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 Giallo's Fingerprints on the Modern Slasher

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 13:00:00 +0000

The American slasher likes to tell a tidy origin story about itself — a masked killer, a group of teenagers, a final survivor, all of it springing fully formed from a handful of late-1970s films. It is a good story and it is missing a continent. Nearly every mechanism the slasher treats as its own invention was already running, a decade earlier, in the Italian thrillers called gialli, named for the yellow covers of the cheap crime paperbacks they descended from. The black-gloved killer, the point-of-view stalk, the elaborately staged death, the amateur who has to solve the murders because the police cannot — Italy built all of it first, and the fingerprints are still on the modern slasher, smeared but unmistakable, if you know where to look.

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The Twelve Films That Invented the Slasher

The Giallo's Fingerprints on the Modern Slasher