The Slasher Genre

In order to make a slasher I thought it would be useful to research the history of the genre, including some of the conventions and possible narratives. I wanted to understand the genre further so that we can decide whether want to make our piece more conventional or steer away from possible 'old' conventions and look into what is currently trending.

The Beginnings 
The original slasher movie is Alfred Hitchcock's classic, Pyscho (1960). Psycho presented us with the character Norman Bates, who was based on real life serial killer Ed Gein (he also inspired The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and others). The story is familiar to most, a woman flees her town after having stolen a large sum of money from her employer, and ends up staying at the Bates Motel, where she meets Norman. The iconic shower scene is famous for it's straight cut edits and sinister non-diegetic string music:

Notes by Hitchcock in the script about the shower scene:
Through the killing, there should be the shower noise and the blows of the knife. We should hear water gurgling down the drain of the bathtub, especially when we go closer it… during the murder, the sound of the shower should be continuous and monotonous, only broken by the screams of Marion.  

Most slasher movies from this point onwards started to follow a similar pattern, e.g. Halloween, Friday 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street. Another classic slasher movie is The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, released in 1974. This film was first banned in the UK for 20 years, although there's hardly any gore until the last ten minutes. Leatherface was also based on Ed Gein. This inspires me to perhaps base our killer off of an existing serial killer. Here the conventional killer can be found, as described in a previous blog post:

• Disfigured
• Masked 
• Weapon of choice e.g. knife, chainsaw
• Childhood trauma/revenge
• Often silent and unstoppable
• Will never die e.g. Freddie Krueger, Michael Myers
• Stalking and killing 

Carol Clover

Carol Clover wrote the book 'Men, Women and Chainsaws', which focused on the positioning of what she calls 'The Final Girl' in relation to the audience. Most theorists label horror films as a male-driven genre, Clover points out that in a lot of horrors (especially slasher), the audience is 'forced' to identify with the Final Girl. While the dominant killer's subjective point of view may be male within the narrative, the male viewer is still rotting for the Final Girl to overcome the killer. We can see this operating in Halloween, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. In horror films, women are usually murdered because of their having ha sex, or their desire for sex. 

From the book:
Final Girl. The image of the distressed female most likely to linger in memory is the image of the one who did not die: the survivor, or Final Girl. She is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is abject terror personified. If her friends knew they were about to die only seconds before the event, the Final Girl lives with the knowledge for long minutes or hours. She alone looks death in the face; but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued (ending A) or to kill him herself (ending B). She is inevitably female. In Schoell's words: "The vast majority of contemporary shockers, whether in the sexist mold or not, feature climaxes in which the women fight back against their attackers—the wandering, humourless psychos who populate these films. They often show more courage and level headedness than their cringing male counterparts." 

Final Girls:

• almost always a virgin / innocent
• costume not provocative or sexually attractive, unlikely to be blonde
• very sensible /studious, unlikely to partake in illegal activities 
• dark hair / usually quite plain looking, no makeup etc

Wolf Creek

• The story revolves around three backpackers who find themselves held captive and subsequently hunted by a serial killer in the Australian outback. 
• Upon release, critics such as Roger Ebert dismissed the film for its raw depiction of violence, particularly against women, with several stating they walked out of their screening
• Critic Roger Ebert gave it a rare zero stars rating, saying, "It is a film with one clear purpose: To establish the commercial credentials of its director by showing his skill at depicting the brutal tracking, torture and mutilation of screaming young women ... I wanted to walk out of the theatre and keep on walking".
• The Independent praised its departure from the generic rules of the horror film genre. Time Out said "by making us feel the pain, Greg McLean's ferocious, taboo-breaking film tells us so much more about how and why we watch horror movies".

Modern/current trends in Slasher

• A new kind of killer is emerging as discussed in previous posts, rather than having a more 'unstoppable', almost supernatural killer, normal everyday people are starting to become the killer e.g. in The Strangers. This makes it almost scarier for the audience as they can go home thinking ANYONE can be the Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers that they've always been scared of.
• This can be seen in Scream, which I will do a whole other blog post on. 
• More recently, 'torture porn' films e.g. Saw franchise and Hostel have become popular. What all of these films share is realism, through the amazing editing and Mise en Scene, the scenes appear very very real to the audience and sometimes it is unclear whose eyes the audience is looking through - victim or torturer?  
• This article gave some interesting points:

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/may/01/gender.world