Paul Farrell
It was the summer of 1998. I was fourteen, at a sleepover with my closest friends and fighting the group’s movie choice with every fiber of my being. The night had grown dark, the hour late and, aside from my one dissenting vote, it seemed that the decision was hopelessly unanimous: we were going to watch a horror movie.
I was a relatively easy going guy back then, certainly- willing to abide the silly exploits of my boisterous friends at almost every turn. However, scary movies were where I drew the line. My deep rooted adamance against all things cinematically terrifying stemmed from a rather unfortunate experience I had with Child’s Play (1988) at an early age and, suffice it to say, I had avoided the genre ever since. Still, it appeared that fateful evening, my teenage mind was about to be exposed to undiluted terror once more.
My friends knew my feelings on the subject, which was more than likely why they were so keen on the idea. After all, years later, I can understand the desire to watch a scary movie with someone truly afraid of them. There’s an electricity to the experience, a palpable sense of tension that shifts beyond the screen and one that hits home- especially when the group in question is the very demographic being hacked up in the picture on screen.
The film was a slasher. I determined I had never actually seen one. I figured Child’s Play more than likely fit that bill, but I hadn’t watched the whole thing- only the part where the mother discovered the doll had no batteries… shuddering, my mind raced. Jus the term irked me:
Slasher.
The word evoked a mean-spirited sense of sport; a sub-genre bent on nothing but slicing up its occupants in the stead of some twisted pleasure. The more I thought about it, the more upset I became. I grew quiet, as I was prone to do when my disconcertedness rose to the surface. My friends ribbed me further, laughing and throwing popcorn at me.
“It’ll be fine!”
“Stop worrying about it!”
“You’ll like it- trust me.”
Trust. How could I trust them? They were about to decimate me, show me deplorable things, invite me into a world from which I could possibly never recover.
My friend Erich, the host of the sleepover, reached into his cabinet and removed the shiny VHS box. Several faces peered back at me from the cover: pretty, familiar faces. Faces that were undoubtedly about to be slaughtered.
Drew Barrymore was there. Neve Campbell too. Also, that woman from Friends. The other guy I didn’t recognize, which most likely didn’t bode well for him…
The movie was called Scream (1996). I had heard all about it- after all, it was a huge success. Still, it was a slasher, right? A horror movie. Something to which I was wholly and completely uninterested.
The VHS was new, so Erich had to break the seal keeping the cassette in the box, a clear strip of tape with the word ‘DIMENSION’ scrawled across it. He took the tape out of the sleeve and put it into the player. I heard it click into place as the gears began to turn, the various FBI warnings populating bright and wavering on the screen in the darkness.
Already, I was afraid.
That’s when I watched my first slasher.
As the image faded to black over Gale Weathers hard edged, live reporting of the massacre in Woodsboro, CA, my friend jumped off the couch and flicked on the lights. He was excited, I think, to see the look on my face. He was surprised, in turn, to see my smile.
I had… fun.
I couldn’t believe it. Sure, I was scared at times. The opening was raw, nail-biting terror. But I also laughed. I was intrigued by the whodunit nature of the story. I was invested in the people on the screen. I was shouting at Randy, just as Kenny was, when there was a five second delay on the feed. I didn’t revel in the deaths, no, I delighted in the mechanisms which brought the movie to such devastating places and the corresponding heights of strength, perseverance and courage exhibited by Sidney Prescott throughout the feature’s runtime.
Despite it being my introduction to the slasher genre, I was struck by the obvious history that was there. I was dumbfounded by the endless references spouted off by Randy that I just plain didn’t get, but appreciated in scope. It was difficult to reckon the experience with everything I had decided horror was and, in many ways, I didn’t. The only way I could process the experience was by thinking of the movie as an anomaly.
Still, the film planted itself firmly in my psyche, a seed of sorts, just like Chucky’s foray in the living room without his batteries. As we talked about Scream that night, going over the plot beat for beat, the twists, turns and characters we liked the most, my love for horror cinema was already growing even though I didn’t realize it. Years later, when I would be led down a path that would culminate in Night of the Living Dead, I never even considered the part Scream played in my journey or the reason the aptly named slasher is so damn important to the budding horror fan:
The slasher is a gateway horror film. It bridges adolescent insecurity into the tangible fears of adulthood, all the while empowering the youth which is so often relegated to dominance. They have the ability to be fun, mean, sexy, scary and just plain malleable- tonally and visually capable of just about any shift at any time, all acceptable within the confines of the sub-genre.
There are rules. But there aren’t.
I guess what it all boils down to is this: maybe my fourteen year old self was less afraid of horror movies and more afraid of the fear the films seemed to be able to awaken inside of himself. Maybe the promise of what they had to offer was easier to write off, then to explore. And, maybe, the accessibility that a formula based slasher offers provides a path through that perception.
The summer of 1998 offered many sleepovers. Many late nights. And many more viewings of Scream. And every time, my smile grew wider, my appreciation deeper, my experience more fun. I remember thinking about that word again:
Slasher.
Simple. Straight forward. Fun. It didn’t sound so bad, after all.
Joe Lipsett
I’ve been thinking about slasher films a lot recently. Between the creation of #GrimSlasherMadness, a Twitter poll March Madness-style competition that pits slasher films against each other, and the recent wave of feminist responses to director Anna Biller’s assertions that slasher are misogynistic, a supposedly moribund subgenre suddenly seems very lively. This got me thinking: what is the historical legacy of the subgenre and is it still relevant today?
If the slasher unofficially originated with Psycho or Peeping Tom in 1960, its conventions are commonly assumed to have solidified in 1978’s Halloween…or at least that’s what the historical narrative suggests (don’t get me started on the frequent erasure of 1974’s Black Christmas). The phenomenal success of Halloween helped to establish the financial viability of slashers and as Hollywood is apt to do, copycat films adopted the same creative/narrative strategies. The result was not only an overwhelming glut of (often) mediocre products, but a historical streamlining of how slasher films are discussed in the horror community.
Films like Scream (1996) and countless think pieces have cemented the idea that slasher films adhere to the “rules” established by Halloween (Final Girls are virginal, liberal behaviours such as sex, drugs and alcohol consumption are punished, etc). The reality is that there are many films that eschew these tropes, but because they don’t readily fall into the revisionist historical narrative that has been crafted over the last fifty years, they are forgotten or purposefully omitted.
To reduce slasher films to a set of rules serves to belittle the subgenre and to cast these films as misogynistic or (sexually) punitive is simplistic and reductive. There is a substantial amount of academic work that discounts, challenges and/or interrogates these falsehoods available online for fans and critics willing to seek it out.
One significant piece that challenges the perception of violence against women in slashers is Sapolsky, Molitor, and Luque’s “Sex and Violence in Slasher Films: Re-examining the Assumptions” in Volume 80, Issue 1 of the Journal of Journalism & Mass Communications Quarterly. The academic article compares slashers of the 80s with their 90s counterparts in several areas: the sex of the victims, the violence inflicted on them and its proximity to sexual encounters. The results are startling in the way that they contradict the typical assumptions:
- 90s slashers are more violent: “The most popular slasher films of the 1990s are significantly more violent than the most commercially successful slasher movies released in the 1980s. Specifically, there was a 44% increase in the number of violent acts suffered by innocent victims in the 1990s crop of slasher films.” This may be the result of less stringent MPAA censorship compared to many 80s slashers that suffered significant cuts in their murder sequences.
- Sex does not equal death: “…a number of researchers have repeatedly claimed that slasher films depict violence during or juxtaposed to sexually arousing scenes. The present findings do not support this assumption. While the amount of sexuality portrayed in slasher films remained unchanged from the 1980s to the 1990s…the genre rarely links sex and violence.” The number is small enough to count on a few fingers, by the way.
- Female does not = death: “A second widely held assumption is that slasher films single out females for victimization. The present study found that males suffer nearly twice as many violent acts as do females.” This is a big one as it confirms that both men and women are victims in slasher films.
- Female does = more terrorized screen time: “Slasher films in the 1990s feature females in terror more than two-and-one-half times longer [in terms of screen time] than males. By comparison, in 1980s slasher films, females were depicted in fear five times longer than males.” This hardly surprises: one need only compare Max’s quick but visceral death with Helen’s legendary epic chase scene in I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), though it does offer one insight into the perception that women are more often victims.
While the findings are undeniably outdated, they suggest an historical pattern in the way that slasher films are perceived – not just by casual observers, but by fans of the subgenre. Which brings us back to Biller’s outdated and unsubstantiated claim, which naturally produced an outraged response from a variety of passionate female horror fans, including Meagan Navarro who wrote this piece for Bloody Disgusting. One need only do a casual search for female horror reception to uncover a wealth of intelligent and critical debate, including favourites like Isabel Cristina Pinedo’s Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing and Sarah Trencansky’s Final Girls and Terrible Youth: Transgression in 1980s Slasher Horror.
This shouldn’t suggest that there’s no value to criticisms of misogyny and sexism in slasher films; simply that blanket assumptions about the values, ideals and morals of five decades worth of films will inevitably be proven false. There’s a vitality in slashers; it’s why the subgenre has persevered where the other, more fad-ish cycles of J-Horror, Found Footage and Torture Porn have fallen by the wayside. There remains something inherently terrifying about the realism of a somewhat normal human being stalking and killing everyday folk. These killers are mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, adulterers and victims of sexualized violence. Slashers are inherently relatable and as inherently adaptable as they need to be to remain modern.
So let’s continue to dissect, critique and evaluate them; let’s continue to analyze how they evolve culturally, politically and economically over time; and let’s go even further by evaluating how they are produced, distributed and exhibited in different nations. Most of all, however, let’s continue to celebrate them as a hallmark of the horror genre that we know and love. Long live the slasher!
“Joe is a TV addict with a background in Film Studies. He co-created TV/Film Fest blog http://Bitchstolemyremote.com and has written for Bloody Disgusting, Nightmare on Film Street and Anatomy of a Scream. He enjoys graphic novels, dark beer and plays multiple sports (adequately, never exceptionally). While he loves all horror, if given a choice, Joe always opts for slashers and creature features.”
Kelly Warner
Horror, more than any other genre, takes pride in shocking its audience. So it may seem strange that the thing I like most about the slasher sub-genre is its familiarity. Long before I ever saw my first Friday the 13th (1980), Elm Street (1984) ,or Halloween (1978), I knew who Jason, Freddy, and Michael were. I viewed them as horror’s constants. And I like having certain constants in my fiction and film.
Maybe, if I’m being honest, I don’t respect slashers as much as other, more original pieces of horror. With some notable exceptions, it’s a subgenre that’s more about fan service and memorable gore instead of new ideas and crafting memorable stories. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love it. Slasher horror is cinematic comfort food.
I can understand how horror fans might’ve felt dismayed watching the slasher genre take over the 80s and then watching those films get cheaper and more desperate over time. But as a fan that came to the genre long after slashers had started to fade away, I can honestly say that I wish the best examples of the genre never gave up their blades in favor of retirement.
I like knowing that Jason, Freddy, Michael and the gang are out there terrorizing their favorite haunts. Just like I take comfort in knowing that James Bond will always be around to save the world, Batman will always answer the Bat-Signal, and Godzilla will never leave Tokyo alone. It’s just nice knowing that they’re there, reliable, constant. (Well, no longer quite so constant these days, but fans like to think that’s always about to change with the next hyped up slasher around the corner. Personally, I can’t wait for David Gordon Green’s 2018 Halloween.) It may sound counterintuitive to request a tenth movie starring the same unstoppable madman over an original horror film with a villain we’ve never seen before, but well, that’s horror fandom for you.
Valeska Griffiths
We recently lost a film legend in Margot Kidder. The prolific actress, dedicated activist, and outspoken personality died on May 13th, 2018. While many remember her best for her role as Lois Lane in the Christopher Reeves Superman era, I’ll always think of her as the ill-fated and absolutely fabulous sorority sister Barb from the classic Canadian slasher Black Christmas. The 1974 version, obviously. One of my most cherished Christmas traditions is watching this film on Christmas Eve with my mother while we snack on assorted appetizers and sip spiked hot chocolate.
Why do I love Bob Clark’s holiday horror classic so much? The fact that much of it was shot in my alma mater doesn’t hurt. Nor do the many comic gags nestled throughout the film, such as Mrs. Mac’s painfully awkward interactions with Mr. Harrison, Barb’s hilarious and iconic monologue about the sex lives of various zoo residents, and the delicious and long-awaited payoff from the carefully-laid telephone exchange joke. These are all very good reasons to love Black Christmas, as are the earnest performances and much-loved costuming choices (can we take a moment to appreciate Jess’s black and yellow sweater, Chris’s fur coat, and anything Phyllis dons?) And let’s not forget about the then-innovative POV shots, the truly terrifying phone audio, and the refusal to reveal the identity of the killer (so much scarier this way!)
But there are deeper reasons to appreciate this cult classic.
With all of the accusations of misogyny levelled at the slasher subgenre (not always undeserved, but not always warranted either), it’s worth noting that Black Christmas is a tremendously progressive film, not only for its era, but even for today. Surely it’s no major spoiler to concede that, yes, many women die violently throughout the course of the film.
But what I love about the film is not the way that these women die, but the way that they live.
I only have room for one example in this piece, but it’s a good one. Jess’s abortion storyline is refreshingly (even shockingly) progressive not only by the standards of 1974. Even now, many films and television shows choose to sidestep the issue by having the character suffer a miscarriage instead, or reveal that she was mistaken about her pregnancy altogether. In Black Christmas, not only does Jess choose to undergo the procedure, but she firmly and rationally lists her reasons for doing so, refusing to be swayed by the emotional rhetoric of her boyfriend, Peter. And what applause-worthy reasons they are: she flat-out refuses to give up on her own ambitions and dreams to settle for an unhappy marriage to Peter, affirming instead that she is going to continue her education and work towards her own goals. It’s a bold move to place the protagonist and audience surrogate in this position, and Black Christmas pulls it off beautifully. Peter’s refusal to accept Jess’s decision plays out as controlling and irrational, and his eventual downfall is a direct consequence.
For Jess, as for many women who face the same choice, the decision to terminate the pregnancy is simple and clear. The film doesn’t require that she wallow in an endless, sob-choked decision-making process, nor that she allow her college boyfriend to make the decision for her. Jess knows what she wants from her life, however short it may be in the context of a slasher film. And that is feminist as fuck.
Valeska Griffiths is a Toronto-based freelance writer, zombie enthusiast, and Camp Arawak drop-out who balances a passion for maple syrup with a love for blood. She is the creator and editor of anatomyofascream.com and the executive editor of Grim magazine, and has written about genre film for Horrornews.net, Bitchstolemyremote.com, Nightmare on Film Street, and Scriptophobic. Valeska spends her time critiquing slasher films, watching makeup tutorials, and living deliciously. October is her natural habitat. Connect with her on twitter at @bitchcraftTO.
Chris Vander Kaay
One of the things I love most about slasher films is that they are accidentally the exact diametric opposite of a love story. They are, literally, Hate Stories.
In a love story, two characters are destined to meet, struggle with the rest of the world not accepting their love, and eventually get together and live happily ever after. In a slasher, one character is obsessed with the other character to the degree that they will murder everyone around them in order to isolate them, at which point they strike and attempt to end their life.
In one, they live happily together. In the other, it is deadly competition, and only one can live. In the love story, they are better for having met each other; in the slasher, the final girl has to become a murderer just to continue living.
I’ve never heard anyone in the history of slashers talk about the influence of the love story on the slasher; usually, they focus on headier psychological elements or some dark mythology. I, on the other hand, find it interesting that I could watch Friday the 13th (1980) and ‘Til There Was You (1997) and see the the same film inverted and turned inside out.
Eric Eghigian
In most circles, cliches are at best a necessary evil, and at worst, an embarrassing show of a lack of ingenuity on the creators part. Curiously, horror fans have the distinct honor of being the only group out there that earnestly, unironically celebrate cliches. More than any other offshoot, slasher films are built from the ground up on a transparent framework of maxims and yet still account for a good number of fan (and critical) favorites.
So, what is the definition of a slasher film? It’s generally considered to be a movie with a body count of disposable characters put to death with a sharp object wielded by a scarily durable monster/murderer. The prospective victims are usually isolated, either through geography or contrivances, making escape or aid infeasible. On top of all that, nine times out of ten our lead is a semi-chaste female who outlives the rest and goes on to have a final showdown against the villain. There’s enough conventions at play to keep narrowing this down to the point of mockery but I think the point is made.
Your average slasher film is almost one giant cliche itself and, for some reason, that’s not a bad thing. But why is that? A part of it, no doubt, has to do with the sheer familiarity of it all. If people like something once, it stands to reason that they’ll like it a few (dozen) more times. It’s why remakes wind up being such financial hits.
This is all a bit general though. So, what about slasher movies specifically? Well, with a sub-genre that’s macabre enough to brag about body counts, I think a balance with entertainment factor needs to be reached. People like to be scared, grossed out and mortified but only to a point. Contrary to popular belief, there is a point past which general audiences will turn on a film and it’s makers as being true sickos. That line fluctuates and shifts along with the times and sensibilities of the culture but it’s there, if not slightly undefined.
I believe the familiarity brought on by a slasher films cliches can help to mitigate how disturbing they might otherwise be. If the audience can laugh, or even groan, along with something like a victim randomly tripping as they flee from a killer or a car that inexplicably won’t start when it needs to, it can lighten the viewing experience for them subconsciously. Some people already naturally like to laugh when they’re scared so it makes perfect sense. Why else would horror-comedy be such a strong sub-genre? Evil Dead II (1987) or, keeping it to laser-focussed to slashers, the later Nightmare on Elm Street movies are just a few examples.
One other angle to come at this from is to think about how this hyper-awareness of cliches effects the viewers intellectually. People like to feel smart, or to be made to feel smart. Something like Scream (1996) is predicated on the audience not only knowing the genre tropes going in but being as fed up with them as the creators were. This is a movie made by Wes Craven, the same man who thought that, at the height of the slasher genre’s popularity, the only way to keep it novel and interesting was to go for the victim’s dreams. Scream was intended to be a big, self-aware swan song to that type of film. A loving, if not slightly cynical, showcase of how trope-ridden it was to send it off in a style fitting the the 90’s. However, audiences latched onto it so strongly, thanks in no small part to how smart it made them feel to deconstruct a beloved genre, that it reinvigorated it to a degree and spawned three sequels.
There’s nothing wrong with following formulas when writing fiction. They’re a genuine necessity to a point. Without them, consumers can feel alienated or uncertain and not in a way that they generally enjoy. Slasher films may be a mostly-dead genre today, but with the way horror fans are, the backlog of classics will never go out of style, especially when it’s so in vogue to, lovingly of course, pick them all the way down to the bare bones.
