The Slasher Film
Going to Pieces: The Rise and the Fall of the Slasher Film presents a thorough history of the slasher film that saw its peak in the early 80s with the release of numerous films that cashed in on the template provided by, what most consider the first of its kind, Halloween. What's interesting about the history of the slasher film, which unlike most other films in the horror genre that are relegated to the status of substandard film and/or dismissed as nothing more than a step above pornography, is the contempt and hatred felt towards them by many critics and the easily offended public.

Slasher films, like most other films, follow a pattern and narrative structure that's easily dissected, pardon the pun, and thus quite easily imitated, hence the glut of films during this period, a good portion of which are not very good. Aside from the obvious violence and gore, most critics felt that the films objectified women as victims of a sexually frustrated male figure, who slaughters them in any number of disturbing and horrifying ways. Lost on many is the fact that most of these films feature very highly intelligent and prominent female figures who, more often than not, serve as the heroine who stops the kill crazy rampage. Also lost are the many deeper themes that are addressed, like the white flight syndrome and conservative notions of sexual freedom, as evidenced by the fact that victims in many of these films are sexually promiscuous. The fact of the matter is that, like any other work of art, slasher films can be critically appreciated on a level equivalent to those of more revered genres.

Now, while it's all fine and good to think that slasher films can and should be accepted as legitimate works, that's not to say they are without problems. While one can dismiss most as wholly unrealistic and far fetched, there are those that push the boundaries, the most notorious being Silent Night, Deadly Night. What struck a cord with this film is the fact that the killer wore a Santa Claus outfit throughout. Clearly, co-opting such a prominent figure and transforming him into a killer is going to rub some people the wrong way and while it's easy to dismiss those who balk as being hyper sensitive and incapable of parenting, one argument that isn't made is the fact that the majority of the killers in these films, from Jason Vorhees to Freddy Krueger to Michael Myers, are wholly supernatural and unrealistic in all aspects. The killer in the Silent Night, Deadly Night series is clearly a troubled individual who, while committing equally absurd acts, could be found in the real world. This does not take into account that the impetus for this transformation was the troubling and far more disturbing fact that, as a youth, he witnessed the rape and murder of his parents on the side of the road by a crazed killer in a Santa Claus suit. Taken as a whole, this is a blueprint for disaster. One would be hard pressed to dismiss any arguments against this type of film as flimsy.

Another troubling aspect of the genre is that every fan is assumed, and quite wrongly, to enjoy the slaughter in the films and simply views them in the hopes of seeing something they haven't seen before. I think this is hardly the case and seems quite at odds with the notion that these films should be taken seriously. What one saw in the evolution of the genre is that each subsequent release tried to one up the last in terms of gore and outrageous special effects. Obviously, these films are made to make money, but in some of the lesser films in the genre, it appears as if the filmmakers built a story around the killings and not vice versa.

Like most trends the genre seemed to sputter out in the late 80s and early 90s in a cloud of absurdity and tediousness. What happened in the meantime is that we entered the late 90s and the early 00s with the innovation of the internet that promised access to a vast underbelly of not only pornography but other disturbing content. Inevitably, when the slasher film was revived, it not only tried to update the conventions and market them to a new audience, it also had to push buttons that had grown increasingly difficult to push in this new information age. Why this is of concern is that defenders seem to fixate on the fact that, yes, this content is in fact available on the internet and, yes, kids aren't as easily shocked as they once were in the 80s when a arrow to the eye was cutting edge special effects. Ignored is the fact that, while it is in fact harder to shock and much more troubling news comes out of perpetual war and terror than any slasher film, we, as a society, especially our youth, seem to be growing desensitized to all sorts of traumas that should, on face value, be deeply disturbing and hard to shake.

I consider myself a fan of slasher films and enjoy them immensely, but I also find myself growing more disturbed by how far some of the new wave horror films push the boundaries. An R rating of a film surely seems more liberally applied now than in decades past, and by that I don't mean in terms of easily getting an R rating on a film that otherwise wouldn't be granted such. I sense that the levels of violence and disturbing content are pushed to the very limits in terms of acceptability by a board that is notoriously conservative in nature. Hypocritical seems like the right way to describe this and also seems to reinforce the fact that conservative repression is only buried skin deep. It's probably not a coincidence that the rise of the slasher film corresponded with the rise of Reagan.