Postmodern Slasher

8/18/2019 Postmodern Slasher

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Mayhem Despite Everything: Understanding the Slasher Subgenre as an Inherently Postmodern

Evolution of Classical Horror Cinema

Analyzing horror cinema is not new academic exercise, nor is it an interesting one. As

our technological milieu has increasingly become one trending toward the proliferation of

screen-mediated information exchange, scholars have been generous in ushering so-called

“media studies” into serious criticism for some time now, with whole journals and academic

departments dedicated to the field. Horror films and their sensationalistic portrayals of misogyny,

violence, and gore, hold a particularly irksome esteem among scholars. In them, there is much to

be discussed, but little to be admired. For this very reason, critical studies on the genre tend to

excoriate rather than appreciate, but it is important to remember that horror, after all, is a genre

as old as film itself, beginning in 1896’s The Haunted Castle and extending profitably into the

present (Hardy 3), and film critic Robin Wood regards horror as “currently the most important of

all American [film] genres and perhaps the most progressive, even in its overt nihilism—in a

period of extreme cultural crisis and disintegration, which alone offers the possibility of radical

change and rebuilding” (Wood 17). In short, this much-maligned genre has been

well-represented in academia despite its shortcomings, with major works focusing on the

representation of gender, people of color, terrorism, and mental health issues, among many

others.

Yet a deep study of writings focused on the intersection of horror cinema and

postmodernity will show that most scholars reference only a handful of noteworthy films, most

often Wes Craven’s 1996 slasher-parody Scream , which is cited as a prime example of

postmodern film writ large, where the characters themselves know they exist in a world of


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overarching conventions. Here, we watch a group of teenagers discuss the existence of “rules” on

how to survive a horror film within a horror film—rules that they themselves break at times,

sometimes meeting the mandated punishment and sometimes not, consummately effacing our

expectations of the established tropes—which may be the genre’s most overt attempt at

self-referentiality. At the time, Scream served as a reminder to fans and artists alike that

contemporary horror had lost its punch to endless variations on the same themes, tableaus, and

conventions. New films became little more than the necessary step on the way to more-profitable

sequel franchises, and audiences settled for their recycled tropes. Because of its parodic handling

of the subgenre’s downfall and its immediate box-office success, for the purposes of scholarly

inquiry, Scream might as well be the only postmodern slasher film worth discussing.

This paper proposes that the slasher subgenre itself—not just Scream and its

imitators—serves as an inherently postmodern reaction to classical horror films, an outgrowth of

the postmodern period as per Frederic Jameson’s conception. First, I will begin by discussing the

difference between slasher films and their “classical horror” predecessors. Next, I will highlight

several aesthetic conventions of postmodern texts and make connections between these concepts

and the structure of quintessential slasher films and tropes. Finally, I will offer a possible

direction for the slasher genre in light of its recent manifestations. As mentioned above, critical

studies of slasher films tend to examine the narrative representation of particular groups of

people, but for a subgenre that “is as apocalyptic and nihilistic, as hostile to meaning, form,

pleasure, and the specious good as many types of high art,” it may be more appropriate to view

the slasher movement as an important, subversive reflection of postmodern aesthetics (Modleski

291).


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A Basic Definition

For the purposes of this paper, I will offer a rather simplistic definition of slasher horror

films with which to identify applicable examples, as the subgenre offers endless variations on a

basic theme. Slashers generally feature “a serial killer who is spreading fear in a middle-class

community by killing innocent people” (Petridis 76). What is important in slasher films is that

the audience is willing, if not eager, to witness extreme violence, as many scenes in slasher films

foreground the fear of murder victims, the attack itself, and its aftermath. The main tension in a

slasher film is “who will the central villain get next and by what method?” (Tudor qtd. in

Sapolsky and Molitor 38). We can further identify slasher films based on their portrayal of the

antagonist, a killer who is known from the beginning, as in 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street , or

one who remains unknown until the end of the film, as in 1980’s Friday the 13th, in which the

killer’s identity is finally revealed via a who-dunnit twist. However, not all horror films that

feature serial killers can be considered slashers. Instead, we can see the break between classical

horror films and postmodern slashers through the rise of films using contemporary settings rather

than gothic ones, the erosion of the good vs. evil grand narrative, and onscreen violence rather

than implied violence.

Gothic vs. Contemporary

Classical horror films generally look toward the past for material, reworking canonical

works of literature and situating narratives in an idealized gothic history. These classical horror

films like 1931’s trio of Dracula , Frankenstein, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , tend to locate the

threat of evil in monsters, ghosts, and other mythical beings. The narrative follows a group of

people as they ineffectually fight off said evil until the patriarchal authority figure—most often a


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member of the wealthy upper class, like Van Helsing, Dr. Waldman, and Dr. John Lanyon in the

aforementioned films respectively—finally defeats the monster and restores peace to the

kingdom. Here, we spend much time skulking around castles and moors as the evil “other” lurks

in the shadows. Only when this monstrous “other” is banished can people return to their normal

lives. Even when classical horror films are set in the present day, as in 1954’s Godzilla and

Them!, evil is located in fantastic, impossible beings, in this case a large reptilian menace or a

nest of giant mutated ants. There is always a sense of remove in classical horror films; what

happens on-screen cannot find a total correlate in real life, and audiences are all the more

comforted by that fact.

In contrast, contemporary or postmodern horror films look at the ugly present for

material, portraying a more “typical” cast of middle-class teenagers. Slasher films locate evil in

the “everyday world, where the efficacious male expert is supplanted by an ordinary victim who

is subjected to high levels of explicit, sexualized violence, especially if the victim is female”

(Pinedo 20). Slasher films take place in the present, where evil is able to invade the comfort of

suburbs ( Halloween ), summer camps ( Friday the 13th), places of worship ( Alice, Sweet Alice ),

and schools ( A Nightmare on Elm Street ), institutions where audiences are less able to remove

themselves from the speculative threat, since they remain so close to ordinary life. Structuring

narratives around “realistic” contemporary settings rather than idealized gothic ones

demonstrates “a fundamental phenomenological uncertainty about the apparent, familiar world

around us and our perception of it” (Syder 81), and such a shift from fantasy to reality rests on

the premise that in light of historical traumas, including world wars, genocides, nuclear testing,

and the assassination of peace activists, an idealized gothic past is too far removed from the


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locus of true evil, which, in the postmodern slasher film, is humanity itself.

Good vs. Evil

In classical horror films, audiences and characters alike are able to easily draw the

boundary between good and evil. Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, Mr. Hyde, and Imhotep are

all markedly different beings than the heroes who defeat them, and these films allow audiences

to project their fears upon these “others,” who remain in stark contrast to “us humans.” While

audiences may be able to identify with the more sympathetic monsters, good always triumphs

over evil in the classical paradigm, and the social order is once again restored after the initial

disruption of normality. With a good bit of romance, fight scenes, and humor, these Universal

Studios monster-flicks of yore end on a happy, unambiguous note: We saved the day yet again.

Whereas a classical horror film “constructs a secure universe characterized by narrative

closure, one in which (hu)man agency prevails and the normative order is restored” (Pinedo 24),

a postmodern horror film makes it difficult to so easily recognize distinctions between good and

evil. Films like A Nightmare on Elm Street , Halloween , and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre all

end with their antagonists meeting an ambiguous outcome. At each film’s climax the

protagonist(s) puts up an honorable fight, and the foe is vanquished, yet each film’s closing

moments takes the classical paradigm a step further by interjecting a healthy dose of

apprehension: Did we kill it? The answer in postmodern slashers is no more often than not.

Antagonists remain on the loose by the time the credits roll, returning soon in a coterie of

bastardized sequels. By eroding our faith in the idea that good will always prevail, postmodern

slashers proclaim that evil can be contained, if anything, but never destroyed.

What’s more, slasher films generally portray human antagonists instead of those


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puritanical codes of conduct to how these films deal with death. In classical horror, we need only

the idea of violence, not the specifics.

Ever since the infamous shower scene in Psycho , where audiences watched blood spill

down the drain (it was in fact Bosco chocolate syrup), postmodern horror films and particularly

slashers have been obsessed with the spectacle of the ruined body. In A Nightmare on Elm Street ,

a teen is sucked into his bed, after which over five-hundred gallons of fake blood spew out of the

mattress and coat his room. Friday the 13th is a story in service of its elaborate murder tableaus;

without them, the plot is meaningless, for “all is disjointed for the shock in a [slasher] film, and

spectacle of violence replaces any pretensions to narrative structure, because gore is the only part

of the film that is reliably consistent” (Arnzen). In the opening scene of The Texas Chain Saw

Massacre, authorities encounter the posed corpses of recently robbed graves; these bodies are

splayed and manipulated in grotesque poses that mimic a sculptor’s pointed vision. The

postmodern horror film sees the dead body as a canvas, and slasher films have a history of

one-upping predecessors in the subgenre to create more nuanced visions of art.

Where before in classical horror films we were allowed to imagine the bloody horrors in

the darkness of our own minds, slasher films take away our comfort in the light by making the

“visible, known world the primary source of terror—primarily through grotesquely realistic gore

effects” (Syder 83). Soldiers returning from Vietnam had seen true horror, and special-effect

artists like Tom Savini used their experiences overseas, along with rapidly innovating film

technologies, to craft stomach-turning recreations of human dismemberment, which in turn

produced huge box office returns (Sapolsky and Molitor 35). The rage and terror that

accompanied the post-1960s landscape seemed to dictate what constituted real horror, and in


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response horror films began to move away from the shyness of classical horror films and into the

first slasher movement. 1960 marked the intrusion of the postmodern era into horror films with

the release of Psycho , and in effect, filmmakers became much less coy in regards to the

presentation of violence, ultimately abandoning the classical horror model in favor of graphic

depictions of gore.

Postmodern Traits of the Slasher Film Model

Now that we have made a distinction between classical horror films and slasher films and

looked at some of the cultural factors behind said paradigms, let us turn to understanding the

slasher movement as a particularly postmodern response to classical horror films. I will now

identify some of the overarching postmodern concerns of the slasher canon, particularly the

prevalence of paranoia, audience participation, and pastiche in its representative films.

Paranoia

In the postmodern slasher, protagonists spend a majority of the time running for their

lives. The last few scenes alone of John Carpenter’s Halloween , which many critics believe to be

the first slasher success that codified many of the slasher subgenre’s conventions, equate to

fifteen straight minutes of the protagonist—teen babysitter Laurie Strode—moving from house

to house trying to outrun her killer, discovering the hidden corpses of her classmates along the

way. In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , Sally meets a similar fate as she escapes from her

cannibalistic captors only to be recaptured again and again, and much of A Nightmare on Elm

Street ’s success can be attributed to its elaborate dream sequences that allowed filmmakers to

morph the known world into an uncanny simulacrum, where telephones grow tongues and walls

pulse. In these films, the suburbs, rural Texas farmland, and sleep are rendered strange and


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antagonistic, as they provide the shadows in which bad men are allowed to move and hide.

Slasher films, then, can be said to evince a paranoid atmosphere of distrust for familiarity

and complacency, since they “usually illustrate the strange, unexpected and horrible turn of

events which threaten our powers of reason” (Manchel 111). Characters in Friday the 13th no

longer find solace in the pastoral lakeside, and the sorority sisters of Black Christmas learn to

distrust the quiet of their own home, where the killer has been calling them all along. Under this

framework, it is easy to see how slasher films revolve around a paranoia that the laws of the

universe are not enough to save “good” people from random destruction. In fact, the modernist,

utopian world of forward progress is altogether rejected in slasher films, as their fundamental

precept seems to argue that our logic can no longer function in a world where chaos is allowed

primacy (Spencer 220). As Michael Myers invades a previous stalwart of contemporary society

(the suburban middle class) and picks off their most cherished possessions (the youth of the

community), the slasher subgenre takes a firm conservative position that our contemporary world

is not to be trusted, and our future is not a bright one.

Slasher films also harbor a distrust of authority figures and institutions, another form of

paranoia. Because slasher films generally target teen audiences and feature teen characters, the

political vision of these films tend to align with those views held by teens (Sapolsky and Molitor

34). The stereotypical rebellious nature of teens and young adults finds its correlate in the

structure of slasher narratives, because “Despite the postmodern horror film's insistence on the

use of force, cops and psychiatrists are largely absent or ineffectual. The nihilistic universe of

postmodern horror cannot rely on the efficacy of science or authority figures” (Pinedo 23). In A

Nightmare on Elm Street , protagonist Nancy’s own father is a lieutenant in the local police force;


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yet when she tells him of her suspicions about the local deaths and their possible cover-up, he

places her under house-arrest by installing iron bars over her bedroom windows; ultimately her

boyfriend dies as a result of her inability to wake him up across the street. Here, the film directs

an assault on fundamental ideological institutions like the suburban family unit, the police force,

and the bourgeois culture that affirms both. Neither one is sympathetic to the needs of young

people.

Similarly, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a thinly-veiled critique of capitalism, a film

about the horrors of people literally feeding off one another when a family driven out of work by

technological progress must turn to eating and selling human meat for sustenance. The police

force is corrupted by murderous family members, and the teens are unable to escape due to a

gasoline shortage (the film was released a year after the 1973 gas crisis). In Halloween ,

psychiatrist Dr. Sam Loomis saves Laurie at the last moment by shooting Michael Myers

multiple times at close range, yet he does not defeat the antagonist who subsequently escapes.

The world of slasher films is one where characters are better off distrusting all authority figures,

who more often than not are either corrupt, unbelieving, or impotent to the greater threats of the

villainous universe. Since the slasher subgenre found prominence only a few years after the

Watergate scandal, it is not difficult to contextualize these films as ones that place no faith in the

powers that be, and throughout their heydey they remain subversive critiques of dominant

ideologies.

A further example of overarching paranoia within the slasher canon is the fact that slasher

narratives are structured in such a way that any character can die without a moment’s notice.

While later conventions of the subgenre required a “final girl” to survive—one who is bookish


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and sexually chaste, who abstains from the alcohol and drugs her friends so freely ingest in order

to outsmart the antagonist in the end—virtually everyone else in a slasher film is up for grabs,

including parents, clergy members, police officials, teachers, and the requisite slew of cardboard

cut-out teenagers, i.e. the jock, the nerd, the stoner, etc. Though we can often single out the most

“honorable” female as the hero, we vicariously witness the sheer randomness of death through

her eyes as she becomes “abject terror personified” (Clover 201). In The Texas Chain Saw

Massacre, we watch a deranged cannibal carve through a young man who remains bound to his

wheelchair without the use of his legs. In Halloween , any stranger who is unfortunate enough to

cross paths with the masked killer must die at his hand. Slasher films are notable for their

narrative simplicities, in which characters are killed off one-by-one in increasingly elaborate

scenarios, and therefore the focus of the film lies in watching people die. These deaths are

executed by a super-ego on steroids, who punishes people for crimes such as underage drinking,

premarital sex, and the sins of one’s ancestors; audience members looking for comeuppance in

slasher films won’t find it easily.

Historically speaking, the slasher subgenre came to prominence immediately after the

Vietnam War, and these films reflect that era with their wanton mayhem alongside the gruesome

deaths of young people, but slashers gained immediate box-office returns in the early-to-mid

1980s, during a time where serial killers in North America were coming into the cultural

spotlight. Slasher films, featuring over-the-top violence along with the changing cultural tide in

America, proclaim that “no one is safe from random brutalization (a vulnerability that is

exacerbated by mass-media stories of serial murders, assassinations, rapes, missing children, and

other crimes that seemingly lack a motive), plus the uncertainty of living in a society where the


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lines between good and evil increasingly become blurred” (Russell 69).

In a related vein, there lies a paranoia in slasher films that anyone can kill without a

moment’s notice. When stories of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Richard Ramirez came to

light, law-abiding citizens were startled at the good looks and friendliness of these supposed

monsters. There too was a media frenzy surrounding the exploits of the Zodiac Killer and the

BTK killer (later identified), who both remained unknown during their crime sprees, inciting fear

that said killers were still afoot. Regardless, horror cinema evolved during an era where it

seemed like behind any random door on the block there could be murderers hiding (as in the case

of Fred and Rosemary West). Compared to classical films like Frankentstein and Dracula,

killers in the slasher period look much more like ourselves—indistinguishable, even.

In My Bloody Valentine, we learn at the end of the film that the killer is a good-looking

high school boy all along; he kills his classmates in revenge for his father’s death in the local

mines decades ago. In Friday the 13th , the killer is revealed to be a mother avenging her son’s

death and not the son himself as we had been led to believe. Friday the 13th Part II then goes a

step further by incorporating the long-since dead son back into the narrative, an innocent child

who we thought to have died when his camp counselors ignored his drowning throes in favor of

sex. In each case, audiences have very little confidence as to guessing who the killer might be,

because anyone, it seems, is capable of the murderous act, preying on the fear of the known as

much as it does the unknown: Do we really want to know what our neighbors are capable of

(Syder 83)? The paranoia over who will die and who will kill in slashers stems from the

increased documentation of violent acts in the media that were, like now, becoming so common

“as to routinely go unreported by the media unless a specific violent act incorporates a


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mind-boggling, grisly variation theretofore unheard of, or some spectacularly high body count, in

which case the media exploits the violence in Guinness Book of World Records style” (Derry

119). Ultimately, theatergoers are subject to the paranoia within slasher films not simply by

absorbing the fear of characters onscreen, but by simultaneously contextualizing on-screen

violence in a world where such acts are not too far from the realm of possibility.

Audience Participation

Slasher films are noteworthy for their innovations with point-of-view cinematography. In

Black Christmas and later Halloween , which codified the practice, we begin each film stalking

victims from the killer’s perspective. At this time, we do not even know who we are being asked

to identify with, since we feel for the victim(s) while simultaneously killing them. Shifting

between identities is a common practice among slasher films, as “The postmodern horror film

repeatedly blurs the boundaries between subjective and objective representation by violating the

conventional cinematic codes (lighting, focus, color, music) that distinguish them” (Pinedo 22).

Whether looking through the killer’s eyes, intentionally obscuring the killer’s face, or changing

non-diegetic sound when in the killer’s shoes, these strategies incite a schizophrenic break in the

idea that identity is singular and unified in the same way that the killers themselves live an

ambiguous identity (until it is revealed to us): We never really know our role in the film, since

we are asked to play several. Postmodern theorist Frederic Jameson breaks down this

schizophrenic break in identity as a matter of linguistic continuity:

first, the effect of a certain temporal unification of past and future with the present before

me; and second, that such active temporal unification is itself a function of language, or

better still of the sentence, as it moves along its hermeneutic circle through time. If we


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are unable to unify the past, present and future of the sentence, then we are similarly

unable to unify the past, present and future of our own biographical experience or psychic

life. (72)

Because the camera is at once our eye, the killer’s eye, and the eyes of victims onscreen, we can

never be sure of our complicity in the stalking and killing of victims, especially in a slasher film

where the red-herring as plot device is immensely popular (Muir 32). Sometimes we realize we

have been looking through the eyes of a dog or a practical joker instead of the villain. Finding

out who’s who in the slasher film is part of the fun, but first the audience must participate in such

a way that we “try on” the different costumes of the film, never remaining in one or the other, a

practice that leads to larger questions of our own psychic lives.

Shifting identities in the slasher canon supports the postmodern view that there is no

unified sense of self. Classical horror films make firm distinctions between good and evil, killer

and victim, normal and abnormal; slasher films, on the other hand, make sure there is ambiguity

as to everyone’s role in the film, including the audience. In fact, the very act of willfully

watching ourselves slice up innocent victims reveals that “audiences [can] be just as indifferent

and callous as the characters in the films” (Karnick). As mentioned previously, many of the

subgenre’s most salient antagonists aren’t much different than the protagonists (and, by

deduction, ourselves). Evil in these films comes from within the human experience, and often

said evil is a product of our culture’s own pitfalls: domestic abuse ( Psycho ), poverty (The Texas

Chain Saw Massacre ), mental disorders such as PTSD ( Friday the 13th Pt. II ), voyeurism ( Black

Christmas ), and more. Admittedly, there are many problematic representations of mental

disorders and sexual politics in slasher cinema, but there is a clear break from classical horror


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that demands audience members to step into several roles at once. Do we root for the killers, who

have their own cults of personality, or the victims, who we on one hand enjoy watching succumb

to slaughter, and on the other identify with as they overcome the villain? Slashers keep audience

members in a constant state of flux, much closer in line to the postmodern conception of the

fragmented (or nonexistent) self.

In many ways, the slasher film is a form of game-play between audience and filmmaker,

and this participation is inherent in the form of the subgenre itself: “The contemporary horror

film knows that you’ve seen it before; it knows that you know what is about to happen; and it

knows that you know it knows you know” (Brophy 279). Because slasher films are at once

entirely formulaic and yet endlessly varied, they tease our ability to predict what might happen,

similar to a who-dunnit mystery thriller. We are asked to on some level care about characters

who are at best flat, at worst stock, yet our hearts pump for them nonetheless. Villains that never

die further reduce our ability to predict the outcome of familiar narratives. Slasher films are

unique in that they engage audiences “in a dialogue of textual manipulation that has no time for

the critical ordinances of social realism, cultural enlightenment or emotional humanism” (Brophy

278-279). How, then, do such grotesque and shallow films do so well? Precisely because the

intended audience for slashers is expected to know the rules, and with that knowledge they can

find comfort when films meet their genre expectations, or they can cackle with glee when a

recognizable trope has been manipulated or abandoned.

Pastiche

Jameson conceives of the postmodern era as one in which “The disappearance of the

individual subject, along with its formal consequence, the increasing unavailability of the


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personal style, engender the well-nigh universal practice today of what may be called pastiche”

(64). In a consumption-oriented culture, artists have produced so much work that individuals

must now turn to the past and cannibalize the stores of previous texts to create something “new.”

No longer is the onus on artists to create an individual style, but rather to plagiarize in such a

self-aware way as to call attention to the constructedness of the work itself, a process that

“actively encourages creative artists to raid the past in order to set up a sense of dialogue

between it and the present” (Sim 231). When viewing a pastiched text, the reader is not only

looking at the single text but the myriad of allusive works contained within that text as well.

Slasher films then, it would seem, are particularly well-suited to the aims of postmodern

pastiche. The subgenre’s most salient conventions, having been solidified in the late 1970s, are

so recognizable that two entire franchises have been devoted to pointing out the artifice behind

those established tropes (Scream and Scary Movie ). To analyze the subgenre at face value, one

might conclude that slasher films are debased cinema at its worse, where audiences pay money

for the privilege to watch people die in agony, preferring those methods which are most

over-the-top. However, the pastiched nature of slasher films, which borrow heavily from other

films in the subgenre, leads audiences to view the violence ironically. Genre enthusiasts have

become so inured to the laborious mental process of filmic survival—stalking victims, killing

victims, being stalked, being killed, defeating the killer only to learn that the killer cannot be

defeated—that they expect each slasher film to hit certain notes mandated by the early successes

of Halloween and Friday the 13th, and much of the viewing experience is less concerned with

the quality of individual films and more concerned with how said films participate with the

subgenre at large (Russell 61). Because of the sheer amount of representative films in a subgenre


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that is noted for its narrative simplicities, there is only so much individuality directors can inject

into their slasher films, and therefore one must rely on a knowledge of what has come previously

in the subgenre to fully enjoy singular texts in order to pick up on a patented self-awareness

evident in many slashers.

A film like Friday the 13th Pt. VIII is particularly forthright in its expectation that

audiences view the text not singularly but as part of a particular franchise and subgenre. After

Jason Vorhees hops a cruise ship and hitches a ride to New York City, he comes across a

multitude of city-folk that were heretofore absent in previous films. During a lengthy rooftop

battle of nearly three full minutes in which a boxer throws his best punches at the villain, Jason

simply absorbs the punches, and when the boxer runs out of steam, Jason lands one punch that

literally decapitates the boxer with such force that his disembodied head flies off the rooftop and

into a dumpster, which slams shut in response. In the slasher universe, audience members know

that whenever a brave and confident character tries to go toe-to-toe with a villain, that character

will most likely die. However, the filmmakers behind Friday the 13th Pt. VIII went so comically

above what was called for that we cannot take the violence seriously; we expect a death, and in

light of previous films, our expectation is not will he die? but rather, how will they one-up

themselves after eight films? Pastiche in the slasher canon is a different pastiche used in the

horror genre as a whole; the postmodern aim of slasher pastiche includes “the prominence of

graphic violence to produce gory humor” (Pinedo 29). In another scene, Jason sees his first

billboard advertisement, on which is featured a hockey player. Having acquired his signature

hockey mask five films previous, Jason stops mid-stride, cocks his head ever so slightly in salute,

and continues his murderous rampage on the city. These small “winks” at the audience reveal a


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fundamental concern of slasher films, that they assume audiences come to each representative

film with a fairly deep knowledge of the subgenre’s history and conventions, which filmmakers

will cobble together rom as needed.

Slasher films traffic in the “adept manipulation of viewer expectations based (ironically)

on pastiche and outright appropriation of scenes from other texts” (Arnzen). It is not an

uncommon experience for a slasher film to reference another film from the canon; slasher

director Wes Craven and The Evil Dead’s creator Sam Raimi have a practice of including one

another’s film posters in their own films, and slasher villains are often compared to other horror

villains in their own films; in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

, one victim describes his

antagonist as “some kinda Dracula.” Slasher films make no pretensions that their narrative events

are singular events, but rather endemic of some universe where mass murder sprees are common

occurrences. Viewers are expected to take such violence in stride; when we expect gore and that

gore is given to us, we are satisfied. If that expectation is denied with a false set-up, then a

knowledge of the subgenre’s conventions make the red herring that much more comical. It is

often said that early slasher films unabashedly steal their key murder scenes from the Italian

giallo subgenre, even in the subgenre’s first big films. Plagiarism has existed in the subgenre

since its inception, and consequently, informal rites of initiation exist among fans to see who can

catch the most in-jokes in serialized franchises like Friday the 13th , A Nightmare on Elm Street ,

and Halloween .

. What makes slasher films particularly unique in the horror genre is that they are prone

to this serialization and franchisement at a much higher frequency than other genre films

(Arnzen). After the independent successes of Halloween and Friday the 13th, studios hitched a


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ride on the slasher coattails by releasing thinly-veiled ripoffs in the form of formulaic slashers

based around holidays, including April Fool’s Day, Christmas Evil , My Bloody Valentine, and

Graduation Day. Each subsequent “ripoff” solidified slasher conventions that much more; at

current count, A Nightmare on Elm Street has spawned nine films, including television and

comic series, and the Friday the 13th franchise has twelve films to its name. Halloween is not far

behind with ten films of its own. These numbers remind us that a slasher’s individual style is

much less important than its marketability, leading to the subgenre’s reliance on pastiche to

create an atmosphere of familiarity for initiated fans.

Finally, slasher films incorporate pastiche into their representative films by mashing

“high” and “low” forms of art. In relation to horror, this would be the difference between “fear”

and “disgust.” Film critics have not been kind to horror films (Roger Ebert gave positive reviews

to less than ten horror films over his lengthy career); however, positive reviews often focus on a

film’s ability to create “atmosphere” and “genuine terror,” and these filmmakers are applauded

for their deft skills in constructing tension. Slasher films, on the other hand, are pitted in

opposition as lazy texts that stoop to “cheap thrills,” preferring the exposed, bloody heart to a

racing one. Carol Clover sees the mash-up of high and low forms of art as an inherent convention

of the slasher subgenre:

Audiences express uproarious disgust (‘Gross!’) as often as they express fear, and it is

clear that the makers of slasher films pursue the combination. More particularly: the

spectators fall silent while the victim is being stalked, scream out at the first stab, and

make loud noises of revulsion at the sight of the bloody stump. The rapid alternation

between registers—between something like ‘real’ horror on one hand and a camp,


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self-parodying horror on the other—is by now one of the most conspicuous

characteristics of the tradition. (Clover 205)

Slasher films are not fully horror, since they incorporate a healthy dose of irony and black

comedy, and yet they incite genuine fear in audiences. The postmodern conventions of slasher

films are evident in the way said films borrow from multiple styles and registers. Psycho is as

much a mystery film as a prototypical slasher. The latter quarter of A Nightmare on Elm Street

incorporates ideas and tropes from vigilante films of the 1970s, and many slashers can be seen as

modern bildungsromans, where young characters must witness and prevent sacrificial bloodshed

in order to move on to adulthood. Because these films are very different from other genres and

yet borrow heavily from all corners of culture, we can begin to see the slasher subgenre as a

postmodern collection of voices and styles, at once familiar and strange.

Conclusion

Now that we have looked at the history of postmodern slasher films in relation to their

classical predecessors and distinguished several examples of postmodern aesthetics prominently

featured in the slasher subgenre, now we can turn quickly to the future of the canon. Recent

years have seen slasher films evolving into texts that are much less ironic in terms of the

spectacle of violence. Franchises like Saw and Hostel made their name by surpassing all previous

slasher films in terms of the realism and gruesomeness of kill scenes depicted. Adam Lowenstein

believes these films, which now constitute an even more specific subgenre of slasher films

dubbed “torture porn,” came to prominence within a few years after the 9/11 attacks, and they

differ from previous slashers in that they are much more violent, with said violence now being

directed toward “decent people with recognizable human emotions” for a change (Edelstein qtd.


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in Lowenstein 42). This straight-faced brutality might be attributed to a further loss of idealism

in North America in the aftermath of another failed war and issues of national security. Perhaps

the slasher subgenre has moved from initial successes, to wanton franchisement, to brazen

parody, and now to self-aware castigation; after several decades of laughing at the demise of

innocent victims, the subgenre may well be headed in the direction of films that force viewers to

turn away, or at least require them to further question their complicity in these deaths. In a time

where postmodernism itself is denied, it may be that the slasher subgenre has evolved to meet the

artistic aesthetics of a society that is so dulled to death that it now stares at bloodshed with a

bold, realistic eye.


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Postmodern Slasher