A slasher film is a type of horror film typically involving a psychopathic killer stalking and killing a sequence of victims in a graphically violent manner, often with a cutting tool such as a knife or axe. For many years now the slasher genre has been one of the most popular and most demanded genres of films.
Slasher films are great for getting audiences on the edge of their seats, and whats even greater about it is, they have certain codes and conventions which audiences know about, therefore tension is caused when the viewer knows something bad is about to happen. For example, if you have sex, you die. This moral template is what predates the slasher genre way back.
This goes way back to a little story called 'The tail of the hook.' All filmmakers and anyone who knows about film know about this legendary story. A couple in a car, are in lovers lane, they were out there and they were making out, and a maniac was going round who had escaped from an institution, and he had a hook for a hand. The girl all of a sudden hears a noise, and it bothers her, she tells her boyfriend to go out and look what it is, so he does and he doesn't see anything. Of course everyone expects them to get killed, but instead he gets back in the car fine, the girl is so creeped out she just cant get back into it, she sits up gets dressed and asks her boyfriend to drive her home. Shes so insistent that he finally agrees and drives off pretty fast. They get home, and when he gets out the car he goes round to her door to open it and there handing is a nasty hook, which still has flesh attached to it where it had been ripped from someones arm.
The hook man was there and was about to get them, but the girl had remembered that her mum said she shouldn't make out with boys in cars.
The influence of the tail of the hook can clearly be identified in John Carpenters 'Halloween' 1978, which kicked off the late 70's teen slasher craze. Set in an apparent quiet urban neighborhood, there was Jamie-Leigh Curtis against the unstoppable Micheal Myers who killed his sister for having sex with her boyfriend.
He then plunges his knife through the promiscuous girls in the town but then meets his match the virginal purity of Lorrey Strode.
"William Lustig - I remember reading in oh, about 1977, or 78 in the magazine variety, that horror and slasher films were dead...then along came Halloween, and it just knocked everyone's socks off. Halloween is what fueled all of the films from the 80's to be made" Halloween was a low budgeted film, not many people expected it to do big, there was no advertising done on a large scale before it came out, but once you had seen you, you had to tell everybody to see it. After Halloween, there was about 50 to 100 films made, souly because of the success of Halloween.
Although Halloween was a fairly visually restrained film, it was followed by wave of slice and dicing films which was concentrated on the slashing's rather than the stalking, most noticeably from the hit 'Friday 13th' Directed by Shaun Cunningham. Friday the 13th was set an in a secluded area called 'Camp Blood', which was actually 'Camp Mersy Bosco' in New Jersey. The story was based on a group of sexual active idiotic teenagers who's flesh was ripped apart on screen in front of our eyes. Mostly thanks to the make up man Tom Savini. No body could of predicted the money or resoect that it had made, and once again its a low budgeted film. The team for the film wanted to make childhood fears become reality. One of these fears was, what if someone was under the bed? And they made this a killing in the film. People argue that the film would of been nothing without Savini and his make up and special effect skills.
Tom Savini "Sometimes I feel like an assassin. People hire me, I load up mu car with my tools and I go some strange place and I kill people. So here I am in Friday the 13th, and I'm killing teenagers in the woods. I'm an assassin"
When you look closely at horror movies, essentially what you see is that they are actually fairy tales, story's about places your warned not to enter. Its the interest of going into the dark room, and the door you don't want to open. Of course its always the door you didn't open that's got what you wanna see behind it. Many films often use real life serial killers as a main running theme for their film. One serial killer which the world became fascinated with was Ed Gein. Ed Gein was a farmer in a small town in America. He became very notorious in the 50s when it was discovered that for a number of years he had been digging up the corpses of women, taking them back to his farm house, dissecting them and transforming them into various kinds of furniture and artifacts. Gein put a very american face on horror, as he seemed a normal nice man who parents felt safe with letting him babysit their kids.
Joseph Stefano, Screenwriter, Psycho "I think saftey went out in the 60s. And I think that's because of Psycho, because it says, you cannot just stop at any motel, go in and take a shower. Watch it."
To many people Alfred Hitchcock's 1960s slasher Psycho, has to be one of the most inspirational films made. Its known to be the 'Granddad' of horror and slasher films, and many would argue that films such as Halloween, Friday the 13th and so on really owe Psycho for their inspiration and success.
'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' Directed by Toby Hooper. Based on the nightmare story of Ed Gein, the director never said he wanted to tell the story of Ed Gein, but he wanted a family of Ed Geins, and that's what he did. You walk out of the movie after watching it and you say to yourself "there are people like this in the world" and its the realization of that which makes the film so great, in a weird scary way. Wes Craven "everything about it just seemed to be totally real, and ah, it was a great example of what I say, the first person to scare the audience had to be the filmmaker, and it had to be crazy people". It became what the 80s feared, a killer with a masc on.
If you wanna know how famous and how badly these famous film monsters became, you only have to go to a comic store where their faces are everywhere on every wall. And it can be easy to forget how scary the characters were the first time we met them.
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