Preface: The Neo-Slasher

Dawn Keetley

Benjamin Lee begins his review for The Guardian of the new Netflix slasher, There’s Someone Inside Your House (Patrick Brice, 2021), with two sentences that will most likely enrage horror fans:

“There’s obvious business sense behind the cyclical resurgence of the teen slasher, age-old formula cheaply reproduced by barely-paid no-names aimed at an easily devalued and underestimated younger audience. What’s less obvious is why in the age of low-stakes streaming, it’s taken this long for them to return from the dead once again.”

Now, Lee may be right in his negative review of There’s Someone Inside Your House (I wasn’t a fan), but what he says about the slasher seems like an unthinking dismissal of a subgenre that has, from the beginning, proved such dismissals to be baseless. From Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) to Freaky (Christopher Landon, 2020), slasher films have transcended and innovated the “formula,” have demonstrated aesthetic and formal sophistication and thematic complexity, have served as the vehicles for exceptional actors, and have actually asked quite a bit of their viewers, both young and old. Back in 1992, the best-known critic of the slasher film, Carol J. Clover, wrote that it is at “the bottom of the horror heap” (21)—and while she went on to dismantle that presumption, some things, it seems, have changed little in thirty years.

The history of the slasher is a story that’s been told by many eminent critics, whom we have represented in the bibliography below. While the most influential critics of the slasher (including Carol Clover and Vera Dika) grounded their definitions of the subgenre in its first flourishing from 1978 – 1981, there are several influential progenitors. A brief survey of these progenitors offers insight into the critical elements of the always-flexible slasher formula, which is best exemplified in films from that first slasher cycle—films such as Halloween, Friday the 13^th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980), and Prom Night (Paul Lynch, 1980).

Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho from 1960 is perhaps the most important slasher progenitor. It unambiguously offers us an archetype of the slasher “killer”—a character who is, as Clover puts it, a “male in gender distress”—who is “propelled by psychosexual fury” (27) and profoundly “sexually disturbed” (28). For Norman Bates, who has internalized a sexually possessive and violently jealous mother, sex and violence are, as Clover points out, “not concomitants but alternatives” (29). In the prelude to the infamous shower scene, for instance, Norman peers through his peephole into Marion’s room, watching her get undressed to take shower; this act of looking precipitates “mother’s” violent stabbing of Marion in the shower: violence as “alternative” to sex, not its “concomitant.”

Psycho’s female characters are dichotomized between a sexually transgressive victim—Marion Crane—and a survivor, a “Final Girl” (Clover 35), who is neither sexual nor sexualized: her sister, Lila Crane. Psycho opens with the camera finding Marion in her underwear on a hotel bed with her lover Sam Loomis, having illicit sex rather than lunch. From then until her death, she is almost always being looked at by a man. Lila, on the other hand, launches an aggressive search for her sister. She searches the Bates house, room by room, and finally discovers the moldering corpse of Norman’s mother in the fruit cellar and thus solves the mystery of Marion’s death. Lila displays one of the two crucial characteristics of what Dika called the slasher’s “heroine”: she can “see” (90-1). (The slasher has to wait for later heroines—notably Halloween’s Laurie Strode—for a “heroine” who can also “use violence.”) Lila displays the traits of the Final Girl in her “smartness, gravity, competence in . . . practical matters, and sexual reluctance” (Clover 40) and she is “watchful to the point of paranoia” (Clover 39), convinced that there is something off about Norman.

Tobe Hooper’s 1974 film, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, fits the slasher conventions so perfectly that many argue that it is the first slasher film. Indeed, Clover discusses the film, together with Halloween, as engendering the subgenre (24). Perhaps the only thing that dislodges Texas Chain Saw Massacre slightly from a place as the undisputedly first US slasher film is that it features not a lone killer but a family of killers. And, with the exception of Leatherface and his mask, the family does not exhibit what Dika calls the “single most distinctive characteristic of these films”—that is, that the killer “is either kept off-screen or masked for the greater part of the film. He is thus depersonalized,” Dika concludes “in a literal sense” (88). Both the Cook and the Hitchhiker are onscreen for significant portions of the film, and their consciousness is not “hidden” as Dika asserts of the consciousness of the slasher killer; rather, the characters of, especially, the Cook and the Hitchhiker, are fairly extensively explored in the film (88). In many ways, Texas Chain Saw Massacre lies as much in an adjacent “backwoods horror” subgenre as it does in the slasher subgenre.[i]

Released one year after Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) is also an important slasher precursor. Not only does it focus on a nonhuman killer picking off children and teens—at least in its first half—but it also joins Black Christmas (the first Canadian slasher, directed by Bob Clark and released in 1974) in beginning with an extended scene in which the camera takes the killer’s point of view. After Chrissie leads a boy from the beach party, pulling off her clothes and jumping in the water, the point of view shifts to something stalking her from underneath, something that is “kept off-screen or masked for the greater part of the film”—what Dika calls “the single most distinctive characteristic” of the slasher film (88). And the killer is indeed “depersonalized in a literal sense” since it is a shark.

After the shark attacks, we arrive at another of Dika’s imperatives of the subgenre: “the opening sequence always presents a woman’s death and/or an image of her mutilated body” (94). Chrissie is killed and her mutilated remains found on the beach the next morning. In some ways, the great white shark is the perfect ancestor to the killer of the slasher film. Peter Quint recounts his shark encounter to Hooper and Brodie in ways that seem to directly anticipate Michael Myers. Quint say the shark has “black eyes, lifeless eyes, like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at you, he doesn’t seem to be living.” In Halloween, Dr. Sam Loomis repeats Quint’s words, declaring that Myers has the “blackest eyes—the devil’s eyes,” ending with the claim that “what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply – evil.”[ii]

There are other candidates for slasher progenitors—The Blob (Irvin Yeaworth, 1958), Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1962), Bay of Blood, or Ecologia del delitto (Mario Bava, 1971),[iii] and The Town That Dreaded Sundown (Charles B. Pierce, 1976)—all of which fed into the subgenre that grabbed public attention (for better and worse)[iv]—between 1978 and 1981.

After this first slasher cycle, the subgenre mutated into a series of increasingly campy copycats, sequels, and reboots. By all accounts, it was exhausted by the end of the 1980s. Audiences seemed to be tiring of the repetition they had earlier craved. Studios slowed down or stopped their production of slasher films and sent those they did produce straight to video.

That all changed in 1996 when Wes Craven’s Scream hit theaters.

Scream re-vitalized not just the slasher subgenre but horror more broadly. It generated, in turn, its own series of sequels and copycats: Scream 2 (Wes Craven, 1997), Scream 3 (Wes Craven, 2000), I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998), Urban Legend (1998), The Faculty (1998), and Final Destination (2000) with its many sequels. These films centered on attractive young people who were often already-established, successful TV stars (from Friends, Party of Five, Dawson’s Creek, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer etc.). Indeed, Scream represented a new trend in cross-over media, as film became integrally tied to TV and to popular music.  With Scream, the slasher became mainstream, breaking the subgenre’s longstanding tradition of casting relatively unknown actors and remaining self-consciously on the margins of established popular culture.

Scream also changed the nature of the slasher killer. As Valerie Wee has pointed out, the killer, in Scream and other 90s slasher films, is “changed from a supernatural force to a resolutely ordinary person, human, personally troubled, and usually a member of the heroine’s close circle of friends.” It is important to the film’s meaning that the killer is close to Sidney, “invisible” (in a very different way than Michael Myers is invisible in Halloween, for instance); what this means, for the heroine, is that she is driven to be suspicious of everyone. As Randy says in Scream’s video store scene—“Everyone’s a suspect.”

When talking about what was new, even radical, about Scream, it’s hard not to agree with the many critics who have argued that the film’s postmodern self-reflexivity was the single most innovative thing about the film.[v] Scream radically changed the horror genre with its substantive and continual references to other horror films. Its self-referentiality was not entirely new (The Thing from Another World was playing on the TV screen in Halloween, for instance), but references to other horror films were never as integral a part of a horror film as they were in Scream.[vi]

As we turn to the twenty-first century, I want to return to Benjamin Lee’s review of There’s Someone Inside Your House. Lee misses the mark entirely when he says that “it’s taken this long”—until 2021, apparently—for slashers “to return from the dead.” Slashers have been here all along—mutating, evolving. They have certainly been present in the twenty-first century—the topic of this special issue. We’re using the term “neo-slasher” here to refer to slashers made in the 2000s—slashers that innovate on the form(ula) that defined the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. The essays in this special issue all articulate some way in which the slasher has taken on distinctive forms and themes in the twenty-first century.

The slasher emerged in 1978 with Halloween. Scream profoundly changed the subgenre in 1996. What films and what trends have been important in the twenty-first century? All of our essays take up this question, discussing both individual films and larger trends. There are also essays that explore how the slasher has evolved into other mediums—the Fear Street “trilogy” for Netflix, for instance, as well as novels (Grady Hendrix’s The Final Girl Support Group and Adam Cesare’s Clown in a Cornfield). So, read on to find out more about the complex and variegated life of the slasher . . .

 

Notes

[i] Bernice Murphy identifies the traits of the “‘bad’ backwoods family” that characterizes the subgenre and which Texas Chain Saw Massacre perfectly exemplifies (149).

[ii] See my discussion of Jaws and the slasher for Horror Homeroom.

[iii] See Lowenstein’s great essay on Bay of Blood and Friday the 13^th.

[iv] See Ebert for an important early critique of the slasher.

[v] See Tudor, 110-113, for a discussion of the self-referentiality of Scream.

[vi] I have made the case that the characters of Scream are so saturated in media that they are losing sense of ‘reality’. The boundaries between what happens in real life and what happens in the mediated world are getting blurred. See “The Posthuman Monster of Wes Craven’s Scream.”

 

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