From Heather M. of The Televixen:
Link: Paula Brancati Talks Slasher: Guilty Party
“I really like that bit of writing. I like a lot of the writing. Each of these characters have the opportunity to show another side. It’s a different outlook on a story that we’ve seen before. At the beginning, [Dawn is] leading the charge into the campground. She’s got a plan. And she’s aggressive.†Continue reading.
From Heather M. of The Televixen:
Link: Aaron Martin, Paula Brancati & Lovell Adams-Gray on Slasher: Guilty Party’s Time Warp
“I always feel guilty as a person. I think everything makes me feel guilty, so I thought, ‘What about making a show where five people actually have something terrible to feel guilty about as a second season for Slasher. Put a terrible event in the past and [have] them trying to deal with it, probably not in the best way possible, and [have] justice coming for them.†Continue reading.
From Bridget Liszewski of The TV Junkies:
Link: Slasher Showrunner Aaron Martin on Going all Out in Guilty Party
“The secret for me is that first of all you have to create characters that are three-dimensional that you know will be visible minorities or queer. The second thing you have to do is push the fact that they are visible minorities and their sexuality aside. You cast that way, but then just let them be any other character on the TV show. I am a gay man, but I’m not defined by that, so why should any of my characters be defined by their sexuality or their race?” Continue reading.Â
From Bridget Liszewski of The TV Junkies:
Link: Slasher: Guilty Party’s Rebecca Liddiard has secrets to hide
“When I read it I thought for sure I knew who it was after every episode, but by the time I got to the end I was like ‘Oh!’ Aaron has done a great job with the story arc. Some people claim they figured it out right away, but I don’t believe them because the way he wrote the story is very character driven. When you do find out who the killer is it’s a twist, but it’s organic and really well done.” Continue reading.Â
It’s understandable if you’ve dismissed the Slasher horror anthology series as simply a gore-fest jam-packed with characters ripe for picking off. But you’d be totally wrong. Though the genre is bursting with projects like that, Slasher isn’t just about the scare and the gore; Aaron Martin has created intricate storylines and interesting, believable characters that you feel badly for as they’re being dispatched in horrible, awful ways.
Just in time for Halloween, the sophomore season Slasher: Guilty Party drops on Netflix in its entirety on Tuesday, with a some returning faces to augment newbies assembled for slaughter. Where Season 1 of Slasher followed murders committed in a small-town, Guilty Party boasts the classic horror movie setting: a summer camp. It’s there that a group of former summer camp counsellors who—while attempting to cover up a crime they committed years before—become the target of a murder spree. Is it revenge, or happenstance?
Martin has assembled an impressive all-Canadian cast for Season 2, including Degrassi‘s Melinda Shankar as Talvinder, Being Erica‘s Paula Brancati as Dawn, Alias Grace‘s Rebecca Liddiard as Andi, The Strain‘s Jim Watson as Noah, Heartland‘s Kaitlyn Leeb as Susan and Lost & Found’s Music Studios‘ Lovell Adams-Gray as Peter; the sextet portray the counsellors. The ensemble is rounded out with Season 1 performers Joanne Vannicola, Christopher Jacot and Jefferson Brown in new roles alongside Leslie Hope, Paulino Nunes, Ty Olsson, Sebastian Piggott and Madison Cheetatow.
Though there are plenty of scares, Guilty Party does have some sweet moments; one we watched during filming at a Scouts Canada camp just outside Orangeville, Ont., boasted Shankar’s Talvinder receiving a necklace from Brancati’s Dawn.
“It was a bonding scene between the two,” Shankar says. “Tal is being gifted a nice necklace, but of course whenever there is a nice, sweet moment there is always something to contrast that.”
For Brancati, who had worked with Martin on Being Erica, signing on to Slasher: Guilty Party was a no-brainer.
“Dawn is a character that I don’t always get to play,” Brancati says. “On the outside, she’s wealthy, privileged, with a crusty exterior and a bit bitchy at times. She comes from a divorced home and has a lot of vulnerabilities that she’s masking with her sarcastic humour. She definitely has no filter.” Brancati says none of the characters is an archetype; they’re layered and very flawed.
“Aaron is unafraid of being unfiltered,” Brancati says of her showrunner. “He’s got a really dark mind and isn’t afraid to push the envelope.” Brancati, who is new to acting in the genre, admits she’s had nightmares after reflecting on the scenes she and her co-stars have filmed after a day of production. The result? It’s not hard to play scared.
Brancati divulges a bit more of the plot of Guilty Party, explaining the counsellors return to the camp, which has since become a commune, creating conflict between the visitors and those who now call the place home. Weather also adds to the drama: a massive winter storm ensures everyone is kept in tight quarters and unable to escape.
“There is a lot of gore and a lot of horror, certainly, but the characters are really textured and the relationships are really interesting and complicated and messy,” Brancati says. “Character-driven stories are interesting TV to me.”
Slasher: Guilty Party‘s full season of eight episodes arrive Tuesday, Oct. 17, on Netflix.
Images courtesy of Shaftesbury.
From a media release:
Production will soon wrap on the second chapter of Aaron Martin’s award-winning anthology thriller series Slasher, produced by Shaftesbury, to be called Slasher 2: Guilty Party. Leslie Hope (24, NCIS, Suits) leads a large ensemble cast comprised of returning actors including Paula Brancati (Sadie’s Last Days on Earth, Degrassi: The Next Generation), Jim Watson (The Strain, Between), Christopher Jacot (Rogue, Eureka), Joanne Vannicola (Being Erica), Jefferson Brown (Rookie Blue, Degrassi: The Next Generation), and Dean McDermott (Ecstasy, CSI). New cast members this season include Lovell Adams-Gray (Lost & Found Music Studios, Dead of Summer), Kaitlyn Leeb (Shadowhunters: The Mortal Instruments, Heartland), Rebecca Liddiard (Houdini & Doyle, MsLabelled), Melinda Shankar (Degrassi: The Next Generation, How to Be Indie), Sebastian Pigott (Rogue, Revenge), Paulino Nunes (Designated Survivor, Brooklyn), Madison Cheeatow (Heartland, Sadie’s Last Days on Earth), Ty Olsson (The 100, Supernatural), and Simu Liu (Kim’s Convenience, Taken).
Aaron Martin (Saving Hope, Being Erica, Degrassi: The Next Generation), recipient of the 2017 WGC Showrunner Award, returns as showrunner. Set in the remote Canadian winter wilderness, the story revolves around a group of former summer camp counsellors who are forced to return to the isolated campground to retrieve evidence of a crime they committed in their youth. Before long the group, and the camp’s latest inhabitants, members of a spiritual retreat with their own secrets to hide, find themselves targeted by someone – or something – out for horrific revenge. Nominated for five Canadian Screen Awards for its first season, Slasher 2: Guilty Party has been filming on location in Orangeville, Ontario and surrounding area since February.
Brought together by a horrific secret they’ve long kept buried, a group of former friends must return in the dead of winter to the now-closed summer camp they worked at five years before. Deep in the snow-covered wilderness, the rundown camp has now become a private and isolated “intentional community†cut-off from civilization by weather, wilderness, and choice. The group’s secretive reason to return causes tension and tempers to flare. Before long, they find themselves gruesomely targeted by someone – or something – out for horrific revenge. The location’s isolation starts to wear on relationships and expose surprising secrets, and as the winter weather worsens, so does the killer’s grisly spree. As blood and secrets spill across the vast and snowy wild surrounding the camp, the mismatched group must try to escape not just the killer’s retribution, but also survive the deadly elements.
