Dawn Keetley Benjamin Lee begins his review for The Guardian of the new Netflix slasher, There’s Someone Inside Your House (Patrick Brice, 2021), with two sentences that will most likely enrage horror fans: “There’s obvious business sense behind the cyclical resurgence of the teen slasher, age-old formula cheaply reproduced by barely-paid no-names aimed at an […]
Nick Redfern Many films released as part of the neo-slasher cycle of horror films between 2000 and 2013 were remakes of ‘first wave’ slasher films from the 1970s and early-1980s, including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Black Christmas (2006), Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006), Halloween (2007), Toolbox Murders (2004), When a Stranger Calls (2006), […]
Julia Aloi Women in past slasher films never truly triumphed, as evidenced in the often exploitative, detailed deaths of the female victims or in the eventual removal of the heroine’s agency in the film’s conclusion. Historically, the Final Girl, though central in her role as the resourceful heroine, has never really been the empowered subject […]
Vince A. Liaguno During the slasher’s golden age in the 1980s, the Final Girl at film’s end was left broken—think Janet Julian’s Sandy at the end of the dock on Dog Island staring forlornly into the horizon in Humongous; or Linda Blair’s Marti numbly limping away from the aftermath of the bloodbath at Garth Manor […]
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 […]
Kelly Gredner The moment in Scream (1996) when Sidney Prescott shoots her homicidal maniac boyfriend Billy Loomis in the head and says “not in my movie,” the rules of the slasher film changed forever. The slasher film was extremely popular in the 1980s as the “heyday” of the subgenre, with over 200 films produced of […]
Emma Kostopolus It’s nearly impossible to discuss slashers without discussing Final Girls. From the earliest slashers in the 70s, to the revival of slashers heralded in by Scream (1996), to the 21st-century fare that comprises this issue of Horror Homeroom, Final Girls are nearly as omnipresent as the villains themselves. And with their instantiation as […]
Melissa C. Macero Grady Hendrix’s recent novel, The Final Girl Support Group (2021) begins where most slasher films end: with the female sole survivor of a mass murder. These so-called “Final Girls” meet monthly with Dr. Carol Elliott to cope with the trauma and unwanted though fleeting fame of survival, as well as the constant […]
Dawn Keetley Directed by Dallas Jackson and written by Jackson and Ken Rance, Thriller (2018) is steeped in the slasher tradition. Jackson has been quite up front, in interviews, about the films that have influenced him. “I have a passion for genre movies,” Jackson says, “especially . . . ’80s horror movies like Friday the 13th, A […]