My Problem with Slasher Movies

As I was writing up the commentary for Neon Red, talking to my co writer T.B. Thelwell about The Thing in the Costume and chatting about our thoughts on slashers, I found myself thinking on my own thoughts on that genre. I found myself realising that I tend to not like slashers very much, for quite a few reasons. I want to share with you my thoughts on the slasher, what problems I have with them, and what slashers I do like. Shall we begin ?

Formulaic Slashers became increasingly reliant on formula. They often fall into the stereotypical list of stupid teenagers doing something bad that gets someone killed or seriously damaged, with the latter coming back for revenge. The stupid teenagers are terrible people of different degrees, normally partaking in promiscuous sex/drugs/other general irresponsibility with the exception of that one girl, too pure and innocent, surviving or saving the day. Slasher movie villains rarely, if ever, stay dead, always coming back for the sequel. They typically are set in American suburbia or campsites as a commentary on the darkness lurking in the American dream.

The idealized life is stripped away to reveal murder and death.

(Post-publication addition: Scream is one exception to this rule, the killer is always someone different. The costume is the same, this is one of the ways Scream has been able to keep fresh and exciting. I should have included this, I did have it in my notes but I forgot to put it in the final draft, sorry!)

While all of this is perfectly fine as framing, the problem is that with such limited scope to work with. Slashers tend to get rather samey. Coupled with the focus on morality tales and shallow characters with very obvious flaws, there is only so many stories one can tell before they start to get very familiar. This would also help exacerbate the other problems I will be talking about later in this post.

The reasoning is rather simple. If you are unwilling to use the Slasher movie to explore new ideas or write something good, there are always other aspects you can focus on. Such as spectacle or the profit motive. We all see how the slasher progressed to becoming a hollow predictable spectacle machine.

Focused on Karma Slasher movies are morality tales at heart. This is born from the general formula of slashers, dumb teenagers making bad choices that lead to them making a killer who then punishes said kids one day. One of the most popular examples that might have solidified this is Friday the 13th when incompetent camp counsellors get murdered by a mother avenging her son’s neglect at the hands of the counsellors.

It is no coincidence that the counsellors were having premarital sex during the moment of Jason’s death, either. Other slashers take the angle of avenging killers against terrible people, such as Slaughter High and Terror Train. How righteous the killer is on a scale. They can be anything from killers delivering righteous Karma like in Friday the 13th or Slaughter High to questionable killer vengeance such as in A Nightmare on Elm Street. This sort of killer is definitely bad, Freddy being a child molester but is taking revenge on the parents who did a mob justice by killing the children. Sins of the father and all that jazz. Other examples would be killers that society created, such as Silent Night, Deadly Night, where a traumatised abused boy kills people after getting triggered by depictions of Santa.

The society, namely the orphanage that abused him and the grandfather who scared him, has failed him. Another example of this killer would be Michael Myers from Halloween, where the killer is a personification of evil, something that society fails to protect people like Laurie Strode. Another is Candyman, where the racist society kills a black man trying to romance a white woman. Because of this act of violence in American society, Candyman haunts the community, punishing those who try to evoke his memory. So you might be asking, why is any of this bad?

Not on its own. Horror is all about exploring the dark. And what can be darker than the consequences of our actions or that we live in a society? The issue, however, is when we find ourselves rooting for the killer over the protagonists.

While isn’t as big a problem with the society-made killer because the protagonist is only surviving the consequences of history. They (the killer) were not personally responsible per se, simply shaped by the environment (Silent Night Deadly Night) or were made as a product of history (Candyman) The other two categories, however, are more of an issue. When people do something terrible to make a killer, we are more likely to cheer on the killer rather than the protagonists. Why should we not?

They (the dumb kids) are getting their just deserts. Maybe they shouldn’t be having sex when they were supposed to be responsible for kids. Don’t bully the teen or you, they wouldn’t have come back to kill you all at your high school reunion. When we root for the monster, or killer in a piece of horror, you, as a writer, have failed, cause the reader/watcher is not exactly scared.

They instead enjoy the suffering that the killer is inflicting on the stupid, unreasonably attractive teenagers. Horror movies should be about being scared, not celebrating the just murder of terrible people. This is often coupled with the focus on spectacle, speaking of which.

Focused on Spectacle I do feel that Happy Birthday to Me is something of an outlier here. Most slashers don’t exactly market themselves primarily on the spectacle of murder. But I do think that Happy Birthday to Me is indicative of a problem with slashers, primarily the spectacle of violence for the viewer as a cheap thrill. For example, Sleepaway Camp’s kills are very elaborate, involving anything from splashing a child molestor with boiling water, rigging a toilet with a beehive or stabbing a woman with a curling iron in the genitals.

That says nothing about the twist ending, while rightfully regarded as one of the best in horror, is memorable due to the spectacle of trans people existing. That was a joke, but you see what I mean here, slasher villains can’t just stab or shoot people, they always have to construct some elaborate scene involving something extremely impractical.

You can see this even in the original Halloween, we have a scene where one of the horny teens is impaled to the wall with a sharp object. Halloween, we have a scene where one of the horny teens is impaled to the wall with a sharp object.

There is no reason for why slasher movie villains have to have impractical weapons or do some outrageous trap to polish off people.

There isn’t a practical reason for Freddy’s glove, but it looks cool. I think that if there is some benefit to things that look cool in horror, Pyramid Head, for example, looks cool, Pinhead or just anything Lovecraft made also look cool. But they don’t take centre stage or a primary reason for seeing a horror movie.

The killer in I Know What You Did Last Summer, for example, wields a hook to kill his victims, it looks cool on the front cover and results in some unique kills. But doesn’t really add to anything and practically comes across as very inefficient as a tool of murder.

That is to say nothing of Happy Birthday to Me, which prides itself on having some of the most bizarre kills on film. We watch slashers more often than not for spectacle; the killer dressed as Santa Claus cutting up people with axes. We love to see the goofy ways Freddy kills people in the sequels. We are not that interested in the thematic elements of the story or the plot per se (mostly because the writing is substandard). We tend to watch slashers because of the cool kills, the costumes, and the gimmicks. That I think cheapens the horror, a shallow experience of gore, pretty colours, and jump scares.

They Don’t End

What is profitable can never die. Slashers were extremely valuable to this reality during the 1970s and 80s. A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Child’s Play (later Chucky), Hellraiser, Scream, Halloween, Urban Legend, Final Destination I Know What You Did Last, Children of the Corn, Leprechaun, and Prom Night. They normally escalate far beyond the point of absurdity, typically space (Hellraiser, Friday the 13th and Leprechaun) or deviate wildly from the original tone or setting (Prom Night, Friday the 13th, Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Silent Night Deadly Night) and tend to have increasingly diminishing returns on quality. While this isn’t always the case, Final Destination and Scream are rare examples of slasher franchises getting back on track, Hellraiser to a lesser extent.

But they are rare exceptions.

My point here is that once you know that the killer cannot die or just be stopped, there is a certain loss of engagement. You know the killer cannot die, there is never any catharsis for the characters after defeating the killer cause he will simply just get up again. Why should we keep being engaged in a story that refuses to end and gets worse in quality with each interaction?

Everything needs to end. The viewer should have some sort of catharsis to seeing the characters survive. There is rarely any exploration of tragedy and trauma in the sequel (one exception being Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends) , as we normally get a new set of characters, or the characters return and don’t express any growth or change outside of what is needed for the plot to progress.

Every series gets tarnished by substandard sequels, even the bad ones like Urban Legend, Prom Night, or even Leprechaun- a series nobody asked for. We begin to associate the series with mediocrity. By encouraging companies to churn them out, we also make art worse. By not demanding an end to the slasher movie series, we deny ourselves good art by watching them. There is a reason why horror movies became so widely derided and dismissed as lower fiction. It was because of the endless mill of cheap jump scare comedy movies that are not interested in scaring or exploring the dark, but rather showing off a spectacle of shallow suffering and loud noises.

I don’t want to remove the fun

Not every movie needs to be as scary or intellectually engaging as some of my favourite slashers, these would include Candyman, Scream, Halloween, Alice Sweet Alice, and also Silent Night Deadly Night. I do worry at times when I write these opinion pieces that I am showing myself to be a snob. Someone who wants their entertainment to be completely and utterly intelligent all the time otherwise there is nothing good to be gained.

There is truth to it, but I have always been clear about my love for dumb games like Devil May Cry 5 and Stick Fight: The Game. I also will not pretend that any of the slasher movies like Leprechaun don’t carry any entertainment value. Sure they suck as horror movies but that doesn’t mean you can laugh at how stupid they are. From what I have seen and heard of Terrifier 1 & 2 (I wasn’t able to see them in time for this article, which is my bad) is a good example of what I have been talking about here done well. There is nothing wrong with enjoying entertainingly bad media.

I didn’t like Leprechaun, I didn’t like a lot of the slashers I talked about here. However, that doesn’t mean we should disregard them as worthless entertainment. I do not want the Prom Nights and the Slaughter Highs to disappear. I just don’t want people to think that horror is only Leprechaun.

I want people to be exposed to the brilliance of Candyman or Alice Sweet Alice while having the option to kick back with Silent Night Deadly Night. To embrace the shallow wholeheartedly while sometimes challenging themselves intellectually. Everyone needs to have fun, but we shouldn’t have to have that at the absolute expense of quality entertainment.

You should engage your brain when consuming art because it is rewarding and enriching. You don’t want to eat only junk food, but that doesn’t mean you can never have a Big Mac from time to time.

Conclusion

Horror, much like comedy, lives on being unpredictable. But unlike horror, it requires build-up and people who you are likely to root for. There is no better way to kill suspense and terror than getting the viewer to root for the monster. Once you are craving Jason or Ghostface to carve up teens, you have failed as a horror artist. Fear of the unknown, fear of the monster what it represents is far more effective than watching dumb teens getting their just deserts-often in the form of pickaxes.