The Twelve Films That Invented the Slasher

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 13:00:00 +0000

The slasher gets talked about as though it sprang from Haddonfield in 1978 with the knife already sharpened. It didn’t. The masked killer, the subjective camera, the doomed teenagers, the surviving girl who lives to scream the credits in — every one of those parts was invented separately, in different countries, over eighteen years, and bolted together only when someone finally noticed they fit. What follows is the assembly line, in the order the parts came off it. Watch them in sequence and the genre stops looking like a style and starts looking like an engine you can see being built, bolt by bolt. I’ve kept the killers’ identities and the twists to myself throughout, so treat the whole list as spoiler-free.

The Final Girl Rule, and the Films That Broke It

Sun, 29 Oct 2023 13:00:00 +0000

In 1992 the film scholar Carol Clover published Men, Women, and Chain Saws, and gave the horror genre a piece of vocabulary it has never given back: the Final Girl. She was describing something viewers already half-knew, the recurring figure of the slasher who survives to the end credits while her friends are butchered around her. Clover’s insight was that this survivor followed rules, and that the rules said something uncomfortable about who a mostly male audience was watching, and how. Thirty years on, the term has escaped the academy and become a marketing hook, a T-shirt, a shorthand. It has also become the most productive thing in horror to break, because every generation of filmmakers works out that the surest way to frighten an audience is to violate the pattern they think protects them.

Final Girl - vo.rs

The Twelve Films That Invented the Slasher

The Final Girl Rule, and the Films That Broke It