‘Slasher: Flesh & Blood’ Comic-Con Panel Recap and Trailer

Season four of Shudder’s horror anthology series Slasher created by Aaron Martin is set to premiere on August 12, 2021. Slasher: Flesh & Blood promises lots of innovative kills while focusing on a wealthy dysfunctional family forced to fight for their lives in a competition for the family’s fortune.

Shudder hosted a Comic-Con@home panel for the series featuring Martin, showrunner Ian Carpenter, and cast members David Cronenberg (director of Maps to the Stars, Eastern Promises), Rachael Crawford (In the Dark), and Paula Brancati (Workin’ Moms). In addition to dropping hints about Slasher‘s upcoming fourth season, the virtual panel included the release of Slasher: Flesh & Blood‘s trailer.

During the panel, series creator Aaron Martin confessed there are kills this season he had to physically look away from because they were so revolting (but in a good way). “Ian and I spent last summer during the pandemic on his front porch safely social distancing and coming up with ways to kill people. It was a very fun, weird summer.”

“There’s a lot of ‘I’ve always wanted to…’ – which is very strange when you’re walking on the street and you’re going to get a coffee and someone walks by – ‘…I’ve always wanted to pop someone’s head with a sledgehammer.’ Someone walks by going like, ‘What?!’ We’re just constantly looking for new things to do to bodies and new ways to hate people and express that. You’re pushing each other and often you’re going, ‘Oh, we can’t do that,’ and then you’re like, ‘Oh, well, we have to do that.’ There’s a lot of that this season,” said showrunner Carpenter.

Slasher: Flesh & Blood Poster

Acclaimed filmmaker David Cronenberg plays the patriarch of the family who sets the deadly competition in motion. Explaining his approach to the role, Cronenberg said, “I approached it as being kind of King Lear – you know, Shakespeare’s King Lear – with a great tragic central character played by me. First time I’ve ever been offered a role like that. Actually, I tend to play dispassionate scientists and doctors and so on. In Viggo Mortensen’s film I was a proctologist; actually, I guess that was the height or maybe the depth of my acting career.

This was quite exciting for me because this character is not dispassionate. He’s very passionate. He’s very intense. He’s very emotional and it required me to do some things as an actor that I – I guess I’ve been acting for 50 years – had never actually had to do before. So it was a wonderful challenge. The characters were complex and the way they were interlinked and intermitted was complex. There are surprises. I can tell you when I was reading the scripts I was constantly being amazed and surprised. All and all just an incredible amount of fun as well as being a challenge for me as an actor.”

Martin confirmed Flesh & Blood‘s characters are much more intertwined than characters in previous seasons. “It’s one (and) the people that surround that family. Like any family, they love each other, they hate each other, but in this case they get to kill each other,” said Martin.