Nathan Fillion

Nathan Fillion, who moves from the bridge of the spaceship Serenity to the science-fiction horror movie Slither, told SCI FI Wire that the latter will be a return to old-fashioned splatter films. "There’s stuff blowing up. There’s some nasty [stuff]. There’s some sliming," Fillion said at a news conference to promote Serenity. "There’s a lot of prosthetics. We leaned away from the CGI and leaned towards the prosthetics as an homage to the horror movies of yesteryear. Our creator/director, James Gunn, said it will be the last time he ever does that."

Slither, written and helmed by Gunn (writer of Dawn of the Dead and the Scooby-Doo movies), deals with a small town in which a sheriff (Michael Rooker) is infected by an alien parasite. Fillion plays a deputy who must deal with the resulting infection, which quickly spreads to other townspeople, with gruesome results.

"This is Bill Pardy," Fillion said. "He was the football hero in high school. He was the good-looking guy, very popular in town, in this economically depressed town. He becomes a police officer. It’s a government job. There’s no crime going on. He just gets to kick back and do nothing. He’s a guy who’s kind of letting [time] pass him by in that he let his high-school sweetheart get away, and he realizes this, that he’s kind of missed the boat. He’s not accustomed to responsibility. Life has been handed to this guy. And now, Slither, when it opens up, he’s faced with impending alien world domination and, for the first time, some real responsibility. This man is blissfully unprepared for it, for the challenge. This is a man acting in much the way you’d expect someone to act if these situations were real, and you were a real person. He’s not someone saying, ’I’m going to rise this challenge. I know just what to do. Everybody relax.’ No, He’s in a panic. He’s upset. No one’s prepared. That’s what I think makes this movie so great: ... People act as you’d expect real people to act in this situation." Slither opens in January of 2006.