Slasher movies occupy an unusual position within horror, and within film in general. As a genre, its scope is extremely narrow, yet its formula is endlessly replicable: somebody stabs a bunch of teenagers, culminating in a face-off between the killer and the final girl. Laurie Strode fended off Michael Myers and launched a thousand imitators.
The slasher movie’s peak, both creatively and in popularity, is also when it was most reviled critically. In the 1970s and 1980s, slasher movies were considered the bottom of the barrel, barely inching out pornography in artistic merit (and second only to pornography in VHS rentals). Critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were so disgusted by the original Friday the 13th that they told their viewers to write letters of complaint to its producers and star Betsy Palmer. It’s only in the subsequent decades that slashers have been taken seriously enough to recognize that great slasher movies are great movies, period. Yet simultaneously, the genre has gone into decline.
I wrote about Christopher Landon’s recent run of slasher movies, Happy Death Day, Happy Death Day 2U and Freaky, for Fangoria! (Fangoria!!!) You can read it here.
The Sundae 