Slasher Movies

Evolution of the American Type

Classic American slashers such as The Texas Chain-saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper), Halloween (John Carpenter), Friday the 13th (Sean Cunningham), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven) are franchises that have inspired numerous sequels and remakes, each featuring the same killer. These works have also successfully crossed over into adaptations for television, books, video games, and graphic novels.

In slasher films, the killer's victims are generally-but not exclusively-female, often groups of adolescents or college students who are away from parental or adult supervision on a university campus or in an isolated setting, such as a summer camp or a country house in a rural location. Killers are usually males; iconic examples of slasher villains are Leatherface (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street), and Michael Myers (Halloween)-all of whom have become major pop culture figures-although there are some notable exceptions. In the first film of the Friday the 13th series, the killer is Pamela Sue Voorhees, mother of protagonist Jason, who, after his mother's murder, subsequently becomes the mass murderer in the following films in this series.

The slasher reached its zenith in the 1970s and early 1980s, with blockbuster films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), and Friday the 13th (1980) and their subsequent sequels, as well as other popular slasher films of this era. The American slasher film generally declined in terms of popularity in the mid-1980s, although it saw a revival in the mid-1990s with Wes Craven's Scream film cycle starting in 1996, which inaugurated successful slasher franchises throughout the 1990s and 2000s, culminating in the “torture porn” slasher franchises such as Saw (2004, James Wan), Hostel (2005, Eli Roth), and their sequels, as well as other cinematic variations upon them.

Critics and the “Final Girl”

Critics, academics, and film theorists have analyzed the slasher film, considering how it represents, objectifies, and/or victimizes its female characters, as well as female spectatorship of slasher films, as in the work of Isabel Cristina Pinedo. Carol J. Clover's concept of the “Final Girl” is a cornerstone of slasher movie criticism. According to Clover, the Final Girl is the last remaining female (a girl or young woman) who overtakes the killer. Unlike the killer's other female victims, the final girl is usually a tomboy, bookworm, and/or virgin; she may have a personal connection to the killer; and she often has a gender-neutral and/or masculine name. Yet in her fight against the killer, she takes on elements of his monstrosity-which most likely were already present within her-by using his own weapon to vanquish him. For Clover, slasher spectatorship blurs boundaries of gender and subject positions, from male villain to the final girl, thereby raising important questions about the slasher film's vexed relationship to feminism and its constructions of gender.

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