 Beginning his acting career at 20, Norman Carter Slaughter, known as Tod, was an original, touring in the provinces on stage for decades, usually as villain in Victorian melodramas, before starting a film career in similar roles in period horror films usually produced by George King in the mid 1930s.
He continued for the next 15 years in such films as Maria Marten: or, the Murder in the Red Barn (d. Milton Rosmer, 1935), Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (d. George King, 1936), Crimes at the Dark House (d. King, 1940), and The Curse of the Wraydons (d. Victor M Grover, 1946) with a heavily theatrical but very entertaining, if hammy, style of acting. The plots typically centred on the rescue of maidens threatened by Slaughter's evil and greedy villains.
He finished his film career with some TV work as a master criminal in the early 1950s.
Book: "Tod Slaughter and the Cinema of Excess" by Jeffrey Richards in Richards (ed), The Unknown 1930s (1998).
Stephen Shafer, Encyclopedia of British Cinema
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FILM & TV CREDITS
