When Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert famously launched their offensive against what they labeled as “Women in Danger films” in 1980, they effectively positioned slasher films as anti-feminist, exploitative, and lacking all artistic merit. But in the intervening years, this once much maligned sub-genre has enjoyed increasing acclaim for its subversive potential and reflection of […]
Elizabeth Erwin A potent hybrid of self-referential humor with a surprisingly high body count, Todd Strauss-Schulson’s The Final Girls (2015) initially reads as the prototypical post-Scream slasher film with all the expected quirks of a neo-slasher. There is the cast of actors whose television work is already familiar to a large swathe of the audience, […]
Rebecca Gibson Note: This essay contains spoilers for It: Chapter Two. Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy (2021) is the latest in a long line of cinematic releases which capitalise on horror nostalgia, building off the platform’s reputation for scrupulous period detail in Stranger Things (2016-ongoing) but this time tackling the nineties slasher. Based on R. L. […]
Conner McAleese Mothers are famed within horror cinema. From Norma Bates and Mrs. Voorhees to Wendy Torrance and Margaret White, mothers dominate the cultural conversation around family in horror. They are the puppet masters behind the scenes and the legacies left to their children; they abuse, love, and sometimes kill, in equal measure across horror’s […]
Paul A.J. Lewis In one of the most memorably gruesome scenes from Ryuhei Kitamura’s The Midnight Meat Train (2008), a commuter (played by Ted Raimi, brother of The Evil Dead director Sam Raimi) has one of his eyeballs knocked out of his head by a blow to the cranium. Dislodged from its socket, the organ […]