Slasher Horror

Halloween to Scream to It Follows. The horror sub-genre that produced the highest-volume body count and the lowest critical reputation, but at its best has earned both.

Slasher horror is the most-formula-driven sub-genre of the horror tradition. The structure: a killer (usually masked, usually silent), a group of victims (usually teenage or young-adult, often punished structurally for various transgressions), a 'final girl' who survives. The conventions were established by Psycho (1960) and Halloween (1978) and have been repeated for fifty years.

The foundational entries

  • Psycho (1960) — Hitchcock. The shower scene was the structural precondition for almost everything that followed.
  • Halloween (1978) — John Carpenter. The genre's working template.
  • The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) — Tobe Hooper. Cheap, fast, foundational.
  • Black Christmas (1974) — Bob Clark. The Canadian slasher that pre-figured Halloween.
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) — Wes Craven. Freddy Krueger as the first 'personality slasher.'
  • Friday the 13th (1980) — Sean S. Cunningham. The franchise that proved the form's commercial reliability.

The self-aware re-inventions

  • Scream (1996) — Wes Craven. The slasher that knows it's a slasher and uses that self-awareness as material.
  • The Cabin in the Woods (2011) — Drew Goddard. The most-meta slasher of the 2010s.
  • It Follows (2014) — David Robert Mitchell. The teen-sex-as-curse premise played for genuine dread.
  • Happy Death Day (2017) — Christopher Landon. Slasher meets Groundhog Day.
  • Final Destination (2000) — James Wong. The slasher in which Death itself is the killer.

The form's structural problem

The slasher's reliability as a commercial form is also its critical weakness. The conventions are so well-established that most entries are working from a template rather than developing the form. The result is that hundreds of slasher films get made; most of them are forgettable; the genre's reputation suffers from the volume of mediocre product more than from the quality of its best entries.

The films above are the entries that have, in our reading, earned the genre's seriousness rather than just confirming its template. The remaining ten thousand entries in the genre's history are, mostly, products rather than films.

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