Slasher

What defines it

A slasher is a horror film in which a killer, or a small group of killers, stalks and murders a group of people, often with a bladed or sharp weapon. The word is sometimes used loosely for any horror film with a murderer in it, but film scholars point to a more specific set of traits that separate the slasher from monster movies, splatter films, supernatural stories and psychological horror.

The core of the form is the stalk-and-kill sequence: a build-up of suspense, a chase or an ambush, and a death. Around that sit a few recurring ideas. The killer is usually a human being, even when the character seems to have superhuman strength. There is a group of potential victims, most of them young. And there is often a past wrong, such as an old tragedy or an unpunished accident, that returns on an anniversary or holiday and sets the killer in motion.

Many slashers end with one survivor facing the killer alone. Scholars call this person the final girl, a term introduced by film scholar Carol J. Clover in a 1987 essay and popularized by her 1992 book Men, Women and Chain Saws. The term usually describes a young woman, though occasionally a young man fills the role. Laurie Strode of Halloween is the standard example.

A short history

The slasher has many ancestors. Scholars point to the fairy tale of Bluebeard, to the Grand Guignol theater of Paris, and to the “old dark house” films of the 1920s and 1930s, in which a hidden murderer picks off guests in an isolated building. Agatha Christie's novel Ten Little Indians (1939) is often called an especially strong influence for its structure of people being killed one by one. In the 1940s, films such as The Spiral Staircase (1946) added stalking and early jump scares.

Two films from 1960 changed the picture. Psycho showed that a quiet, ordinary-seeming person could be the killer, and its score was imitated for decades. Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, released the same year, put the audience inside the killer's point of view. In the 1960s, German adaptations of Edgar Wallace's crime stories, known as Krimi films, and a wave of low-budget gore films such as Herschell Gordon Lewis's Blood Feast (1963) kept the ideas in circulation.

The most direct influence came from Italy. The giallo, a type of stylish murder mystery with a masked or unseen killer, supplied many of the visual ideas that slashers later used. Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood (1971) is credited with inspiring the death scenes of Friday the 13th, and Sergio Martino's Torso (1973), with a masked killer and a sensible young woman trapped in an isolated villa, looks very much like a slasher in the making. Dario Argento's Deep Red (1975) was a success, though the giallo declined in Italy by the middle of the decade as budgets shrank.

In North America, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) was a huge independent success, and Bob Clark's Black Christmas (1974) is cited by some film historians as the first true slasher. It made about $4 million on a budget of $620,000. Critics still disagree about which film deserves the title of first slasher, and the answer depends on how strictly the term is defined.

Hallmarks

• A human killer, often masked or kept in shadow, who may be nearly silent.
• A group of young potential victims, who are usually killed one at a time.
• A past wrong, often tied to an anniversary or holiday, that explains why the killer has returned.
• A final survivor who confronts the killer, usually called the final girl.
• Camera work from the killer's point of view, and music that signals the approach of danger.
• A sequence of set-piece deaths, which many fans treat as the main attraction.
• Sequels that move the focus from the survivors to the killer, who becomes the franchise's star.

The golden age, 1978 to 1984

Halloween (1978) set the pattern and, with a budget of about $300,000, showed how profitable the form could be. It was followed in 1979 by When a Stranger Calls, and in 1980 by Friday the 13th, which grossed more than $59 million and was released by Paramount. Some scholars count more than 100 similar films between 1978 and 1984. Most were poorly reviewed, but many made money, and the boom was helped by the arrival of home video, which allowed very cheap films to find an audience.

The decade also saw the form become controversial. Critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were harsh about Friday the 13th, and Siskel's review in the Chicago Tribune even revealed the killer's identity and gave the address of the chairman of Paramount so that readers could complain. The R rating the film received was criticized in turn. Some films were accused of dwelling on violence against women, and others of linking sex with death, a pattern that critics noted and that later films often copied. Halloween's creators have said they never meant the film to carry that message.

The decade's biggest success from the horror side was A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), made for about $1.8 million by Wes Craven. It grossed more than $25 million and helped make New Line Cinema a major studio, which led to the nickname “The House That Freddy Built.” The film also moved the slasher toward the supernatural, since its killer attacks in dreams.

Franchises and the video years

By the mid-1980s the slasher was more a franchise business than a film trend. Series built around a single killer, such as Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Child's Play, kept returning to theaters, and the killer, not the survivors, became the star. The survivors of one film often died early in the next, and the fact that this became a convention in itself shows how fixed the form had become.

At the same time, the home video market pulled in a wave of cheaply made films, some shot on video itself. Quality varied widely. By the early 1990s the major series had faded at the box office, and in the middle of the decade the genre looked tired.

Self-awareness and the Scream era

The revival came from an unexpected direction. Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) played with the idea of a film series haunting its own creators, and then Scream (1996), directed by Craven and written by Kevin Williamson, treated the slasher's rules as common knowledge. Its characters had seen the films and discussed the clichés, even as they were being hunted. Unlike most slashers, its focus stayed on the heroine, Sidney Prescott, rather than on the killer, whose identity changes with each film.

Scream was a sleeper hit and set off another cycle that included I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), written by Williamson, and Urban Legend (1998). Scholars sometimes divide the genre into three periods: the classical period, from 1974 to 1993, the self-referential period, from 1994 to 2000, and the neoslasher period, from 2000 to 2013. The second cycle faded quickly, as sequels such as Halloween: Resurrection (2002) were poorly received.

Remakes, revivals and the present

In the 2000s, producers turned to remakes. Freddy vs. Jason (2003) paired two franchise killers, and the 2003 remake of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was a box-office hit. Rob Zombie's Halloween (2007) and a run of remakes in 2009 and 2010 continued the trend with mixed success.

Since then, the form has returned in several shapes. The 2018 Halloween, directed by David Gordon Green with Carpenter and Jamie Lee Curtis involved, had the largest opening of any slasher film to that point. Scream was revived in 2022 and returned in 2023. Independent filmmakers have continued to find new variations, such as Ti West's X (2022) and the Terrifier series, the third film of which reportedly became the highest-grossing unrated film of all time. Television has followed along with series such as Bates Motel, a prequel to Psycho, and Scream: The TV Series.

What scholars argue about

The slasher has attracted unusual critical attention. In the 1980s, many writers read it as a conservative morality play and a form of misogyny. Clover's work challenged that view by arguing that, whatever the violence, audiences were asked to identify with the heroine, which made the final girl a more complicated figure than critics had assumed.

Other claims are contested too. Some writers say the importance of the final girl is overstated, and that in recent decades she has been handled through parody and subversion. A widely repeated rule that the Black character always dies first has been described as largely a myth: in a 2013 analysis by Complex of fifty films with speaking Black characters, that happened in 10 percent of them. These debates are a good reminder that popular ideas about the genre are often simpler than the films themselves.

Where to start in the library

A good route is to begin with Psycho for the roots, then The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Halloween for the form taking shape. Then follow the people behind them: John Carpenter, and the killers Michael Myers and Leatherface. The two long-running series in this library are the Halloween franchise and the Texas Chain Saw Massacre franchise.

Verified details

• Friday the 13th (1980) grossed more than $59 million and was released by Paramount.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) was made for about $1.8 million and helped build New Line Cinema.
• Scream (1996) was written by Kevin Williamson and directed by Wes Craven.
• Black Christmas (1974) made about $4 million on a budget of roughly $620,000.
• Carol J. Clover introduced the term final girl in a 1987 essay, and it reached a wider audience through her 1992 book Men, Women and Chain Saws.
• Scholars divide the genre into a classical period (1974 to 1993), a self-referential period (1994 to 2000) and a neoslasher period (2000 to 2013).
• Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood (1971) is credited with inspiring the death scenes of Friday the 13th.

Sources and further reading

• Slasher film, Wikipedia
• Halloween (1978 film), Wikipedia
• A Brief History of Slasher Movies, Creepy Catalog

Related subgenres