Spencer’s introduction may be, there’s more than meets the eye to the character. We can expect to see how this pivotal character factors into the overarching murder mystery throughout the season. We can also expect that journey to get downright violent.
“Slasher: Flesh & Blood” will stream exclusively on the horror platform Shudder in the US, Australia, and New Zealand on August 12, with two episodes debuting on that day.
