Cullen Wade
Recently, I watched Andrew McCarthy’s 2024 documentary Brats (not to be confused with Bratz which is actually worth your time), in which a 60-year-old movie star grapples with the psychic toll of someone calling him a brat four decades ago, and it got me thinking about slasher movies. Let me explain.
“The Brat Pack” refers to a loosely-delineated group of young actors who starred in popular teen movies of the 1980s, generally in the orbit of John Hughes. In McCarthy’s documentary, authorities ranging from Malcolm Gladwell to Rob Lowe repeatedly argue for the Brat Pack’s breakout as a seismic shift in the Hollywood profile of the teen movie. Gladwell calls it a “generational transition,” and, as McCarthy puts it, “Hollywood discovered the box office potential of a young audience … In the history of Hollywood, it had never been like this.”
Box-Office Battles
I don’t know about you, but when I think “‘80s teen movie,” I think slasher. Not just culturally, but economically too: for two years of the decade, the highest-grossing teen movie was a slasher (1980’s Friday the 13th and 1988’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master). The only John Hughes movie to manage this feat was 1986’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, not normally considered part of the Brat Pack canon. The film that lit the Hughes powder keg, his directing debut Sixteen Candles (1984), came out the same year as the original A Nightmare on Elm Street and made $2 million less. The highest grossing Brat Pack movie, The Breakfast Club (1985), still underperformed Freddy Krueger’s 1988 outing by more than $3 million.
Between 1980 and 1985, teen movies crept up the box office mountain: 1981’s Halloween II at 12th place, ‘82’s Porky’s at number 6, ‘83’s War Games at 5, ‘84’s Karate Kid at 4–until a teen movie finally captured the year’s highest-grossing prize in 1985 with Back to the Future. The movie that started the trend, raking in $39.7 million domestically to become the 15th highest-grossing film of 1980, was Friday the 13th.
Why, then, does pop culture history credit John Hughes with kickstarting the teen juggernaut rather than the power duo of Wes Craven and Sean Cunningham? We know part of the answer: the genre ghetto. Coming-of-age films were respectable mainstream entertainment, while horror still held dirty-little-secret status. It’s why Molly Ringwald became a Hollywood icon instead of Heather Langenkamp, despite the fact that the latter’s 1984 breakout out-earned the former’s. When Brats’s talking heads declare the John Hughes ascendancy to be the moment when teen pictures became big, what they really mean is when teen pictures became “A” movies. This distinction again prompts the question: why? I think it has to do with the mainstream’s comfort, or lack thereof, with the issues tackled by the two waves of movies.
Slice-of-Life vs. Slice-and-Dice
In my analysis, key to the slasher ethos is a unique preoccupation with youth: its joys and its ravages, its freedom and bondage, its envy and its loss. The slasher killer might be an avatar of the adult world’s reified violence (A Nightmare on Elm Street), an avenger of stolen childhood (Friday the 13th), or a psychotically possessive teen at war with the adult world for obstructing their plans (Mortuary), but the slasher’s central conflict is always between youth and age. These movies are not just about adolescents, they are about adolescence–which is interesting, because conventional wisdom says that same quality is what set the Hughes films apart.
Scholars like Timothy Shary and Frances Smith write that Hughes avoided simplistic characterization while grounding his films in realism. In the introduction to ReFocus: The Films of John Hughes, Shary and Smith write, “Far from the outrageous or terrifying adventures encountered elsewhere, sending teenagers … into the path of a deranged serial killer so they could be picked off one by one … Hughes’s trick was to convey the undramatic, bordering on the mundane” (7).
I am far from the first or most qualified commentator to point out that the Hughes formula’s supposed universality assumes an America where middle-class cishet neurotypical non-disabled whiteness is the default. Earlier in the above-quoted chapter, Shary and Smith acknowledge Hughes’s “persistent undercurrents of sexism and racism … the reification of gender stereotypes and a blasé attitude toward sexual assault” (2). But even if these movies’ characters don’t resemble you, certainly their prosaic concerns are more relatable than the slasher’s contrived mayhem, right? I’m not so sure.
Homecoming Dates vs. Homicide Rates
Horror fans often argue, as I did a few paragraphs back, for the genre’s symbolic resonance. Murder portrayals, we say, exaggerate the human fears of a certain historical moment. In doing so, we should take care not to overlook the import of the slasher genre’s violence when taken literally. We need to acknowledge that it is a position of privilege to think “What do I do when two different boys like me?” is a more relatable teenage question than “What do I do when all my friends start dying?”
U.S. homicide rates reached a peak in 1980, then fell in the first half of the decade, before peaking again in 1991. In 1984, there were about 8 murder victims in the 15-19 age range per 100,000. As the rate fell among ages 35-44, the teenagers ascended. By 1988, the 15-19 range had surpassed 35-44 year-olds in number of homicide victims, and by 1991 teenagers had overtaken 25-34 year-olds to become the second most-likely cohort of murder victims. Between 1984 and 1988 (that is, between A Nightmare on Elm Street parts 1 and 4), the likelihood of an American teenager dying by violence increased by more than 40%.
A similar, though less dramatic, story can be told regarding suicide. Among the same age range, rates increased by 27% over the course of the decade, while the likelihood of a 20-24 year-old dying by their own hand remained basically flat.
Conclusion
The reason why the splats beat the brats at the box office, and the reason why the latter nevertheless get credit for transforming the teen film, are one and the same. The slasher’s reckoning with violence—the shock of a loved one ripped from your life, the ragged hole left behind, the numb hammer of “what now?”—may be less cutely packageable than the Hughes movies’ quotidian high school woes, but it is broadly more relatable. If the Hughes ethos can be summed up in Allison’s Breakfast Club declaration that, “When you grow up, your heart dies,” the slasher film is brave enough to confront the less poetic truth: intact heart or otherwise, not everyone gets to grow up.
Works Cited
BoxOfficeMojo. Multiple pages. Accessed November 24, 2024. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/.
Council on Criminal Justice. “Trends in Homicide: What You Need to Know.” December, 2023.https://counciloncj.org/homicide-trends-report/.
Kachur, S. P., et al. Suicide in the United States, 1980–1992. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, 1995. Violence Surveillance Summary Series, No.1.
McCarthy, Andrew, dir. Brats. 2024; ABC News Studios. https://www.hulu.com/movie/3c92789a-4a02-418b-b896-28f9799be387.
Shary, Timothy, and Frances Smith. “Introduction: Refocus on John Hughes.” In ReFocus: The Films of John Hughes, edited by Timothy Shary and Frances Smith. Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
Cullen Wade (he/him) is a writer, musician, and high school teacher from Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. He is the author of S(p)lasher Flicks: The Swimming Pool in Horror Cinema, out in 2025 from McFarland Books. His film writing has appeared in online outlets like HorrorGeekLife and Deaf Sparrow, and he has been a guest programmer and panelist at the Virginia Film Festival. Follow him on letterboxd @tobe_whooper and Bluesky @cullenwade.bsky.social.
