-- John Carpenter, on Halloween
It’s hard to find praise for a subgenre that became such a crystallized formula in the 80’s and has since devolved into what has been dubbed “torture porn.” The formula is simple: a masked man (sometimes a woman) with a knife or bladed weapon kills young adults one by one until only the lead female character (whom pop culture has dubbed “The Virgin”) is left alive and she kills the slasher, or the male lead comes in saves her. From the plethora of films that simply followed this formula it became just a fact that the teenagers that did drugs and had sex were the ones to get killed and only the “good girl” would get to live. This led to these movies being likened to campy urban legends intended to keep teens away from premarital sex. But these 80’s slasher movies weren’t aiming for any kind of moral commentary; they just lifted the plot of Friday the 13th. In Friday the 13th Mrs. Voorhees is killing the counselors having sex and doing drugs because Jason drowned while the counselors were having sex and doing drugs. Her motivations make sense in the story of the movie. In Halloween Michael Myers is a psychopath obsessed with killing his sister; the other teens he kills were just doing what teens do- having sex and doing drugs.
Pop culture has also erroneously dubbed Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho the first slasher movie. I can only pretend to see links between Psycho and the slasher genre: the killer uses a knife, that’s it. Prototypes for the slasher movie come with Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972), Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), and Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974), all of which are good, effective movies, but it wasn’t until John Carpenter’s Halloween in 1978 that the slasher film as we know it came to be. Not only was Halloween the first real slasher movie but it may also be the only one of real quality. John Carpenter, rather than going for blood and effects, uses almost Hitchcockian techniques to set tone and atmosphere and build suspense.
The structure of Halloween was taken and used effectively, though on a campier level, a couple years later in Friday the 13th. That movie went more for shocks and thrills, but it did its own thing. That’s more than can be said for Sleepaway Camp; My Bloody Valentine; Silent Night, Deadly Night; Prom Night; He Knows You’re Alone; Happy Birthday to Me (which actually has a great final image and closing titles song); and the anti-slasher movie April Fool’s Day. Most of those have been remade and most were named after dates.
Slasher movies have since turned into geek shows like the Saw and Final Destination series where gore effects and gruesome scenes of horrendous violence are more pivotal than story or characters. As much as Eli Roth’s Hostel is reviled I believe it’s a well made film and has a story that unfolds, like a movie should. Unlike in the Saw franchise where the slim plot exists only to frame the scenes of torture and gore. Slasher movies have always walked a fine line between campy entertainment and exploitation, but in the last decade they've lacked such quality and merit that they can only be exploitation films. I think my friend Gene Siskel would agree.
1 comment:
Those clips remind me how much I miss Siskel & Ebert. They would really talk about films beyond just saying "see it" or "skip it." New rating system aside, it is nice to have real film critics like Phillips and Scott on At the Movies again!
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