Hello and welcome to The Unhinged Binge where I am currently sinking into the sandpit of reality. Today I would like to do a deep dive into the Slasher Film!
We’ll look at what a slasher is and how they came to be by analyzing Proto-Slashers, the real life impact of the rise in serial killers and other variables, how censorship imposed on films limited the sex and violence, and the subsequent shift in censorship standards coincided with the Sexual Revolution and Second Wave Feminism, as well as better practical effects. Further, I’d like to look at various tropes of the slasher film and why they exist and persist.
I should mention I have done videos on The Final Girl and Sex Equals Death Tropes so I’d recommend checking those out as I won’t go into as much detail on those here for that reason. And yet! I still feel like I have more to say about them. I’m a wordy bitch. shrug
The Teenage Slasher Movie Book by J.A. Kerswell (2018). List on Letterboxd.
Lastly, two warnings.
First, I will give notice if I’m going to spoil a movie so you can avoid by skipping ahead.
Second, if you are going to get pissed off that I call out men for harming women and go into how misogyny plays into the Slasher Films, well this is not for you, thanks for stopping by, see ya, bye-bye! Also, have you ever watched a slasher? Damn!
Ok! We got some oozing to do!
I’m going to start with a timeline…
Timeline: - citation my knowledge from school and double checking with Wiki.
Since the dawn of time - Misogyny!
Erzsabet Bathory
1830s - Beginning of mass circulation newspapers in UK and US…
1878 - The Horse in Motion.
1888 - Whitechapel murders
1890s - Yellow Journalism… thanks NY and William Randolph Hearst…
1896 - First Narrative Film (Alice Guy Blache, La Fée aux Choux)?
1906 - First Full Length (Story of the Kelly Gang from Australia)?
1907 - “Chicago enacts the first movie censorship law in America. Cities and states around the nation create local censorship boards in the following years, resulting in a variety of different rules and standards.” - NCAC.org.
1908 - Schizophrenia coined by Paul Bleuler - Britannica.
1911 - First feature length horror movie (L’Inferno from Italy)?
1914-1918 - WWI
1915 - In Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, the Supreme Court decided films are not protected under the First Amendment.
1920 - The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is released, Wiene’s German Expressionist movie with a twist end: the character is in a psych ward all along!
1922 - Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) is created
1927 - First Talkies (Jazz Singer, Warner Bros.)
1928 - First all-talkie horror movie (The Terror, Warner Bros)?
1929-1939 - Great Depression
1930 - MPPDA creates the Production Code or the Hays Code - NCAC.org.
1931 - Fritz Lang’s M is about a child serial killer
1934 - “The Catholic Legion of Decency is formed.” - NCAC.org.
“Joseph I. Breen becomes head of the new Production Code Authority, which enforces the Hays Code.” - NCAC.org.
1934- mid 1960s - Hays Code/Production Code - self censorship of US films
1939/1940 - Agatha Christie’s ‘And Then There Were None’ is released
1939-1945 - WWII
1950s - Suburbs on the rise! (increasing urbanization and ‘white flight’)
Oh hey teenagers exist and they are an untapped market to sell things to
McCarthy! And the Red and Lavender Scare…
1950s-1989 - Cold War
1952 - DSM-I published - Psychiatry.org.
In Burstyn v. Wilson, aka The Miracle decision, the Supreme Court overturns its 1915 ruling. Films now have First Amendment protection - NCAC.org. [37 years!].
1955 - Rebel Without a Cause is released, early film about teens
1957 - Ed Gein caught - he’s an inspiration for Psycho, TCM, Silence of the Lambs
I Was A Teenage Werewolf is released - early horror movie about teens.
1960-1980s - Second Wave Feminism
1960-1970s - Sexual Revolution!
1960 - Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho - grandfather of the Slasher
1964 - Civil Rights Act
1968 - MPA’s Rating System [which is now: G, PG, R, NC-17]
1969 - Tate-LaBianca murders by the Manson family
1970s - Exploitation Films (sexploitation, blaxploitation, ext)
“American cinema had certainly been skewed in the direction of downbeat male themes.” - ‘A History of Film: An Odyssey’ Mark Cousins.
Late 70s sees a rise in wide theatrical releases, rather than slower rollouts. Also a rise in multiplexes (less single screen theaters) ^ paraphrasing Mark Cousins. There are more screens and a demand for movies to show on them.
1970-1990s - Serial Killers Rise 😢
1971 - Nixon “declared drug abuse to be “public enemy number one”” - Britannica (the sin factor! And cultural belief of personal responsibility spawning from our culture of individualism which does nothing but help the wealthy.).
1972 - Wes Craven (and Sean S Cunningham)’s Last House on the Left
1973 - William Friedkin adapted Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist
Roe vs Wade legalized abortion nationwide (overturned in 2022)
US left Vietnam… (war started in 50s - drafts were a big deal)
1974 - Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre
1975 - Stephen Speilberg made Jaws (John Williams did the score). Blockbusters are born! This will change the landscape of cinema. $$!
1976 - Brian de Palma adapted Stephen King’s Carrie
1980s - Ronald Reagan is President = counter-revolution (to the more liberal 70s)
War on drugs, defund mental health, rising prison population. Nationalism. Consumerism.
Rise in Child Abductions (and their appearance in the news/ Milk Cartons)
The Stranger Danger campaign begins - promotes belief that ‘strangers’ are who we need to fear. Goes into Us vs Them mentality. When in reality it’s the man in the house (or a male friend) we actually need to fear.
1978 - John Carpenter (and Debra Hill)’s Halloween
1979 - Ridley Scott’s Alien
1980 - Ted Turner launched CNN, 24hr news channel…
Victor Miller (and Sean S Cunninghan)’s Friday the 13th
1981 - Rick Baker won an Academy Award for Best Makeup for An American Werewolf in London.
1984 - Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street
Addition to Rating System: PG-13 [Gremlins and Temple of Doom]
War on Drugs: “Just Say No” campaign
1985 - Music censorship boards and hearing lead to Parental Advisory stickers.
Late 1980s - VHS/home video increasingly prevalent
“By the end of the 1980s the target audience of much of Western commercial cinema was teenage, male and hooked on MTV.” - ‘A History of Film: An Odyssey’ Mark Cousins.
1995 - Wes Craven (and Kevin Williamson)’s Scream (genre deconstruction of Slashers with added 90’s element of meta-ness changes/revitalizes Slashers)
DEFINITION + FORMULA
The natural place to start is with a beginning. Here is how I would define a slasher.
Definition: Slashers are a subgenre of horror films depicting a typically masked (though not always) killer wielding a bladed or pointed weapon (basically anything other than a firearm) and stalking a group of high school to college aged youths to kill them.
Standard Slasher Film Formula: this comes from my horror knowledge, some of the terms I picked up over the years but you’ll definitely hear all of them via interviews in the In Search of Darkness trilogy and in Kerswell’s ‘The Teenage Slasher Movie Book, 2nd Revised and Expanded’.
Opening Kill - to set the stage, let the audiences know what they’re in for and gives the filmmakers time from the rest of the first act to relax and set the stage for the rest of the kills by introducing the location and other characters.
Original Sin - back story and gives killer motive (might have a special date like an anniversary and/or holiday). Examples: Halloween + Friday the 13th.
Harbinger of Doom - an unhinged old man who gives a warning/exposition
Cast aka Red Shirts - a finite amount of high school to college aged youths who want to party, are camping, going on vacation, babysitting, having a sleepover, ect. They are unsupervised, high, drunk, and horny… well except…
Sin Factor - sex, drugs, alcohol, showering, babysitting, walking in the woods, skinny dipping, swimming, being at home, going camping, pulling pranks, ya know… being alive when someone wants you to not be. Rude.
Final Girl - aka Main Character (protagonist) the survivor of the film.
Mad and/or Masked Killer (antagonist), often silent…
Location - horror films rely on isolation
physical+geographical isolation achieved by the specific location (think Alien, The Thing) or from traveling/camping (new environment/people).
lack of support, authority doesn’t believe (adults vs teens)
Car not starting… ok it’s more of a cliche, but it’s in the formula!
Timeframe - usually Slashers take place over a night (two days really), more specifically it’ll be a setup then one night of slaughter. This is to help with isolation, as the next day (day break) brings help.
Characters split up to get killed… (Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None (1939)). It goes back to isolation, if you stray away from the group/ community then you’re more susceptible to harm/danger. I guess mass murder doesn’t make for good horror movies…?
Final Girl vs Killer - 3rd long chase/battle scene.
Ending Chair Jumper - (that’s what Tom Savini called it) one last scare to leave the film open ended and (unintentionally) open to a sequel.
The killer don’t die… or if they do, they’re coming back. In sequels anyway.
ORIGINS
Cycles: important movies, AND, ones I will be mentioning
Proto Slashers
The Lodger (1927), M (1931), The Hitch-Hiker (1953), Night of the Hunter (1955), many more
Grandfather of the Slasher
Psycho (1960), Peeping Tom and Diabolique,
1961-1978: proto-slashers
Giallo films
Last House on the Left (1972), Morgiana (1972),
Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Black Christmas (1974),
Father of the Slasher
Halloween (1978) - Father Slasher
Friday the 13th (1980) - Cemented Tropes
Slasher Craze! [some examples I may talk about]
Final Exam (1981),
Slumber Party Massacre (1982),
Sleepaway Camp (1983),
Blood Rage (1983/1987),
Silent Night Deadly Night (1984)
Step Father (1987),
Reinventing the Slasher
Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), revived the slashers which were beginning to cannibalize themselves (think franchise fatigue but for a subgenre).
Meta-ing the Slasher
Scream (1995), Kevin Williamson: Genre Deconstruction/Parody
Slashers in the 21st Century
Christopher Landon: hat on a hat (Happy Death Day, Freaky), others follow (It’s a Wonderful Knife, Slotherhouse, Totally Killer, Final Girls)
Terrifier 2 (2022) independent and gory slashers make a comeback?
Early proto-slashers: I will circle back around to this! I promise.
Then Grandaddy Slasher, Hitchcock, made Psycho (1960), based on the book that was inspired by the real life sensational articles about Ed Gein.
Psycho tells the story of a woman, Marion Crane, on the run who stops at the Bates Motel where she meets a meek and timid hotel manager, Norman Bates. Marion winds up dead in one of the most iconic murder scenes in cinema, it even has its own documentary devoted just to it! Marion’s sister, Lila, and her boyfriend, Sam Loomis, investigate Marion’s disappearance. The audience is led to believe the killer is Norman’s Mother, but we learn that Norman’s Mother is dead. The twist ending reveals the truth in all the lurid detail a swinging nude lightbulb can provide a fruit cellar. The rotted corpse of Mrs. Bates, a shocked Lila, a screaming Norman in a dress wielding a knife as Sam holds him back. Then the ten minute exposition dump by an almost gleeful psychiatrist, Dr. Richmond, explaining that no, no, no, Norman isn’t trans, or the killer, not exactly. Norman has DID, oh and he killed his Mother. It’s the “Mother half of Norman’s mind”... eyeroll. I wrote a whole essay about how problematic this is so I’ll skip that. But, keep in mind that this IS the Grandfather of the Slasher, this film is part of the genetic outline that went into the creation of the Slasher film.
Psycho came out while the Hays’ Code was losing control but still in use. Psycho is a low budget black and white movie made in an era of color, with harsh limitations regarding what could and couldn’t be shown, and how. Despite that, Psycho was successful at the box office. It maintains a legacy in the annals of cinema, and is considered by many a masterpiece. (Based on Box Office Mojo it made apx 39x its budget, which is pretty great ROI.). Because of Psycho’s success it was replicated by filmmakers going forward to this day… looking at you De Palma, lookin at you!
After the demise of the Hays’ Code and institution of the MPA’s rating system we start getting more ‘realistic’ and graphic horror films like Wes Craven (and Sean S Cunningham)’s Last House on the Left (1972) and Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). There are others of course but these are two primary examples.
House depicts a trio of criminals who brutally attack two teen girls in unrelenting detail. Then one of the girls’ parents enact a violent revenge on the criminals.
TCM on the other hand is about a group of youths traveling to rural Texas. They keep breaking into a house and getting killed by a massive skin-mask wearing, chainsaw wielding, non-verbal, cannibal and his insane, probably inbred, definitely hungry, family.
In Italy Slasher films are gory, vibrant red-streaked, misogynist extravaganzas! However, I am simply not a fan of Italian horror. I’ve tried! Really I have. I’m just not into them. So, I’m mentioning this as it is important, but I’m not going into it in further detail. If you want to know more, find another video essay. shrugs
Moving on! 1978 brought the Father of the Slasher: John Carpenter (and Debra Hill)’s Halloween.
Michael Meyers at just six years old, murders his fifteen year old sister, Judith, Halloween Night 1963. He’s subsequently institutionalized for the next fifteen years, until October 30th 1978, he breaks free, returns home, steals a William Shatner mask, and goes on a killing spree. On his tale is his psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis who is dragging Sheriff Leigh Bracket along with him.
Good-girl Laurie Strode survives the silent stalker with her two minor charges, Tommy and Lindsey. We’re left with Carpenter’s haunting synth score playing over empty shots of Haddonfield, knowing Michael is still out there. The Boogeyman is still out there.
Just like Psycho, Halloween has some deeply problematic issues. I have an essay on the Sex Equals Death trope that goes into the purity culture aspect that this film and more to the point the Slashers that copy it propagate. It, along with Psycho, are terrible depictions of mental health… they’re ableist AF, but I’ll get into that in more detail later.
Halloween, was released as an R rated film, compared to contemporary R films it’s pretty tame. Though it is in color and we do see nipples. Hitchcock could never. Halloween is one of the most successful independent films of all time. [Halloween’s apx budget $325,000 and made over $47m at the box office which is 144x it’s budget - Box Office Mojo.] Because of Halloween’s success it was replicated. Huh, that sounds familiar.
The tropes set up in Halloween are cemented by Sean S. Cunningham and Victor Miller’s 1980 film Friday the 13th. Friday the 13th is important because, “It was the first independent slasher film to be acquired by a major motion picture studio.” - wiki. Paramount. What this means is that more people saw Friday then many other slashers as it had a wide theatrical release. (Friday made apx 26.5x its budget btw, based on the Box Office Mojo numbers). Like Halloween, Friday is a R-rated film but this time it shows the gore, the kills, the blood in all their Tom Savini splendor.
Friday is about a group of relatively young counselors getting a lakeside summer camp set up for its upcoming re-opening. They are subsequently killed off one by one by a mentally unstable Mother out for revenge for the death of her son at that same camp twenty-two years prior [1957]. Unlike Psycho and Halloween this movie ends with a simple jump scare and no psychiatric exposition. No dehumanization of Mrs. Voorhees. No explanation beyond what she herself gave.
Stick a pin in that! Or skip to the mental illness section…
Success breeds replication… Thus begins the slasher craze! 1978-1984 according to J.A. Kerswell. Unfortunately, often it’s a matter of copy and paste for a payday, without much consideration for substance.
CENSORSHIP
The history of censorship in the film industry is long. I’ll speedrun the highlights:
1907: “Chicago enacts the first movie censorship law in America. Cities and states around the nation create local censorship boards in the following years, resulting in a variety of different rules and standards.” - NCAC.org. (Link)
1915: “In Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, the Supreme Court holds that movies are not protected by the First Amendment. The ruling allows state and local boards to continue censoring films.” - NCAC.org.
1922: The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) is formed, led by Former Postmaster General William H. Hays.” - NCAC.org.
During the Great Depression there was a moral backlash which was further aimed at Hollywood because of a series of scandals in the 1920s.
1920: Olive Thomas died of an OD.
1921: the trials of Fatty Arbuckle for the manslaughter? of Virginia Rapp
1922: the murder of William Desmond Taylor
1924: the death of Thomas H. Ince on William Randalph Hearst’s yacht
1930: “MPPDA creates A Code to Maintain Social and Community Values in the Production of Silent, Synchronized and Talking Motion Pictures, also called the Production Code or the Hays Code.” - NCAC.org.
1934: “The Catholic Legion of Decency is formed.” and “Joseph I. Breen becomes head of the new Production Code Authority [PCA], which enforces the Hays Code. Under Breen, (...), the PCA is closely allied with the Legion of Decency. During this period, (...) any company that releases a film without its seal of approval is subject to a fine.” - NCAC.org.
1952: “In Burstyn v. Wilson, the Supreme Court strikes down a ban on Roberto Rosselini's film, The Miracle, which the New York Board of Regents had found "sacrilegious." For the first time, the Supreme Court holds that "motion pictures are a significant medium for the communication of ideas," [and] entitled to some First Amendment protection.” - NCAC.org. [37 years!]
1968: MPA’s Rating System [which is now: G, PG, R, NC-17]
1984: addition to rating system: PG-13
What is censorship? Basically it’s government bodies deciding that their citizens can’t be trusted to watch a movie… I’m oversimplifying, but not by much.
Film censorship is covered in the third chapter of Julian Petley’s book, ‘Censorship: A Beginner’s Guide’. Here is what I learned. People in authority positions took issue with the wide accessibility that motion pictures had. Based on the codes they’d enacted and the language they used to argue their need, they felt poor, uneducated people, who they seem to equate with criminals, would commit crimes if they saw a film depicting crime (or sins). Turns out the argument that violence in films, video games, and music lyrics causes crime really is an age old one. Huh.
As an example, I’ll take it back to the first censorship board in the U.S.
“Local censorship was first introduced in 1907 in Chicago, where there were 116 nickelodeons visited by some one hundred thousand customers per day. The Chicago Tribune condemned these cinemas for ‘ministering to the lowest passions of childhood’, and in November 1907 the Chicago City Council passed an ordinance empowering the chief of police to issue permits for the exhibition of motion pictures; a permit could be refused if he felt a film to be ‘immoral or obscene, or portrays depravity, criminality or lack of virtue of a class of citizens of any race, colour, creed or religion, or tends to produce a breach of the peace, or riots, or purports to represent any hanging, lynching or burning of a human being’.” - ‘Censorship: A Beginner’s Guide’ Julian Petley.
As a side I just want to note that these people were so against sex (even in education) and depictions of what they considered to be crimes. What I mean by this is a film couldn’t show a murder in 1940 the way Tom Savini could in 1980. However, watching films in the 30s-50s do you know what I noticed a lot of? Men hitting women. And those men aren’t even considered the bad guys! Domestic violence, yeah sure. A married couple sharing a bed, no. Sinful!
Back then these groups weren’t concerned with juvenile delinquency or ‘protecting the children’. I talk a lot more about this in my essay on Sex Equals Death. To explain quickly, childhood innocence is a social construct, much like virginity. Further, it’s one that didn’t exist until pretty recently. We couldn’t ‘think about the children’ until we had child labor laws, and vaccines (and antibiotics) that reduced child mortality rates. Then suddenly they were these important, precious idiots who need constant protection from bad words and gay people… I guess.
Film censorship was about making the Catholic League of Decency happy. Specifically during the Production Code era of 1934-mid 1960s. Before that a lot of the basis of censorship, even in the courts, was on the grounds that a film was considered ‘sacrilegious’. Separation of Church and state you say, AH! Since when? The religious majority is running things, don’t fool yourself into thinking otherwise. That was true in the twentieth century and it’s true now.
Here is the synopsis for the book ‘Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry’ by Frank Walsh [1996].
“During World War I, the Catholic Church blocked the distribution of government-sponsored VD-prevention films, initiating an era of attempts by the church to censor the movie industry. This book is an entertaining and engrossing account of those efforts--how they evolved, what effect they had on the movie industry, and why they were eventually abandoned. Frank Walsh tells how the church's influence in Hollywood grew through the 1920s and reached its peak during the 1930s, when the film industry allowed Catholics to dictate the Production Code, which became the industry's self-censorship system, and the Legion of Decency was established by the church to blacklist any films it considered offensive. With the industry's Joe Breen, a Catholic layman, cutting movie scenes during production and the Legion of Decency threatening to ban movies after release, the Catholic church played a major role in determining what Americans saw and didn't see on the screen during Hollywood's Golden Age.”
Wild.
Let’s look at the Do’s, Don’ts, Be Carefuls, and the “statement of general principles”: [Copied from ‘Censorship: A Beginner’s Guide’ by Julian Petley.]
Pointed profanity – by either title or lip – this includes the word ‘God’, ‘Lord’, ‘Jesus’, ‘Christ’ (unless used reverently in connection with proper religious ceremonies), ‘hell’, ‘damn’, ‘Gawd’, and every other profane and vulgar expression, however it may be spelled.
Any licentious or suggestive nudity – in fact or in silhouette; and any lecherous or licentious notice thereof by other characters in the picture.
The illegal traffic in drugs.
Any inference of sex perversion.
White slavery.
Miscegenation (sex relationships between black and white races).
Sex hygiene and venereal disease.
Scenes of actual childbirth – in fact or in silhouette.
Children’s sex organs.
Ridicule of the clergy.
Wilful offence to any nation, race or creed.
No picture shall be produced which will lower the standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.
Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.
Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.
Censorship to me is Conservative. How it’s done in the US is conservative anyway because censorship is spawned from the ‘Moral Majority’ - it’s Puritanical Fascist leaning old men who think with their unearned feelings of superiority, and their idea of right and wrong are absolutely the only way to view things.
News flash “don't you blame the movies. Movies don't create psychos. Movies make psychos more creative!” - Billy Loomis, Scream, 1996.
For whatever reason these people are so ready to blame video games, music, movies… art. But, they never blame the adolescent white boy with the firearm who killed people. No, it’s not his fault. It’s the art he was listening to, watching, playing. They hold him to no accountability. No blame. We can’t blame men for their bad behavior. God forbid.
Sigh. Anyway.
For decades the film censorship board, PCA, literally answered to the Catholic League of Decency. They censored films for everyone. Their concern was not children. It was their interpretation of moral decency. And they decided for everyone what was acceptable to view or not.
Taste and beliefs evolve. Even censors.
The 1960’s saw a rise in change. 1961 saw John F. Kennedy elected President, the Civil Rights Movement, Second Wave Feminism, the Sexual Revolution, and more. The code of old was just that. Old. The Production code was outdated.
In 1968 the Hays Code was officially replaced with a rating system that gave the audience an idea what to expect. The ratings today are:
G, general admittance,
PG parental guidance suggested,
R, restricted to 17 and older unless accompanied by an adult, and
NC-17 further restricted - no one under 18 is admitted at all.
PG-13 was added in 1984 because of Speilberg.
The only restricted ratings are R and NC-17. Meaning a twelve year old can go, unaccompanied, to a PG-13 movie, it’s just letting audiences know that it’s probably too mature for young children.
The ratings board is kind of secretive. “Ratings are determined by the Classification and Ratings Administration (CARA), via a board comprised of an independent group of parents.” According to MPA’s website. These parents “give() advance cautionary warnings to families about a movie’s content. CARA’s mission is to afford parents the tools they need to make informed decisions about what their children watch.” Filmratings.com.
Movies are rated on a case by case basis and arguments can be made to lower their rating. It’s a whole complicated thing. According to the MPA’s site they specifically look at the following: “language, violence, nudity, sex and drug use.”
Notice now they really try to push how this whole system is about protecting children. Sure Jan. Sure.
As I said times change. What might get a movie an R rating in 1975 might get it PG-13 today, or vice versa (well PG, they didn’t have PG-13 in 1975, see Jaws for reference). As an example: in the 70s no one thought twice about letting kids see characters smoking. Today the same thing gets a R rating. Why? Because times change. Big Tobacco had to admit smoking causes Cancer. So, can’t show kids smoking is kool anymore, sorry Joe Camel.
As this rant pertains to Slashers! Well Slashers are everything these boring chastity belt wearing grumps hate. Alcohol. Drugs. Sex. Nudity. Violence. Shudder!
Funny that the ones having sex and doing drugs are the ones who get killed… yay subconscious Conservative propaganda! Woohoo.
The Production Code [1934-mid 60s] is the reason we have proto-slashers. Slashers simply could not exist in the US until the downfall of the Hays’ Code.
Then it was a matter of evolution; for the subgenre to find its footing. From Last House on the Left, I Spit on Your Grave, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, ect, to Halloween. It took a decade. Almost exactly.
We started off maybe a bit too gritty and brutal. Which makes sense. The gates of censorship were open and filmmakers could now do anything they (and their practical effects team) could dream of. It makes sense they swung too far the other way. It took that ten years to find the balance.
Once Halloween came out it took two years for Friday the 13th to copy it and get a wide theatrical release to cement the tropes it set up. Thus the censors were about to be inundated with their nightmares. Don’t worry, they’ll protect all those children… eyeroll
LEARNED BIAS
There are learned biases. Of course there are. We don’t come into this world ready to hate insert demographic people. We learn that. We learn it through our family, peers, education, media (news and art), and a million little interactions.
Just like we learn how to gender. Gender socialization is real.
Both these things have aspects that are innocuous and aspects that are extremely harmful. Purity culture and racism as examples of how it can be harmful.
Pertaining to this conversation about Slashers: my reasons for bringing it up are two fold.
First, some fears are culturally learned.
Second, a lot of aspects of the Slasher are influenced by the writer/director’s biases in negative ways. Once again see purity culture and the negative perception of mental illness, ect. Also casting practices, which I’ll discuss later.
In the US we are taught to view houseless people as alcoholic lazy people who have ruined their own lives. But, factually, the data does not reflect that.
In the US we are taught to see addiction and drug use as much the same. Individual responsibility. Bad kids (and adults) making bad choices. But, Merton’s Strain theory says otherwise. As does the Mayo Clinic.
In the US we are taught to see premarital sex (and being gay) as the worst of sins, if my abstinence only education in the twenty-first century is anything to go by.
So what’s my point?
My point is, for as much as Carpenter wants to say Halloween isn’t Conservative. It is. And I’m completely sure, it was done totally subconsciously. Because Carpenter and Hill, for as liberal as their movies clearly are, still were inundated with these beliefs. You have to realize you’re being lied to, before you can confront the lie. Carpenter hadn’t put his sunglasses on yet, he was still asleep. [They Live reference].
These messages and more, infiltrated the sleeping minds of writers and directors for generations. In fact, these ideas are still around.
WHAT IS SCARY
Horror taps into fears: with Slashers it can go one of two basic ways.
Fear of the unknown. You go to the killer. Travel and get caught by hillbillies/ southerners/ big outdoorsy probably inbred and definitely mutated men.
Fear from subverting a safe space. The killer comes to you. scary man breaks into the house in the suburbs.
It’s more difficult to do a Slasher in the suburbs because Slashers (like all horror) rely on isolation - not being able to get away (drive) or get help (police).
Note in 80s horror movies how often a car won’t start. Now I know why I’ve never seen a car from the 80s before, they never worked!
What is scarier than the place you feel safest becoming the most dangerous place?
Sheriff Brackett in Halloween (1978): “More fancy talk. Doctor, do you know what Haddonfield is? Families, children, all lined up in rows up and down these streets. You're telling me they're lined up for a slaughterhouse.”
Sidenote: That’s why most Slashers have the killing spree take place over a single night, so the killer doesn’t have time to get caught. Gotta hurry up and kill those kids before your manic psychiatrist and his angry Sheriff sidekick show up.
There are different experiences that can be tapped into. Not everyone goes on road trips. Not everyone goes camping. But, we all have a home, though not all of us live in a house or the suburbs. We’ve all walked down a street. A movie about people getting stalked and killed in the woods will probably be more scary to someone who goes camping or lives in a rural area. Conversely, a movie about cannibal hillbillies in Texas is likely more scary to people who live in a metropolitan city, because the people who actually live in Texas aren’t afraid of their own inaccurate depiction.
Basically, what’s scary for one person might not be scary for another. So, Slashers can have a thousand kinds of set up and pay offs that work differently for different audiences. It might seem narrow but there really is a lot of variety in the Slasher subgenre.
I will go into more detail about the scary rural killer stereotype later.
As it pertains to Slashers, there are also differences in violence and fear based on gender. Hear me out. It stands to reason that, especially in the past, because men and women had different experiences and expectations different fears and traumas would arise.
Men fear ‘man v science’, internal evils, war. Because, men were going off to war, they were the ones allowed to be educated and work, they worked in mines and factories, ect, they saw how greed could lead to terrible inventions or unethical decisions that killed. Also men are more violent.
Women fear men (possibly children and pregnancy, family, and the home)… Women for centuries were confined to the home, to housework, to being a wife and a mother…. Ew.
One of the many reasons that the protagonist of the Slasher is a Final Girl.
Realistically, anyone can be the victim of homicide and in real life men are murdered more than women. Even if you exclusively look at serial killers, women and men are killed almost equally with women unfortunately getting killed at just slightly higher rates (but not by much). But keep in mind, the people doing that murder are very overwhelmingly, men.
These ideas are culturally ingrained in us from a young age. Sometimes, it was not subtle at all. Stranger Danger anyone? The images of abducted (white) girls compared to boys. Back in the 50’s boys would have grown up with The Draft hanging over their heads, while girls would have been inundated with purity culture. Different fears would develop from that, hell an entirely different perception of the world would develop from that.
*please note: overwhelmingly movies are written, and definitely directed, by men. So their stories, voices, world views, perceptions, ect: are the ones that dominate film and the language of cinema. Cinema is the male agenda! Fuckin’ Patriarchy.
“In 1983, Joanne Russ explored the suppression of women’s writing in society, culture, and academia. She argues that “a mode of understanding life which willfully ignores [half the human consciousness] can do so only at the peril of thoroughly distorting the rest. A mode of understanding literature which can ignore the private lives of half the human race is not ‘incomplete’; it is distorted through and through.”” - excerpt from ‘Women Make Horror’ by Alison Peirce.
Even when the film is focused on a female story, often it’s created by men and so (to me) generally lacks authenticity. Carrie, Barbarian, Strangers ch1, The Craft, ect.
How does all this affect the Slasher? Well men are biased to see women as the weaker sex. As if! We are beaten over the head in the US with that narrative. With the image of passivity, weakness, (white), of what a victim should look like. The men making horror movies just fed into that, generally without interrogating it. Some for better and some for worse. They maintain status quo.
Which is odd because horror as a genre is the best medium to question the status quo and confront our cultural norms, particularly the unjust ones.
Slasher films propelled this narrative of sexually active teen girls getting killed by a mentally unstable (often rural) man… and oh boy do I got a lot to say about that. Again, I’m a wordy witch.
But we could do better on the victim shaming front, America. Just saying.
SERIAL KILLERS
Ultimately, Slasher films are movies about serial killers. Often they take inspiration from real life events but not always. I don’t want to get too into real serial killers but I do think it’s worth discussing them a bit.
As a side I personally don’t like films based on real life killers using their names and depicting on film the murders of real human beings. That to me is a disgusting form of exploitation. Inspiration is fine, but exploitation (to me) is in bad taste. Further, I don’t think it’s morally right to glorify serial killers.
I did read up on serial killers and got really sidetracked down that rabbit hole. I want to keep this to pertinent information to help explain Slashers.
Murder has existed since man has. It exists in most mythologies - notably because a lot of oral storytelling functioned as a way to communicate rules and social conduct to the next generation. It also acted as a way to ensure good behavior. Christianity is an easy example: murder is against one of the ten commandments, which are taught to people and helps ensure people won’t commit this sin otherwise they will go to Hell. Religions acted as a lesson and a threat basically.
Horror movies are, in their most basic form, a cautionary tale. For ref see: Video.
The history of serial killers is harder to track. I tried. I just went and looked on Wikipedia [List of Serial Killers Before 1900s, Wiki] to get an idea. So here is my take away: It’s just an opinion to be clear, an opinion based on observation.
Our relationship to death and even murder and more to the point murderers have changed over time. There’s less government sanctioned torture and murders, wars, assassinations, uprisings, diseases, famine, religious nonsense (Inqiusition), colonialism, ect. Also we view more people as… well, people (not property).
Further, there is a better understanding of science and mental health. I bring this up because it seems like a lot of serial killers in ye olden times were mythologized by labelling them as supernatural beings. Ex: werewolf of… witch… vampire… ect.
Today serial killers are still mythologized from [here is the part I will name some real people] Jack the Ripper to Son of Sam to the Night Stalker, ect. Giving serial killers these nicknames seems to have existed for centuries and looks like it’s typically done by reporters. I do feel like this is a glorification of the person and their crimes… and it’s done to sell papers. The news is not just a warning, these stories get ratings and sell papers (or in modern times clicks). People have an appetite for cruelty. Whether it helps keep people safe, like naming a Hurricane for example, I don’t know.
Reporting plays a very integral role in the immortalization of some crimes, and more specifically some serial killers. Jack the Ripper! I’m sure most of you have heard of him and have seen a movie, doc, podcast, or something about him and his crimes. He killed at least five women (yeah we don’t need to call them prostitutes, if they even were because evidence suggests only one was, but whatever, misogyny) in 1888 in London.
“If it was not for the sensationalist journalism, which would come to be a hallmark of the reporting of the Whitechapel murders, the murders would not have had the resonance they had and continue to have. In the 1880s there was comparatively little to report so moral panics were bound to have been capitalised on. (... with the 1885 article …) 'The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon', (...) the blueprint for using scandal and moral outrage to sell papers was born (Walkowitz, 1982: 545).”
- Gregg Jones (2013), 'Murder, Media and Mythology: The Impact the Media's Reporting of the Whitechapel Murders had on National Identity, Social Reform and the Myth of Jack the Ripper,'. Link.
This trend of sensationalizing serial killers continued until, eh, at least the 1990s.
The term ‘serial killer’ coined in 1974 (ish) by an FBI agent, maybe, there are arguments but the mid-70s is when the term became popular. - Britannica.
In the 1970’s there was a rise in serial killers. - Vox article by Zachary Crockett (research from Dr. Mike Aamodt) ‘What data on 3,000 murderers and 10,000 victims tells us about serial killers’.
This is likely due to a rise caused by there being easier targets from increased urbanization, counter culture, drugs, more homelessness, hitch hiking, and more trust… it was a more trusting time. Because of all the serial killers of the past, people became more fearful and new businesses rose like home security systems and pepper spray. So, the past killers made it more difficult for there to be future killers. - Rolling Stone article by Brenna Ehrlich, ‘Why were there so many serial killers between 1970 and 2000 — and where did they go?’.
Further, around the turn of the Millennium we have better technology and harsher prison sentences, so that curved the presence of serial killers. They’re caught earlier now and don’t get out of prison as often. - Northeastern Global News article by Cody Mello-Klein, ‘Why are there fewer serial killers now than there used to be?’.
So! To bring this back to movies!
The dawn of film-making happened around the same time as Jack the Ripper, one of the first (in)famous serial killers… which sounds so horrible to say.
But in early movies (pst this is the Proto-Slasher part!) as in literature around that time, it seems to me, murder in film was typically portrayed in murder mystery type stories, like noir films. I found four basic trends:
Gothic sensibility - people staying at a big old house disappearing (dying) one by one. Examples: Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, Cat and the Canary, Spiral Staircase, Night of Terror
Procedural - people investigating killings, like Sherlock in The Scarlet Claw or Fritz Lang’s M.
Art! Like self-referential about the exploitation or voyeurism of cinema/art- A Bucket of Blood and Peeping Tom… Most Hitchcock films.
Real Life - films that are based on real murder, typically focusing on the killer: The Lodger (1927 and 1944), The Hitch-Hiker, Night of the Hunter, The Town That Dreaded Sundown and Psycho.
Most proto-slashers, I would say, don’t really resemble what the Slasher film would become in the 80s.
It’s not until the Hays’ Code is phased out and replaced by the MPA’s rating system in 1968 that we start getting Slasher films that are really gorey, because simply put, they couldn’t have gore before then. Even now filmmakers will make blood black or green or some color other than red to get a lower rating. Wild.
Or to quote Heidi Honeycutt’s ‘I Spit on Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies’, “As we know them today, horror films did not exist until the second half of the twentieth century. The things we associate with horror, like slasher films, ‘Final Girls’, gore, excessive blood, nudity and sex, (..), and practical makeup effects, were not the norm for cinema (...). It wasn’t until the 1920s that feature-length ‘horror’ films became recognizable, and not until the 1930s that classic icons like Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster became known to audiences in a meaningful way. It wasn’t until the 1960s that films like Psycho (1960), Blood Feast (1963), and Night of the Living Dead (1968) ushered in an entirely new type of horror cinema unfettered by the chains of the studio code, theatrical monopolies, and traditional, conservative Victorian sensibilities.”
Welp… we gotta talk about serial killers again for a second. More specifically methodology!
So based on this article, ‘What data on 3,000 murderers and 10,000 victims tells us about serial killers’, from Vox (research from Dr. Mike Aamodt by Crockett) a lot of serial killers are financially motivated in real life, and the number one weapon used is actually firearms, a lot of serial killers are part of gang activity. Obviously these types of serial killers are not really taken as inspiration when making Slashers.
The types of murderers that inspire Slashers are those, who in real life, kill for (sexual?) gratification usually with a bladed weapon or by strangulation. In this case the killer is usually (though not always) a cis-het white man killing women.
According to an article on the University of Michigan website, ‘Serial Killer Statistics’ by Taylor Stacy: approximately 92% of serial killers are men. “theory regarding why there are more male serial killers rests on the recurring finding in clinical psychology that men are more likely to have paraphilias (atypical “turn-ons”) than women.”
According to the Vox article by Crockett, “Serial killers also prefer younger victims: About 18 percent of all victims fall under the age of 18, while just over 10 percent are over the age of 60. After peaking at age 29, the chances of being murdered by a serial killer dramatically decrease in one’s 30s, 40s, and 50s.”
Specifically the chart shows that age 10-19 makes up 18.1% of victims, age 20-29 comprises 27% of victims (the highest) and age 30-39 makes up 17.7% of victims.
As it pertains to the high school to college aged victims in movies that does seem accurate to real life, as does the targeting of female victims, especially if the killer is sexually motivated. “[Financial gain] is still the largest single motive for all serial killing, but close behind is killing for sexual pleasure, which comes in at 27.3%.” Taylor Stacy ‘Serial Killer Statistics’ University of Michigan. website.
I rewrote this whole section a couple times. Based on those aforementioned articles, the Wiki research, and being a chick of a certain age who listens to podcasts, I’ve come to the conclusion that the image that is portrayed in media of what a serial killer is… isn’t exactly reflective of real life. In movies, most Slasher killers are a knife (or pointy weapon) wielding mad-man killing both teen boys and girls. The image of the depraved hyper-charming man who kills young women isn’t most serial killers. Those who do are outliers. But, they are the ones who become notorious. Them and the ones that kill young boys.
“Americans seem to have a strange fascination with serial killers. For decades, we as a nation have been enthralled by the idea of someone who kills for pleasure. In 1979, the trial of Ted Bundy was among the first to be televised nationally and was watched by millions of Americans. In the twenty-first century, documentaries chronicling the murders of America’s most prolific killers are some of the most watched shows on streaming services.” - Taylor Stacy ‘Serial Killer Statistics’ University of Michigan. website.
I don’t really know what my point is. The people who need to fear the most are the houseless and sex-workers because they are overwhelmingly in this day in age, the targets of serial killers. That or families, kind of hard to plan for poison or a family annihilator, though. What I’m saying is most killers are not a Bundy or a Dahmer.
To segue a little. It seems like most killers who targeted both men and women typically used firearms. Something I noticed being of interest to this conversation is that the men attacked had a higher likelihood of surviving than the women who were attacked, and by attacked I mean shot. This is relevant because while we remember the Final Girl, less talked about is that if there is a secondary survivor it’s overwhelmingly a guy. It’s very rare for two girls to make it to the end, SPM being an example as an outlier, even less likely is a cast of survivors like Scream.
I found an example of a killer who used firearms and other weapons (of convenience) and would break into houses. warning for some specifics about Richard Ramirez. If there was a man home he would kill the man then attack the woman, (often SA*) sometimes he would kill the female victim other times he let them live. If a child was in the house he did not attack them.
This is relevant as it demonstrates what most Slasher films do. They have their masked-mad-man kill the guy (often post sex) then linger on the semi-nude woman as she’s attacked in a far more prolonged scene, focused on her fear and attempt to survive.
I go into a lot more detail and bring in quantifiable data in my essay on the Sex Equals Death Trope, if you’re interested. I’ll just quote myself:
“I am concluding that males are more often victims in slasher films but women are shown in fear longer and are more likely to experience violence in a state of undress, which often makes their death scenes longer and more memorable. This, intentionally or not, relates sex to violence. Which, simply put, is an unhealthy connection.”
Otherwise, take my word for it. Misogyny!
What most of these films don’t depict is a sexually motivated killer. Usually it’s the opposite. It’s a sexually repulsed killer. That’s not always the case. But, something to consider.
To be honest I don’t know if I have a point in all this observation.
There are bad people out there. Both men and women. But mostly men. Sometimes the people close to you can hurt you in the worst way possible. Sometimes a stranger can be dangerous. Most targets are ‘easy targets’, houseless people, the mentally ill, sex workers… but that doesn’t mean a middle class woman walking home from work can’t be murdered. I guess my point is, you never know, things happen. There are definitely patterns that the FBI, criminologists, psychologists, social scientists of all kinds try to figure out. But, we really don’t understand how these people can do such evil. Not be so evil. Do such evil. -.- Loomis.
Maybe it’s a good thing we don’t understand.
But, in a movie characters are typically given some kind of motive. The men writing and directing them, give them one. Regardless if that reflects real life. And those cinematic portrayals begin to be what people subconsciously accept as truth.
again, that’s just my opinion.
SLASHER KILLERS
The trend of Killers in Slashers:
So having watched too many slashers, I noticed some trends! Some similarities.
Killers in slashers are often motivated by: (see Quadrant… ten-drant)
Mental illness: Psycho, Silent Rage,
Compulsion: M, Angst,
Being trans/raised as the gender they weren’t assigned: Dressed to Kill,
Being deformed/poor: Hell Night, Hills Have Eyes,
Pure evil: Halloween,
Fun: Chucky, Behind the Mask,
Revenge: Friday the 13th [a prank gone wrong (Original Sin) Terror Train],
Oedipal (sexual dysfunction)…: Psycho, Blood Rage,
A dude who just wants to kill women because he’s a disgusting violent misogynist: Pieces, Maniac, Slumber Party Massacre, most Giallo films,
Realistic?: The Hitch Hiker, Night of the Hunter, Slumber Party Massacre
Let’s get into these further… gulp!
Mental Illness in Slashers aka ableism: warning I am not a mental health professional
In The Cabinet of Dr. Cagliari from 1920 the story is told by an unreliable narrator who in a twist end, turns out to be a patient in a psychiatric hospital.
The trope of mentally unstable killer is prominent in so many Slashers, including two of the most replicated: Psycho and Halloween.
I am going to talk about Psycho and Halloween then get into a deeper(ish) analysis of this trend.
In Psycho: we have a deeply misogynist take on mental illness from the ‘50s.
Norman tells Marion: “She needs me. It's not as if she were a maniac, a raving thing. She just goes a little mad sometimes. We all go a little mad sometimes.”
Dr. Richmond expo dumps “A man who dresses in women's clothing in order to achieve a sexual change, or satisfaction, is a transvestite. But in Norman's case, he was simply doing everything possible to keep alive the illusion of his mother being alive. And when reality came too close, when danger or desire threatened that illusion, he dressed up, even in a cheap wig he bought. He'd walk about the house, sit in her chair, speak in her voice. He tried to be his mother! And, uh, now he is. Now, that's what I meant when I said I got the story from the mother. You see, when the mind houses two personalities, there's always a conflict, a battle. In Norman's case, the battle is over... and the dominant personality has won. (...)
Now to understand it the way I understood it, hearing it from the mother... that is, from the mother half of Norman's mind... you have to go back ten years, to the time when Norman murdered his mother and her lover. Now he was already dangerously disturbed, had been ever since his father died. His mother was a clinging, demanding woman, and for years the two of them lived as if there was no one else in the world. Then she met a man... and it seemed to Norman that she 'threw him over' for this man. Now that pushed him over the line and he killed 'em both. Matricide is probably the most unbearable crime of all... most unbearable to the son who commits it. So he had to erase the crime, at least in his own mind. He stole her corpse. A weighted coffin was buried. He hid the body in the fruit cellar. Even treated it to keep it as well as it would keep. And that still wasn't enough. She was there! But she was a corpse. So he began to think and speak for her, give her half his life, so to speak. At times he could be both personalities, carry on conversations. At other times, the mother half took over completely. Now he was never all Norman, but he was often only mother. And because he was so pathologically jealous of her, he assumed that she was jealous of him. Therefore, if he felt a strong attraction to any other woman, the mother side of him would go wild. When he met your sister, he was touched by her... aroused by her. He wanted her. That set off the jealous mother and mother killed the girl! Now after the murder, Norman returned as if from a deep sleep. And like a dutiful son, covered up all traces of the crime he was convinced his mother had committed!”
I go into a lot more detail about this ending in my other essay about Trans Rep in Horror. To quickly sum up that essay: combining the reveal that Norman is wearing a dress, is mentally unstable, and a killer merges those three things and creates an association between them for the audience which unfortunately was replicated by filmmakers for decades further linking mental illness, gender non-conformity/ trans-ness and homicide together. It’s very incorrect and harmful.
Additionally, once it’s revealed Norman is the killer, he doesn’t talk anymore. He’s diagnosed. We don’t hear from him though. We’re told by an oddly scene-chewing Psychiatrist what Norman told him. He loses autonomy. This is common. There are quite a lot of horror films where once the killer is revealed they suddenly don’t speak any longer, regardless of how stable and/or erudite they were before the reveal, this especially prevalent in the 80s.
Lastly on Psycho, it goes heavily into Momism. I won’t go too much into that as I have elsewhere. Essay. This idea that Norman’s mom was a demanding, overbearing woman and his father wasn’t in the picture is probably something you’ve heard about real life serial killers. It’s total bullsh*t that plays into a misogynist stigma that dates back at least to the 1950’s masculinity crisis. Mom loves her son too much? He’ll turn out to be a queer weak-sissy. Mom doesn’t love her son enough? He’ll turn out to be a serial killer. Do men not have any control of their own behavior? Are women responsible for all actions? Damn. Men who kill women are misogynist pigs who hate their mothers for existing. Let’s move on.
Segue! Halloween isn’t doing much better in 1978 than Psycho did in 1960…
Dr. Loomis expositions to Sheriff Brackett when he’s told he’ll need more than “fancy talk” to convince Brackett to stay out all night hunting for Myers: “I watched him for fifteen years, sitting in a room, staring at a wall, not seeing the wall, looking past the wall; looking at this night, inhumanly patient, waiting for some secret, silent alarm to trigger him off. Death has come to your little town, Sheriff. Now, you can either ignore it, or you can help me to stop it.”
Loomis continues the fancy talk: “I met him fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing left, no reason, no conscience, no understanding in even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong. I met this six-year-old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face, and the blackest eyes, the Devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply, evil.”
At the end of the film Laurie Strode asks “Was it the Boogeyman?” to which Dr. Loomis, the psychiatrist, replies, “as a matter of fact it was.”
More examples of Loomis’ dehumanizing language:
Marion: Don't you think it would be better if you referred to "it" as "him"?
Loomis: If you say so.
Marion: Your compassion's overwhelming, Doctor.
Brackett: A man wouldn't do that. Loomis: This isn't a man.
“He's gone! He's gone from here! The evil is gone!”
long pause. Alright. This franchise is complicated. I’m not going to try and explain it. I do have three videos on Halloween that amount to nearly three hours. So I’m not here not to get too bogged down in details. Let’s be straight. In the 1978 film, Michael Myers is a man. Full stop. He is just a human man. Boy did they go back and forth on that later but he definitely started out as a man, retcons ignored.
His Psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis, using this dehumanizing language regarding him is unprofessional and just outright vile. It’s wildly ableist.
Michael Myers is depicted, inarguably, as mentally ill - he escapes from a psychiatric hospital for crying out loud. Then the audience is told by his doctor! That he is pure evil. Like in Psycho how gender nonconformity, mental illness and homicidal violence are associated, in Halloween mental illness, homicidal violence and evil are intrinsically linked. Further, like Norman, Michael doesn’t talk. He lacks that autonomy to explain his actions, they are explained by a psychiatrist who diagnoses Michael as… incurable evil. Death. The Boogeyman.
Historically there has been a lack of mental health awareness… more importantly there was a severe lack of empathy. It’s one thing that it took centuries to understand the human mind, which we still don’t fully. It’s entirely another to dehumanize people and stigmatize what’s not understood, simply because it’s not understood. What often happens when we don’t understand? We demonize.
It’s natural to want to understand evil actions, but films created a further stigma for people who are mentally ill, and ya know, innocent! Specifically, not killers.
Some serial killers may have something that meets the DSM’s diagnostic criteria but overwhelmingly they lack the legal definition of ‘insanity’ (diminished capacity? I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer) because they’re usually organized killers - one of many reasons they weren’t caught quickly in the past.
What I want to emphasize here is that mental illness very rarely leads someone to kill, let alone be able to get away with that crime long enough to be a serial killer. These people, serial killers, are depraved, but it’s not due to a psychotic break or something they can’t control. They know what they are doing. They plan. They follow through. And they cover up their crimes so that they can continue to take lives and hurt people because they actively want to. They are aware. That’s disgusting. That’s not mental illness.
To give film-makers the benefit of the doubt here. This plays into learned biases that I spoke about earlier. I don’t know when mental illness became stigmatized but it has been for an incredibly long time, we all watched Queen Charlotte a Brigerton Story, we know. Just Googling it, the AI Overview said “Mental health has been stigmatized for thousands of years across many cultures and societies.” (do I need to quote that?). Again, that’s in large part due to a lack of understanding… and also religion. Oh my god religion. Once again you suck.
In M (1931) the reason Fritz Lang gives for the killer being so depraved is purely and simply, he has an uncontrollable compulsion. The film’s climax is good old fashion mob-justice. The town catches the killer and puts him on trial. The killer argues for his life:
“What do you know about it? Who are you anyway? Who are you? Criminals? Are you proud of yourselves? Proud of breaking safes or cheating at cards? Things you could just as well keep your fingers off. You wouldn't need to do all that if you'd learn a proper trade or if you'd work. If you weren't a bunch of lazy bastards. But I... I can't help myself! I have no control over this, this evil thing inside of me, the fire, the voices, the torment! [...] It's there all the time, driving me out to wander the streets, following me, silently, but I can feel it there. It's me, pursuing myself! I want to escape, to escape from myself! But it's impossible. I can't escape, I have to obey it. I have to run, run... endless streets. I want to escape, to get away! And I'm pursued by ghosts. Ghosts of mothers and of those children... they never leave me. They are always there... always, always, always!, except when I do it, when I... Then I can't remember anything. And afterwards I see those posters and read what I've done, and read, and read... did I do that? But I can't remember anything about it! But who will believe me? Who knows what it's like to be me? How I'm forced to act... how I must, must... don't want to, must! Don't want to, but must! And then a voice screams! I can't bear to hear it! I can't go on! I can't... I can't...” - M (1931)
If you’re making a movie about a man who is killing people, it’s likely easy to think, ‘oh he must be a madman’. [see Madman, Maniac, Psycho, Schizoid]. The truth was something that in the 70s, 80s, and even into the twenty-first century we weren’t ready to face. They wanted easy outs. Chalk it up to a mentally unstable stranger killing poor teen-early twenties sexually active youths. Stranger Danger! When in reality the person those young women should fear the most is the person they’re in a relationship with, living with, friends with… trust. Statistically you’re much more likely to be killed by someone you know.
People who are mentally ill are unlikely to kill or be violent. They are statistically more likely to be the victim of a crime. And to be the victims of police brutality. So, there is that.
A noteworthy film is Blood Rage (shot in ‘83, released in ‘87). One of the more realistic slashers… I assume unintentionally. There are identical twins. One is institutionalized for the crimes of the other. On Thanksgiving he breaks out and goes home much like Michael Myers. That same day his brother goes on another killing spree. Why is this realistic? Because the mentally unwell guy in the movie is NOT the killer, he’s the targeted victim. That’s the reality.
Something I realized in my twenties is that men will often forgive and overlook other men’s bad behavior. So, all these men writing and directing horror movies aren’t going to point out that it’s their own demographic that is the problem.
So let’s look at the other ways that men wrote Slasher killers…
Another common motive for a slasher killer is Revenge.
Revenge: Myth of Perfect Victim / Cycle of Violence / Hurt People Hurt People - perpetuating the myth that victims are either scared little white girls shaking in fear or snap and go on an insane journey of rage filled vengeance. Which is… not true.
It also mitigates the guilt of the party that committed the original sin.
Example: Urban Legend. Redhead pulled a prank that led to the death of a man and ruined that man’s friends, family, and fiance’s lives. Years later people start getting killed around the redhead. Turns out, fiance is out for revenge. Well now fiance has arguably done worse acts than redhead, so she’s no longer the victim, redhead is. Redhead has effectively, in the role reversal (transitioning from bad guy to victim), been forgiven their bad deed and the fiance (also a victim) is now able to be demonized.
Having lived for three decades I can say one thing for sure, people have a real hard time holding two things to be true at once. Someone can simultaneously be a victim and a victimizer. Even if that person is a woman. gasp! That doesn’t make their actions ok, nor does it mean they deserved to be hurt in the first place.
I’m going to say something that will really blow some minds. A lot of women who are abused, yell at their abuser, throw things at them, hit back. And, that doesn’t mean they deserve to be abused, were in any way shape or form ‘asking for it’, or were at all abusing that man back.
Most abuse victims actually aren’t timid little hundred pound white women shaking in a corner totally subservient. But, that’s often how they look in movies isn’t it? And that depiction creates real world harm for real life victims who don’t look like that. OH that doesn’t even get into how race plays a role.
We’re here to talk about Slashers though. It can be nice to watch someone get revenge on a cast who deserves to get got - by the logic of the film. For me, that’s often way more fun than watching innocent babysitters or campers getting knocked off because Mr. Killer never got laid and that gives him homicidal rage.
Just remember that most people who are victims of crimes, violence, or abuse do not go on to hurt others. Although, watching it in movies can be cathartic hmm.
#AngelaWasRight! Also, don’t prank people!
Oedipal Complex… also sexual dysfunction that seems to often play into Momism… it’s your standard ‘it’s the Mom’s fault that a grown man is actively choosing to murder people.’ I already went into this. I do kind of think there is some truth to this, though not the way movies write it. It’s less boy had a overbearing mom (see Norman Bates), more man has a sexual paraphilia so he decided to harm boys or girls. Anyway, we’ll move on.
Female Killers: I’ll just quickly note that female killers are over-represented in Slasher films. Also women poison, we don’t slash. See Morginan (1972). There is a way to have a female killer that is empowering. Like ‘be female, do crime’. It’s rarely ever done that way though. They’re usually portrayed as ultra jealous, mentally unstable, vapid, harpies.
We need more Mary Lou Maloney’s and Angela Baker’s.
Realistic?:
Enter: Slumber Party Massacre in 1983. A rare Slasher directed by a woman, though it was produced by Roger Corman. The Slumber Party Massacre franchise is one of the only franchises (I think there are four total, plus Sorority House Massacre) that are directed by women and only women. [Fear Street, Bridget Jones, The Matrix].
Russ Thorn is a man escaped from an institution or prison who hunts teen girls then kills who he needs to, to get to them. There is a sexual perversion to him.
“You're pretty. All of you are very pretty. I love you. It takes a lot of love for a person to do this. You know you want it. You'll like it. Yes.” - Russ Thorn, SPM.
He’s a gross man who speaks. No excuses. No reasons. He’s just a depraved killer.
A proto-slasher steeped in realism is Night of the Hunter (1955). A Preacher, who also happens to be a serial killer, gets in with a widow to try and gain money. He kills her and goes after her children to get the money. I’m oversimplifying a great film to avoid spoilers. It’s the man at home killing his ‘family’ for financial gain. Nothing more real than that.
There is a direct line from Night of the Hunter to The Step-Father in 1987.
The Mad Masked Mute Killer:
Having the killer wear a mask and stalk around silently makes sense on a technical level. The writer doesn’t have to write lines for them and the film-makers can just get a stunt guy to play the slasher, which is cheaper. For ref see A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge.
And hey, the killer not having a reason is terrifying, The Strangers anyone?
Conclusion! Do I have one…?
This is just my opinion. By not giving these killers a voice, they lack autonomy, they are stripped of reason and humanity for the audience. I think that, unintentionally, this gives an out for the writer not to have to indict masculinity. The killer isn’t a man, ‘it’s’ (as Dr. Loomis would say) a madman, psycho, evil, the Boogeyman, Death.
The Rural Killer: Hicksploitation aka Hixploitation
Heidi Honeycutt explains the film, The Hitch-Hiker (1955), in her book ‘I Spit on your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies.’ “Myers [the killer] is a construct of modern corruption, disappointment, and technology: a killer that has adapted to the new social expectations of people calmly settling down into suburban sprawl, connected by brand-new expensive freeways that facilitate housing developments and long work commutes and leaving long, lonely stretches of uninhabited country marred only by telephone poles, concrete, and cars. While in earlier noir films, the city itself is a haven for corrupt cops, crooked politicians, and hard-boiled femme fatales that smother disappointed and cynical war veterans, in The Hitch-Hiker, the city is a comfortable nest where job, family, and home are protected from the shocking and harsh wilderness of the outside world. Bowen and Collins [victims] are conformist, 1950s Cold War culture husbands looking for excitement and escape; instead of reveling in gritty adventure, they find that they’ve “gone soft,” as Myers says.”
She goes on to write, “Rabinovitz suggests that The Hitch-Hiker studies masculinity and power in the modern world. I agree but posit, however, that The Hitch-Hiker is a precursor to many of the violent horror and thriller films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in which everyday modern citizens become victims of dangerous, backward ‘others’ that still live outside of the known, safe, and comforting city.”
She also says, “The seeds planted by The Hitch-Hiker would blossom into the anti-rural culture sentiment later seen in 1970s horror films such as The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). ‘Classier’ mainstream pictures, such as Straw Dogs (1971) and Deliverance (1972), reinforced the continued perception that civilization equals good, and countryside/wilderness/small town equals bad.”
Robin Wood writes in his essay on ‘Race with the Devil’, in ‘Robin Wood on the Horror Film’ “it seems valid, for instance, to read the monstrous family of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) (ex-slaughterhouse workers) as representing an exploited and degraded proletariat.”
There is a level of classism in these ‘rural killer’ vs ‘urban victim’ Slasher films.
Yes they on a technical level help in isolating the victims from resources and help. Again, isolation is key to horror.
But, the cliche of these backwoods, rural, often inbred or deformed killers is odd.
Does it help play into the propaganda of: The American Dream?
Safe White suburbia, with heteronormative mommy and daddy doing their jobs with 2.5 kids is safe. People on the outskirts of the major cities, living in poverty, are dangerous? But, we’re all Americans. Why are rural Americans demonized? I actually don’t get it. Civilization is safe. Isolation is backwards and dangerous. Have you lived in a big city? Then again, have you lived in a small town? They both have their pros and cons.
Ultimately, I do think it is feelings of superiority from a place of intellectual and financial privilege. Uneducated hicks/southerners/rednecks/ are dangerous.
It’s classist.
As a wise Harbinger of Doom in Children of the Corn (1984) said, “Well, folks in Gatlin's got a religion. They don't like outsiders…”
I do think it’s funny that Tobe Hooper is from Texas.
No one loves Texas as much as someone from Texas. Equally, no one hates Texas as much as someone from Texas. The same can be said for the Deep South, the Midwest, and the Appalachian Mountains.
I kind of came down to this: it’s easy to make fun of these backwards, gross, uneducated, hicks and believe we are so much better than our own countrymen. But, having lived all over the US my entire three plus decades of life… yeah that’s most of America. Most of us aren’t better, we’re just not cannibals.
Idiocracy is a documentary you say, Children of the Corn is a documentary I counter.
But I’m from LA so… we’ll move one. Doodadoo.
FINAL GIRLS
I’ll move on to the other half of the equation. The Main character. The protagonist. The Final girl! I do already have a video on this but it’s old and I got more to say!
The term ‘Final Girl’ was coined by Carol J Clover.
1992 - Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
1987 - Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film
“The one character of stature who does live to tell the tale is of course female. The Final Girl is introduced at the beginning and is the only character to be developed in any psychological detail. We understand immediately from the attention paid it that hers is the main story line. She is intelligent, watchful, level-headed; the first character to sense something amiss and the only one to deduce from the accumulating evidence the patterns and extent of the threat; the only one, in other words, whose perspective approaches our own privileged understanding of the situation. We register her horror as she stumbles on the corpses of her friends; her paralysis in the face of death duplicates those moments of the universal nightmare experience on which horror frankly trades. When she downs the killer, we are triumphant. She is by any measure the slasher film’s hero.” - Clover (1987).
Types of Final Girls (aka Slasher Survivors):
I tried to break down the types of final girls but I failed.
Final Girls are all kinda the same: depressed, stressed, anxiety-spiral, hyper-alert, good girls who maybe should smoke something to relax, damn.
Historically, final girls aren’t cool or fun. Their job is to be cowering, terrified, white girls who are chased through the third act, drop whatever weapon they picked up after a single swing, and somehow make it to the end of the movie traumatized but alive.
As the 80s wore on we started getting Final Girls with more personality. But that took a while. It’s not until about 1984 that the depiction shifts. Even then, the most charming final girl still fits the description above, she might just get a few one-liners and maybe keeps the weapon in hand.
Representation:
Females are the stars, the main character/protagonist. Not only that but they get to be the action hero! Which is unique even today, let alone the late 70’s!
But it’s in defending themselves against violence where ultimately even though they survive, they are a victim. And like I said, they didn’t really becomes the bad-ass action hero of the Horror Genre until 1984. There are some earlier outlines like Alien and Poltergeist, but they are few and far between. Even then, those aren’t specifically Slashers.
The argument over whether Slashers are anti-women in their depiction of violence against women, or feminist, in their giving women a lead role where they can be the hero of the film… is a long fought one. I’m not here to give a definitive answer. Also it’s a case by case… or movie by movie basis. Some are better than others.
My opinion. I do think it’s both. I know, two opposing things being true, so complex. Is it healthy to have this cliched depiction of women getting killed half nude after sex? No. See my essay - I go into Purity Culture. But, is giving women a chance to be the lead in a movie good? Yes. Does the good outweigh the bad? I don’t know. All I can say is as a person with a vagina, I like horror. While Slashers are far from my favorite subgenre of horror, I do enjoy many of them. And I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. Just be aware of the issues. It’s ok to like imperfect things.
Content Analysis:
On the Perils of Living Dangerously in the Slasher Horror Film - Andrew Walsh
Men killed more in the Slasher film. This is due to a few reasons:
women survive more
men are hired more to be in roles
Women are depicted in longer death scenes, in more peril and more exposed. Horror shows nude women in danger and it shows them for a longer duration than men.
Virgin/Whore dichotomy. I went into this in my Sex Equal Death analysis. I do think there is an issue in the depiction of girls and women in horror films.
Firstly because most are written and directed by men.
Secondly because sex sells, women are required to be nude more in horror films. And going back to that learned bias thing… the way that victims are often portrayed is as hyper-sexual while the survivor is portrayed as more shy and introverted. This plays into the Virgin/Whore dichotomy. Good girls live. Bad girls die. Sex is bad. Blah blah blah.
Again, it goes back to purity culture. Purity Culture sucks. Stop it! Let the Final Girl have sex! She’s earned it.
The Male-Final Girl:
In the language of cinema it is well established that the surviving victim of the Slasher is a woman. That doesn’t mean that all Final Girls are well, girls. There are final boys. Given most final boys are very much that, boys. The male survivors tend to be much younger, generally pre-pubescent. See Friday the 13th 4, and 5, People Under the Stairs, Child’s Play, ect.
There are some teen and adult final boys.
But, when put in the traditional female role, by definition, the character is emasculated. And, I find something about that very interesting.
There is a reason Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge is considered the gayest Slasher. [There is an argument for Fright Night here too but it’s not a Slasher.] I think that’s because they play it like any other Slasher without having adjusted the script to fit a main male lead. See Evil Dead 2 for comparison. Bruce Campbell isn’t playing a Final Girl, even though he is, he’s playing a John Wayne-esque action hero.
Having the lead be a man can make for a funny comparison. In Creep [2014] for instance I frequently found myself saying, yeah this character needed to be a man, because a woman would NEVER do this! Though I was saying the same thing in Barbarian about that woman, that’s what happens when men write for women.
It’s rare that men are depicted as weak or cowering in fear in films. Gee, wonder why. Even though if in the same position as Laurie Strode a guy would be just as afraid.
The Black Guy Dies First! Trope
Yeah it’s not just about men v women. Other types of representation exist. Not many in 80s slashers, but it’s a non-zero number.
Much like Randy told us the rules and Sidney decided to have internalized ‘I’m better than other girls’ in the first Scream. Scream 2 gave us Maureen Evan’s pointing out a cinematic crime that the movie then goes on to commit. FYI, acknowledging a problem before engaging in it, doesn’t make you better, it still makes you part of the problem.
Phil: Now why do you wanna pay 7.50 to see some Sandra Bullock, unless she's naked.
Maureen: Oh, but you will sit through some movie called STAB.
Phil: It's an adrenaline rush Maureen, that's what it is.
Maureen: No, I'll tell you what is. It's a dumb ass white movie about some dumb ass white girls getting their white asses cut the fuck up.
Phil: Is that what it is?
Maureen: No, I'm just saying that the horror genre is historical for excluding the African American element.
I am not Black. But I can read. So I read this book and totally recommend it. ‘The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema from Fodder to Oscar’ Dr Robin R. Means Coleman (2023). And I’ll quote him.
“But does he really? The answer, in fact, is a resounding no. He (...) might die second or third or, in more nihilistic films, seventeenth. But odds are pretty good that he will indeed die. How good? Well, in an informal and soul-crushing survey of almost one thousand horror movies containing more than fifteen hundred appearances by Black characters, we found their mortality rate to be about 45%. Given this figure includes minor, nonspeaking, sometimes nameless roles that may not even warrant a death, the fact that nearly one out of every two dies sounds like a genocidist’s wet dream.” - Dr Robin R. Means Coleman.
“Of course, in this new age of edgy horror, Black characters weren’t the only ones dying, but since Blacks were still allowed to play only ancillary roles, they suddenly found themselves in the cinematic crosshairs. And the more ancillary the role, the greater the chance they would die [], before the character is developed and audiences can come to sympathize with them.” - Dr Robin R. Means Coleman.
“It doesn’t have to be with any malintent that Hollywood movers and shakers craft Black characters so poorly, but with little knowledge or consideration of the Black experience, they naturally treat them with a sense of “otherness.” Black people become something audiences can’t relate to and whose exoticism is at best mysterious and at worst dangerous. Ignorance, after all, breeds lazy writing. Worse, it breeds fear.” - Dr Robin R. Means Coleman.
That quote above can easily be swapped out for the female experience too. And the queer experience. Certainly for Slashers the trans experience.
It seems to me that Slashers focused on hetero white audiences, like most cinema, throughout the… well up until about ten years ago. Definitely through the 80s.
I can think of Slashers that have a black character survive. It’s a small, finite amount. I can think of less where a black woman survives.
Slashers really don’t get into intersectional issues as much as you’d think.
Shout out to Wes Craven, Don Mancini, and Kevin Williamson for pushing boundaries. It’s not until Jordan Peele’s prestige horror films that studios started to really give ‘black’ horror a serious chance. The same could be said for Kevin Williamson and queer horror. Much as Blaxploitation began to open doors in the 70s, it kind of died out in the 80s.
I don’t know for sure but part of me thinks that goes back to the Final Girl. She’s the star. And she’s a representation of the good victim. So… she’s white. For decades. We’ve since had some slashers with women of color leading, and I mean leading, not surviving like I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, or Scream 5 and 6. But leading. The actual Final Girl: US, The Blackening, Barbarian, Demon Knight… I am sure there are others but those are the only ones I can name. Isn’t that tragic?
Slashers still have a long way to go in terms of representation.
I didn’t really even get into queer slashers like A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, They/Them, High Tension, Sleepaway Camp, Hellraiser, ect.
I’ll leave it at yikes.
Long history short, we as a society still have a long way to go with how Black characters are portrayed on screen… in every genre. But, that only happens if there is more behind the scene representation. That goes for all forms of representation in every aspect of television and cinema… and life. Do better America. Do better.
INTERPRETATION
Interpretation: arguing against the status quo of accepted interpretation, which is at its most basic level, is just agreed upon opinion, is totally okay and what I’m about to do… and have been doing. But, here I get explicit.
A lot of agreed upon film interpretation is based in archaic agreed upon academia which took its roots in the (at the time) accepted Freudian literature (and Lacan and Althusser). Which, let’s be clear, was opinion. I can’t stress that enough. Freud is a soft science at best and mostly unused now because we’ve learned more since he did coke over a century ago.
So a few last threads I want to talk about to end this:
Phallic and Yonic imagery in the Slasher. I think it’s all dumb and people are looking way too deep. Unless it’s like Slumber Party Massacre where the weapon is obviously supposed to be a phallic metaphor then the knife is just a knife. The female survivor picking it up is not emasculating the male killer.
While we’re on the topic of knives not at all being phallic. American I know you’re puritanical but this is ridiculous. A knife being used to stab a woman is not and should not be equated with a penis penetrating a vagina (or other orifice). That is so dangerous for everyone. It equates all penetrative sex as violent. Stop! Guys if you penetrate someone, willingly, you’re not basically stabbing them. At all. If you’re the party being penetrated it should not feel like you are being stabbed. At all. Let’s all have a healthier relationship to sex shall we. It’s supposed to feel good. Damn. Ok moving on.
Sex and drugs are capital offenses? Ok Reagan we can stop with that.
Modern slashers, because there have been so many, tend to have a hat on a hat mentality now. Like it’s a Slasher AND Freaky Friday, Time Travel, Groundhog’s Day, with a Sloth, with a dancing robot, from the killer’s POV, ect. They are more meta and have more representation. Usually they’re more campy, in a post-90s world, thanks to Kevin Williamson and Don Mancini.
I… I’m on page 45 and have no idea how to end this. What is the point of this? I don’t think I have a point. It took a lot to be able to make slasher films from censorship reducing to practical effects getting better. A lot of key people made specific films that changed the landscape of this genre. The Slasher genre developed slowly over decades, then exploded in the late 70s, then started to run on fumes by the 90s.
Female representation is both good and bad in this subgenre. Queer representation and people of color generally are not depicted well. I have a whole hour and forty minute video on trans representation in the Slasher.
The purity culture and conservative slant of Slashers could be improved. Still. But it’s certainly gotten a lot better.
I don’t know. I think that’s it. They had a slow start and are slowly dying out.
Slashers are a beloved subgenre. For whatever your reason for loving or hating them as a whole, it’s totally valid. Maybe you’ve been introspective and understand why you like them, maybe you haven’t? Maybe your love aligns with the academic assertion that they are a cathartic way to experience fear. Maybe you’re like me and think that’s stupid, I like them because I love special effects, and a lot of these movies were made in a era where cocaine was the biggest part of the budget (that’s a joke), so the plots are so wild that unlike most other movies, I couldn’t possibly guess what’s going to happen. It’s actually a surprise. They’re usually more unique than other genres.
You mean to tell me this isn’t a werewolf movie? It was a slasher the whole time? WHAT the killer was Hitler, wtf!?! Wait she has a twin? Wait she doesn’t have a twin?! It was the mother? It was the children? Umm is he the good guy or bad guy? Ugh this guy sucks kill him!!!
They’re fun. Violent. But, fun.
I guess what it comes down to is, like what you like. Fuck the critics. And engage with the material so you know how these films have evolved. Know their pitfalls and where they, as a genre, have evolved. Because, these movies are influenced by real life. It took nearly forty years to get a Black Final Girl, these movies couldn’t be overtly queer until the late 90s, we still get the Virgin/Whore dichotomy, the last guy in a dress killing people reveal was only eleven years ago, so on. And yeah, these movies could really have better depictions of the female experience, especially coming from the screen.
With all that said. I’m going to go rewatch Slotherhouse and root for the Sloth.
SOURCES
‘The Teenage Slasher Movie Book, 2nd Revised and Expanded’ by J.A. Kerswell (2018).
‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film’ by Carol J Clover (1987).
In Search of Darkness volumes I, II, III.
‘The Story of Film: A Odyssey’ by Mark Cousins (2020).
‘Censorship: A Beginner’s Guide’ by Julian Petley (2009).
‘The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema from Fodder to Oscar’ by Robin R. Means Coleman and Mark H. Harris (2023)
‘I Spit on Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies’ by Heidi Honeycutt (2024)
‘Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre’ by Alison Peirce (2020).
Behind the Mask: Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006).
‘Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry’ by Frank Walsh [1996]. Link.
Slasher Movie, TV Tropes.com. Link.
War on Drugs, Britannica.com. Link.
Serial Murder, Britannica.com article by John Philip Jenkins. Link.
DSM History, Psychiatry.org. Link.
Halloween, Box Office Mojo. Link.
Friday the 13th, Wikipedia. Link.
List of Serial Killers Before 1900s, Wiki.
‘A Brief History of Film Censorship’ by National Coalition Against Censorship, NCAC.org (2023). Link.
History of Publishing, ‘Growth of the newspaper business in the English-speaking world’ by David H. Tucker, George Unwin, et all. Britannica.
Yellow Journalism, Britannica.
Film Ratings. Link.
Jones, Gregg. (2013),' Murder, Media and Mythology: The Impact the Media's Reporting of the Whitechapel Murders had on National Identity, Social Reform and the Myth of Jack the Ripper,' Reinvention: an International Journal of Undergraduate Research, BCUR/ICUR. Link.
Walkowitz, J. R. (1982), 'Jack the Ripper and the Myth of Male Violence', Feminist Studies, 8 (3), 542-74
‘What data on 3,000 murderers and 10,000 victims tells us about serial killers’ by Zachary Crockett. Vox (2016). Link.
‘Why are there fewer serial killers now than there used to be?’ by Cody Mello-Klein. Northeastern Global News (2023). Link.
‘why were there so many serial killers between 1970 and 2000 — and where did they go?’ by Brenna Ehrlich. Rolling Stones (2021). Link.
‘The Paramount Decrees’ Antitrust Division, US Department of Justice. Link.
‘Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson, 343 U.S. 495 (1952)’ Justia: US Supreme Court. Link.
‘Serial Killer Statistics’. Taylor Stacy. (2023). University of Michigan. Link.
‘Florence Lawrence’ by Kerri Lee Alexander for National Woman’s History Museum. Link.
‘DID in History’ for Dissociative Identity Disorder Research. Link.
‘History of Bipolar Disorder’ by Angela Nelson, reviewed by Smitha Bhandari, MD, for WebMD. Link.
‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ for Wikipedia. Link.
‘Psychiatric Illness and Criminality’ by Noman Ghiasi; Yusra Azhar; Jasbir Singh, for National Library of Medicine (updated 2023). Link.
‘Male Gaze’ was coined by Laura Mulvey in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1970).
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