The Slasher

Since I feel I have little in the way of novel things to say about some of our more time tested Horror baddies like Vampires, Ghosts or Shape-shifters, let's talk about some more recent Horror heavies, ones that are less clearly defined already. Looking back on the past few decades, without a doubt the most prevalent foes on the modern Horror landscape all fall under the all-purpose umbrella of: THE SLASHER!

There are five basic types of Slashers as I see it: the Common Slasher, the Tragic Slasher, the Super Slasher, the Clan, and the Torturer.

The Common Slasher is probably the simplest of all Horror antagonists, aside from maybe a non-mutated killer animal. When we're dealing with an imaginary creature there always needs to be some explanation for where it came from and why and how. The Common Slasher is a regular human, driven for whatever personal reason to slaughter a whole buncha people. All we need is a flimsy motive.

Most film scholars say the Slasher genre seed was planted with Psycho in 1960. I don't feel qualified to refute that, since the movie was insanely influential on both horror movies and cinema in general. But I do take umbrage with the widely accepted notion that Halloween was the template for all Slasher movies to follow. While there is no denying that the gimungous financial success of Halloween kicked off the Slasher glut of the early 80's, that's just the randomness of the box office at work. Since we're talking about genre conventions here, I gotta point out that John Carpenter's film came out in '78, a good four years after the late-great Bob Clark's Black Christmas, which Carpenter was clearly lifting liberally from, as far as templates are concerned (Halloween didn't even originate the idea of Slasher movies pointlessly revolving around holidays).

Now there is a difference between Slashers and Serial Killers. That difference being - Serial Killers are in Thrillers, not Horror movies. If you think it's silly to make such a distinction, and that I'm getting way into semantics, then you really shouldn't waste your time reading any of this HORROR 101 crap. It's all like this.

Even a shitty Thriller's main appeal is supposed to be the suspense milked from the story, so the movies are bound to an attempt at realism. Slasher movies on the other hand are about the simple, visceral entertainment of the killer's kills. Plot is secondary (and in a lot of cases, completely thrown out the window). I see Silence of the Lambs (1991) referred to as a Slasher movie a lot, and while there are certainly elements of a Slasher movie in there (wearing someone else's face for one), I feel that it really doesn't fall into the category at all. There's too much going on. The plot of a Slasher movie is generally quite barebones.

Most Slashers movies are structured about as thoroughly as a porno. The first thing you need is a "unique" primary location where all the killing will happen. (See, technically your Common Slasher is what's known as "spree" or "rampage" killer, meaning that his/her multiple victims are all taken in a short period of time, but not all at the same time; that's a "mass" murderer. How's that for killer semantics?) This primary location is clutch, and presumably is usually something that the filmmakers already had access to and wrote a movie around. It could be anything from a suburban home (Halloween) or sorority house (Black Christmas), to a shopping mall (The Initiation, 1984) or a mineshaft (My Bloody Valentine, 1981).

Let's walk through what I feel is a perfect example of a classic Common Slasher movie - Terror Train. The movie came out in October of 1980 and to put into perspective just how many Slasher movies were being crapped out back then, this was the third stabfest Jamie Lee Curtis had starred that year, after The Fog and Prom Night.

Most Common Slasher movies try to keep it a secret who the killer is (another reason I feel Black Christmas is a more solid template than Halloween) and yet a lot feature an opening like Terror Train where we see a horrible prank being played on an unfortunate character who, when we inevitably jump forward a year or so, is no longer in the movie... or so we think! Kenny is the poor schmuck who gets pranked freshman year of college in the prologue, and when we jump forward to senior year we learn that he was committed to a mental institute. Well, I guess that's the last we'll see of Kenny. Poor bastard. Onward!

Terror Train features one of the more awesomely dubious of setups for a Slasher movie primary location. Our Heroes are all members of a frat and sorority. Now, you'd think such a movie would take place, I don't know, if a frat house or on campus, but no, as the title implies our college punks are celebrating graduation - on a train! Of course. Isn't that what everyone does?

Once the killings begin, we have two options for how to show the CS: we take the Jaws-style POV approach, where we only get to see the killer's hands (Black Christmas again) or we can take the masked man approach. While horror filmmakers were clearly wracking their brains in the early 80's trying to come up with fresh face covering outfits our Slasher could wear - he's a welder! No, an umpire! No, a beekeeper! - Terror Train takes the interesting copout of having our train-riding frat kids also throwing a costume party. Genius! So, after an initial POV killing, our Slasher then takes each new victim's costumes for himself. Novel, yes, though the movies looses out on any kind of iconographic imagery à la Michael or Jason.

After the primary location and the mask, our next critical element is the Slasher's weaponry. What you don't want is just an ordinary knife. Boring. Gotta get creative and crazy. Sometimes a CS will have a particular iconic weapon they like to reuse, like Jason's machete, or say an electric guitar with a drill-bit on the end so our CS can rock out while killin' (Slumber Party Massacre II, 1987). A lot of CS take more of a "found art" approach to their weapons, grabbing random objects that are immediately on hand. If I were to kill someone, I'd use a gun probably. I can't imagine what circumstances would lead to me trying to kill someone with a meat thermometer or a lawnmower. But I'm not a Slasher. Though maybe I'm just one mean prank away from flipping.

Anyway, good news for any other potential Slashers out there, apparently once one decides to become a CS one immediately develops both teleportation powers and super strength. We're all aware of the Slasher teleporting riddle: how can a Slasher be chasing a victim and then somehow end up in front of them (see Totally Random Crap)? Terror Train is possibly the most insane example of this, since our characters are on a fucking train! You can only move forward and back! So how can the CS sneak around so successfully? Also in pretty much every CS movie there is a moment, if not many moments, where our CS will lift someone off the ground by their neck or perform some absurd feat of strength while killing. In Terror Train one victim gets his face pushed through a mirror. You know how hard that would be to do when the person is fighting back? As egregious as this can be, our CS's Herculean strength often becomes all the more ridiculous during the climax when the CS is de-masked by the Hero and revealed to be a petite girl; I'm looking at you Urban Legends (1998). The answer to both these riddles is simple though: shoddy filmmaking! Gotta love it, man.

Another unexplained aspect of a lot of Slasher movies is where the Slasher is hiding the corpses of his victims. Quite often the Hero of the film is completely unaware his/her friends are even being killed, since when they walk into the room - where we just saw their buddy get a fan-blade to the face - the body is gone! Then ushering in the climax will be the superb moment where our Hero discovers all the victims strategically, often creatively placed all over house. This is what I call Corpse Art (see Totally Random Crap). This brings us to the ending...

The Scooby-Doo style de-masking is another great CS movie moment. In films like Terror Train, despite the fact that they're pointlessly giving us red herrings (one of which is David Copperfield; that's right, our frat boys hired a magician to perform at their graduation frat costume party held on a train) we already fucking know who the killer is: Kenny! The guy they put into an asylum through prankery! Remember him? It was only like 75 minutes ago. Usually the de-masked CS will turn out to be one of our existing characters, getting revenge for something that happened in the past, though often enough we'll get the Friday the 13th (1980)style random new character. Oh my God, all along the killer was... this person we've never seen before! Huh? Either way, the CS's motive is always revengeance of one kind or another.

Quite often our Slashers don't need to be revealed, and I'm not talking about movies like Halloween where we simply know the killers identity already. I'm talking about movies where the Slasher is the main character. I thought about calling this character the Slasher Hero, but that doesn't really jive. Slasher protagonists always die in the end, justly defeated by a Hero who often isn't even a real character. It's just like a regular CS movie except flipped over. Like a gangster pic or Shakespearean drama, it plays out like a tragedy, hence the Tragic Slasher.

These movies follow a Frankenstein's Monster-like formula. Our TS doesn't start out a bad guy, mixed up and not right for this world, yes, but not bad. They're usually overly obsessed with something in particular, like movies (Fade to Black, 1980) or Christmas (You Better Watch Out, 1980) and also obsessed with a particular girl (though rare, a TS can also be a woman - May, 2002). This thing they're overly obsessed with will serve as the motif for how they conduct their killings when they inevitably snap somewhere during Act II. What causes them to snap can be anything, though often involves a tragic misunderstanding or accident involving the girl (or boy) they have a secret crush on. They react poorly to said accident, kill some peeps, and like Frankenstein's Monster, are ultimately chased down by the villagers at the end.

Fade to Black's ending is meant to ape the ending of the James Cagney gangster classic White Heat (1949), our TS up on a rooftop surrounded by cops (you know, the "Made it, Ma! Top of the world!" scene). But in White Heat Cagney's character was a criminal from the beginning. Fade to Black's ending felt more like King Kong to me. Kinda sad cause, like Frankenstein's Monster, I felt for the guy. Because of this sort of ending I also thought of calling the TS the Sympathetic Slasher, but TS aren't always so super sympathetic. By the end of Maniac (1980) or Driller Killer (1979) even the most twisted of individuals have gotta feel like the TS really had it coming. Structurally these films are classic Greek tragedies, so Tragic Slasher it remains.

Now while all our Slashers were out there slaying comely coeds, they were also slaying the box office (I love awful movie critic puns). You know what that means - sequel time! When your villain is The Mummy, you can easily do sequels. Didn't they kill the Monster at the end? How is he back? Well, he's a fucking magical creature, how was he alive in the first place? But if we're dealing with the creepy boy nextdoor, how can we get away with having him in a sequel if we saw him die? Halloween cleverly solved this problem by having our Heroes actually fail to kill Michael Meyers at the end, but they sure as shit killed him in Part II. What then?

Horror movies aren't supposed to be high art. We can always say, "Well, he didn't really die." Okay, whatever. But we can only get away with that once. If we want our Slasher back for Dormageddon 3 we need to think of something else. Sometimes the filmmakers will opt for changing Slashers on us - the common link being the outfit the Slasher wears, or maybe a similar killing scheme. They'll try to connect the new Slasher to the old one in someway - it's the previous Slasher's brother, taking revenge, or some bullshit. This is lame and rarely works to a satisfactory level. That's what killed that Scream trilogy. What started as a brazen deconstruction of the genre ended up becoming just as half-assed and generic as any other Slasher movie. Oh, money, how easily your seductive allure leads to ruin.

So why doesn't this approach work? Well, if you don't sequel the Villain, you need to sequel the Hero, and horror movies aren't really about the Hero. The only successful horror series I can think of that kept the same Hero throughout also kept the same Villain (the Phantasm or Evil Dead series for example.) I can imagine an Alien 5 without Sigourney Weaver, but I sure as shit can't imagine it without out the aliens. I mean, who here actually liked The Riddick Chronicles (2004)? And Riddick was a fucking cool character too.

"Don't change horses mid-stream," the silly saying goes. But we need sequels! I'm as big a horror fan as you can get, but I'm not stupid. I know the studios consider these movies embarrassing. The only reason we get them is because they're cheap and make a lot of money. Sequels are a must. So if our bad guy is a regular human, and they died (as they must) at the end of the first movie, how can we bring them back? Easy... they weren't really human! Ta dah!

The 80's gave us a lot of odd things: mullets, legwarmers, New Coke, and probably the most important discovery for horror sequels since the "Son of" "Bride of" revelation back in the day - The Super Slasher!

The Super Slasher is a rather straightforward concept. He behaves just like a Common Slasher, except for the fact that he's not a regular dude, he's a horrible monster. Vampires bite necks, zombies eat brains, but a Super Slasher, despite being a ghastly undead creature still enjoys the tactile please of stabbing the shit out of people.

Jason Voorhees and Michael Meyers are the two best examples of Super Slashers. They both started out - as far as we were initially told - as regular dudes. Then they died. Then they came back. And back. And back. Then we were eventually told they were in actuality magical in some way. Frankly it didn't matter. We were happy to have them back. In fact, when Jason Goes to Hell (1993) decided to "explain" how Jason's nine-lives were possible it felt both retarded and unnecessary.

I'd place Freddy Krueger in the Super Slasher category. We know he was once a regular Slasher, then became a supernatural creature, and of course, we eventually got a lame and pointless explanation for his powers. But if you wanted to be a dick and get anal on me - pointing out that he was already dead when the first film began - I'd have to eat it like a man. But fuck you. Now who's getting into semantics?

Super Slashers: Illogical? Yes. Lazy? Yep. Sorta stupid? Sure. Just a way to pump out more films to make more money? Duh. Fantastic? Hell yeah.

It's hard for a Slasher franchise to resist the Super Slasher charm. Halloween III (1982) almost ended the franchise when they decided to make it sans Mr. Meyers. So of course he was back from the dead for Part 4. Even the I Know What You Did Last Summer series has now turned the Fisherman into an unkillable ghoul. Good I say. Super Slasher are great. I just love the idea of a zombie, possessing superhuman strength and resurrection abilities, continuing to obsess over slaughtering campers and obnoxious teens. I'd hope if someone ever played a prank on me and I went crazy, killed a bunch of fools, was subsequently killed myself, and actually came back to life, that I'd get over it. If I were Jason I'd try out for the Minnesota Vikings. Sure, I'm rotting as I stand, but I'd wreck shit on the field. Plus the Vikes could really use me on defense. 

This brings us to The Clan and The Torturer. In my mind these aren't really Slasher movies, but most critics lump them in the Slasher subgenre, so I suppose I might as well touch on them.

Structurally these movies have more in common with movies about killer bears than Slashers. A killer bear Slasher movie would go like this: years ago, as a cub, Bearie, was captured - seeing his mother killed in the process - and brought to a zoo. Now, years later, employees at the zoo start getting hacked up at night by a humongous, one might say bear-sized, Slasher dressed as the zoo's mascot (uh... a dolphin), then at the end the Slasher gets de-masked and, oh my God, it's Bearie! As much as I'd love to see that movie, a killer bear movie looks like this: campers, ignoring the warnings of a ranger, sneak into a part of the forest they aren't supposed to camp in and have to fight for their lives against a bear, driven mad by who knows what.

Similarly, a Clan - usually a family of inbred or mutated hillbillies - lives out in the middle of nowhere, minding its own business, which of course consists of regularly murdering those unfortunate enough to pass by - like our hapless Heroes. These are Stumbled Upon movies, where if our Heroes just hadn't got that flat tire or just hadn't taken that short cut, none of this would have happened. A Slasher has a motive to kill the people he/she does. Even if that reason is stupid, it isn't because they stumbled into his house. If it hadn't been at the school dance it would have been next week when everyone went to party in the abandoned factory.

It can get a little murky at times, I'll admit. In Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Leatherface does have a mask and a signature weapon, but there's no revengeance and thus never a de-masking. There's no need; our Heroes don't know these people. Even in later Jason movies where he's essentially become a shark, killing all who cross his path with no real motive, he still follows some of the Slasher rules, like hiding his bodies to delay our Hero realizing he's there (plus, Super Slashers aren't held to the same first installment regulations as a Common Slasher). Clans tend to show their hand immediately, and our Heroes spend most of the movie running and hiding. The Hills Have Eyes (either version), Just Before Dawn (1981), and Wrong Turn (2003) all fit squarely into the Clan category.

The Torturer is a whole different story. This kind of movie is so brand new it hasn't had proper time to form strong conventions. Torture has always been present in Slasher movies, for sure, but it's never been the killer's main objective. Just kind of happens now and then. You know how it is when you're killin' some kid.

This recent subgenre pretty much sprung to life in 2004 with Saw,which is an interesting entry in the horror canon mainly because it's hard to categorize. Personally I'm not a big fan of this recent Torture sub-genre. Aside from Hostel (2005), I feel like the movies lack the bounce of a good horror movie. That's neither here nor there though, since the Saw flics have proved endlessly popular and have cast a long shadow on the horror landscape, regardless of what I think. Part of what I didn't like about the first film was that I didn't think it was a horror movie at all. I thought it was a Thriller! Gar! Thrillers, quit mixing with my beloved genre!

Playing devil's advocate against myself, I'd say what made Saw a Slasher movie was that it placed a lot of importance on the killings themselves. It also featured a mask, by way of the stupid talking puppet thing, and the Slasher's motives grew out of revenge, taken against specific people along with a standard Slasher's collateral damage. But whatever - gore alone doesn't make something a horror movie, otherwise The Passion of the Christ should have been on the cover of Fangoria. Strip away the excellent marketing artwork and the movie is just Seven-lite. And Seven was most certainly a Thriller. A damn good one too. Alas. I'm just one man with one website. Only so much I can do.

Unlike Saw with its overly complicated, convoluted plot, a conventional Slasher movie, a real Slasher movie, is beautiful - almost breathtaking - in its dumbass simplicity. You can virtually write one by accident. Just go the videostore, grab a video, look at its back-of-the-box teaser, scratch out some of the key details we discussed earlier, and write your own movie, Mad Libs style:

"College senior, (name of person), and some friends decide to celebrate (name of holiday or social event) by having a party at (name of remote location) only to discover that a madman dressed as a (some manner of mask wearing profession) wielding a (something kick ass and sharp) is (verb)ing and (verb)ing them (adverb) one by one! Will (name of Hero again) discover who the madman is? And will anyone survive... (name of holiday or social event again)?!?!"

Personally I'm still pullin' for the movie about the Slasher bear. Paws! Or maybe Stabbing Zoo! I'm a genius.