Is the Slasher Alive or Dead?: Conflicted Genre Discourse and the Continued Return of Michael Myers

Alex Svensson

In his article “The Comeback of the Slasher Movie,” Hollywood Reporter contributor Richard Newby anticipated the release of David Gordon Green’s Halloween by arguing that the “true test of the slasher movie’s continued relevancy and evolution will come on Friday [October 19, 2018], when Michael Myers returns to theaters […]. Halloween could be the film that brings the slasher movie back into the house.” Similarly, Miles Surrey proclaimed that, “The Slasher Film is Not Dead,” contending that the new Halloween “had energized the long-dormant subgenre, and provided a template for future success.” Alison Foreman – citing Halloween’s “[smashing of] box office records with a lifetime gross of over $253 million” – cheekily warned readers that if “you despise slasher films […] here’s something really terrifying: Hollywood’s horror industry is coming for you.” Summing it all up in a piece about Halloween’s financial success, Bloody Disgusting’s John Squires boldly proclaimed, “Bring on the Slasher Resurgence.”

Understanding the slasher film as a subgenre of horror that has been critically maligned, culturally stagnant, and exhausted under the weight of endless sequels and remakes over the last two decades, these and similar publications collectively positioned Halloween 2018 as a significant event that could revive the slasher as a culturally dominant, economically viable, and even critically respectable presence within popular cinema.

This article aims to compile and offer a few critical routes into what I find to be a complex, hyperbolic, and often conflicted genre discourse regarding the slasher film. Pronouncements of Green’s Halloween as slasher savior not only overstate a prior dearth within the subgenre but also tend to overlook the ways film cycles like the slasher have historically developed and functioned. Informed by Richard Nowell’s work on the early teen slasher film cycle of the late 1970s and early 1980s, I argue further that it is necessary to consider how a film like Halloween 2018 has “intersected with and [been] impacted by contemporaneous trends in film production and promotion” (5) both within and beyond the horror genre – specifically the trend of the soft-reboot.

The Slasher Returns?

There is a rather easy and perhaps obvious argument to be made that – of course – the slasher never went anywhere. It is an ever-persistent and long-popular subgenre, even in years when other onscreen horrors (from torture traps and paranormal activities to teenage witches and satanic rituals) have seemed more immediately to capture public and critical imaginations. The slasher has for years been witness to sustained audience interest, hardcore fan investment, commercial viability, nostalgic re-visitation, and artistic experimentation – not just at the movies, but also across a variety of mediums.

In the previously mentioned Hollywood Reporter piece, Newby argues that more recent slasher films – which includes Scream 4 (2011), The Final Girls (2015), Terrifier (2016), Hush (2016), Happy Death Day (2017), Tragedy Girls (2017), Hell Fest (2018), and The Strangers: Prey at Night (2018) – are indicative of a subgenre that has “been evolving, picking up our social changes, and becoming if not prestigious then at least something that could have real staying power.” However, he contends that these films have been doing such work within the subgenre at the margins of more popular, profitable, and/or critically celebrated horror cinema. Here, a slasher revival does not equate to mere presence across exhibition formats or sustained horror fan interest but, rather, mainstream box office success, prolonged pop cultural discourse, glowing critical praise, and the clear establishment of a new Hollywood-engineered film cycle – things Halloween has been seen as generating with vigor and viscera.

“Elevated” Horror vs. Schlock and Splatter

The use of the word “prestigious” in Newby’s assessment also points to the ways Halloween is somewhat uneasily situated within recent, pervasive discourse regarding a supposed “horror renaissance” and the emergence of what has been dubbed “post-horror” cinema, which includes such critically lauded films as The Babadook (2014), It Follows (2014), The Witch (2015), The Invitation (2015), Get Out (2017), It Comes at Night (2017), A Ghost Story (2017), A Quiet Place (2018), Hereditary (2018), Midsommar (2019), and Us (2019). 

As David Church points out, “[heralded] for possessing an aesthetically higher tone than the average multiplex horror film, [post-horror] films have received disproportionate critical acclaim for catering to more rarefied tastes” (16). Church further reminds us that horror has long been “derided for its corporeal appeals, fantastical conceits and thematic focus on evil, monstrosity and death. Accordingly, it is a critical commonplace for reviewers to celebrate horror texts that privilege haunting atmospheres and indirect chills over shocking spectacles and visceral disgust” (18). 

I find that Green’s Halloween resides restlessly at the center of these critical considerations and emerging (and arguably ill-fitting) genre labels. Reviews of the film have applauded it for its feminist politics and willingness to grapple with concurrent, urgent discourses on sexual assault and generational trauma – accolades that I happen to agree with, but themes that for many reviewers (in line with Church’s argument about the historical taste politics of horror criticism) actually wind up productively and pleasantly subverting and even scrubbing away supposedly tired, low-brow tropes of earlier slashers. The Playlist’s Victor Stiff articulates such perspectives, writing that, “Green is too savvy a filmmaker to revel in an old-school slasher movie’s schlockier elements. Instead, he chooses to comment on the toll violence takes on its victims. […] It’s a novel take on the material that wants the audience to reconsider what it means to be a horror flick’s final girl.”

Complicating this critical approach, Justin Chang writes in the Los Angeles Times that the film’s ideological stance might make it seem “heavy with topicality, but it isn’t. It’s nasty and nimble.” Dread Central’s Jonathan Barkan also had possible slasher-fan trepidation in mind, writing that the “body count in this film will rival any Friday the 13th entry, so don’t worry whether or not the blood will flow.” Such jumbled reception and conflicting takes on slasher conventions lends this discourse a fuzziness not only in terms of whether Green’s Halloween is too much of a slasher or not, but also whether the film properly pays homage to and functions as a continuation of John Carpenter’s lean and mean original (all the while breathing new life into an aging franchise and an allegedly listless subgenre). As Heather Wixson opined, the film is a success in this regard (due in part to its splattery violence):

“In terms of the slasher elements to Halloween (2018), the kills are incredible, with some playing off-screen and some of them just going right for the jugular (which is literal in some cases), and I love the fact that while Green wants to make something that will appeal to modern audiences, he often leans into the classicism of Carpenter’s approach to violence in Halloween (1978), thereby delivering a mix of brutality that honors its past while also making great strides in bringing familiar slasher tropes back to the big screen in new ways, akin to what Wes Craven was able to do with the Scream series.”

Sequel as Soft-Reboot

Naturally, this deference to Carpenter’s Halloween and its legacy is entirely expected, as Green’s film simultaneously functions as a direct sequel, a 40^th anniversary celebration, and a warm welcome back for Carpenter as executive producer, composer, and overall advisor (articles about the film constantly reference some version of Carpenter “giving his blessing” to Green in taking on the project). Importantly, the film is also what we can call a “soft-reboot” of Carpenter’s original; as James Fleury explains, the soft-reboot is a modern variation on the more standard remake or reboot, “resetting some of their respective franchise’s narrative” (189) in ways that often function as a “corrective” to various sequels, spin-offs, and remakes (191).

The term captures Halloween’s approach to its own franchise history, and more specifically the ways that approach has been understood and often applauded by critics. As Peter Debruge writes, “David Gordon Green’s ‘Halloween’ sequel pretends like the last nine films in the franchise don’t exist, picking up 40 years after John Carpenter’s seminal 1978 slasher movie as if none of that other nonsense has ever happened.” Similarly, The Hollywood Reporter’s John Defore sees the film as “clearing the franchise of decades of crud.” These and other flippant dismissals of the Halloween films released between 1982 (Halloween II) and 2009 (also Halloween II) refer not just to oft-derided narrative structures, convoluted mythologies, weak characterizations, and repetitive tropes and scenarios, but specifically to increased levels of corporeal destruction and decay that would seem to betray the relatively bloodless, no-frills approach Carpenter took back in 1978.[i]

Echoing such sentiments and centering Halloween and slasher devotees in the conversation, Jake Dee’s review of the film argues that for “rabid horror fans, HALLOWEEN [sic] isn’t just a film franchise, it’s an institution. John Carpenter’s original was not only a testament to ingenious, no-budget, less-is-more filmmaking, but […] it also revitalized, if not popularized, the slasher film template by setting a new standard.” As a soft-reboot, Green’s film has seemingly been tasked with a similar power and responsibility. 

Taking these critical stances into consideration, I find that when reviewers and cultural commentators proclaim that the success of Green’s Halloween indicates a new slasher revival, what they actually seem to be saying (and are in fact pining for) is that the slasher is back – an idealized and over-simplified notion that the original slasher franchise starter, the film and filmmaker that established the rules of the subgenre, and the ultimate slasher and final girl icons in Michael Myers and Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode have finally returned to at once jumpstart the slasher and cement the legacy of Halloween as an endlessly renewable slasher urtext.

Yet I find that such critical appraisals of both Halloween films are somewhat ahistorical in their interpretations of the relationship between Carpenter’s film (and by extension, Green’s) and the slasher subgenre. As Mark Jancovich reminds us, “Carpenter had little to no sense of making a slasher movie […]. Carpenter could not have seen Halloween as a slasher movie because there was no such category at the time” (8). Commenting on the supposed immediate influence of Halloween on the development and success of the slasher, Richard Nowell further explains that it arguably wasn’t until 1980 that the release of Friday the 13^th “demonstrated the box-office potential of the teen slasher” (145) and that “the appeal of producing [an immediate] Halloween Cash-in was […] overshadowed by the confidence filmmakers placed in several non-horror youth-oriented film types” (116) that would later influence the production and marketing of teen-centric slashers like those featuring Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger.[ii]

Conclusion

In many ways, then, Halloween 2018 doesn’t just function as a soft-reboot of Carpenter’s film in the now increasingly typical sense,[iii] but reimagines the original as a more fully-formed, clearly-recognizable slasher than it ever could have been in 1978. It is not so much indicative of a slasher revival as it is a confirmation of the ways that genre categorizations like “slasher” are always tricky, fluid, and messy things (and that these qualities should be embraced rather than scorned). As William Proctor has argued about the horror genre writ large, I find that the slasher “need not be subservient to a single, univocal cycle but involves cross-breeding across and within sub-generic elements, a dialogic array of different manifestations of what we might describe as ‘horror’” – or in this case the slasher – at any given moment across film history.

Rather than seeing Green’s film as either a “success” due to its erasure of slasher/franchise history or a “misstep” due to its gruesomely detailed slit throats and peeled-off faces,[iv] I find it more instructive and productive to consider this new Halloween as a film that works within the framework of the soft-reboot in ways that – whether intended or not – challenge and confound not just the rigid boundaries of “post-horror” or “horror renaissance” films, but more specifically the critical discourses that retroactively apply such labels in the first place. Pushing beyond the limitations of such genre discourse, these varied claims of a Halloween-led slasher revival conversely work to further articulate the increasingly multifarious, mutable, and perhaps even insufficient category of “slasher” altogether.

 

Notes

[i] You can brush up on the Halloween franchise’s extensive moments of gory mayhem and bodily dismemberment here.

[ii] Nowell references films such as American Graffiti, Saturday Night Fever, Grease, Animal House, and other teen-hangout and/or gross-out comedies in this regard.

[iii] Influenced by Nowell’s approach, I also configure Halloween (2018) as existing within an established trend of non-horror soft-reboots, including: Star Trek (2009), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Jurassic World (2015), Terminator Genisys (2015), Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), Creed (2015), Jason Bourne (2015), Terminator: Dark Fate (2019), and The Suicide Squad (2021).

[iv] It is notable that early reviews for Green’s Halloween Kills (2021) are deeply critical of an apparent amplification of brutal violence (see here for representative examples). It will thus be significant to revisit this “slasher revival” discourse in light of these critiques. Importantly, it would seem John Carpenter himself has lent some complication to the matter by recently anointing Halloween Kills as the “ultimate slasher” – a claim I gather is both genuine on his part and a bit of tongue-in-cheek promotional hype.

 

Works Cited

Halloween. Directed by John Carpenter, Compass International Pictures, 1978.

Halloween. Directed by David Gordon Green, Universal Pictures, 2018.

Halloween Kills. Directed by David Gordon Green, Universal Pictures, 2021.

Barkan, Jonathan. “TIFF 2018: HALLOWEEN Review – The Shape is Back!” Dread Central, 9 September 2018.

Chang, Justin. “Review: A nasty, nimble ‘Halloween’ sequel finds this horror franchise in pretty good shape.” Los Angeles Times, 15 October 2018.

Church, David. “Apprehension Engines: The New Independent ‘Prestige Horror’.” New Blood: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Horror, edited by Eddie Falvey, Joe Hickinbottom, and Jonathan Root. University of Wales Press, 2021, pp. 15-33.

Debruge, Peter. “Film Review: ‘Halloween’.” Variety, 9 September 2018.

Dee, Jake. “Halloween (Movie Review).” JoBlo. 19 October 2018.

Defore, John. “‘Halloween’: Film Review.” The Hollywood Reporter, 9 September 2018.

Fleury, James. “World-building, Retconning and Legacy Rebooting: Alien and Contemporary Media Franchise Strategies.” Film Reboots, edited by Daniel Herbert and Constantine Verevis. Edinburgh University Press, 2020.

Foreman, Alison. “How 2018 made the elusive horror renaissance official.” Mashable, 28 December 2018.

Jancovich, Mark. “General Introduction.” Horror, The Film Reader, edited by Mark Jancovich. Routledge, 2001.

Newby, Richard. “The Comeback of the Slasher Movie.” The Hollywood Reporter, 17 October 2018.

Nowell, Richard. Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle. Continuum, 2011.

Proctor, William. “An Introduction and a Provocation.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, 30 October 2018.

Squires, John. “Bring on the Slasher Resurgence: ‘Halloween’ Tracking to Smash the Franchise’s Box Office Records.” Bloody Disgusting, 27 September 2018.

Stiff, Victor. “‘Halloween’: Rejoice! This Brutal Horror Remake is Killer.” The Playlist, 9 September 2018.

Surrey, Miles. “The Slasher Film Is Not Dead.” The Ringer, 22 October 2018.

Wixson, Heather. “Halloween (2018) is Everything I Was Hoping For, But Could Never Have Expected.” Daily Dead, 21 September 2018.