Stabbing America

The masked man clutching a blood-soaked knife has become one of the most notable images in modern cinema. Tellingly, you probably aren’t sure which franchise I’m describing. After all, there are so many masked lunatics running about in our films (more and more each year, in fact) that I’d have to narrow it down. Every Halloween, stores allow trick-or-treaters to dress as their favourite murderous psychopath. You can wear Leatherface’s grotesque skin-hood, Jason Voorhees’ hockey visor, Michael Myers’ Halloween mask, or Ghostface’s… well, ghost face.

But why has the slasher film become such a cultural touchstone of modern cinema? It’s not just because horror is the most lucrative genre in cinema (it’s not very expensive to dress a large man in overalls and a mask, after all), though that is an undeniable component of the subgenre’s success. Particularly in America, the slasher film captured the general public’s attention and burrowed into the national subconscious exceptionally well. But what was it about late-20th-century depictions of violent psychotics stabbing Americans that turned them into a global phenomenon?

Part of the reason behind the success of these films is the sheer fact that they were being made at all: there was literally nothing like the slasher film before 1960. While horror films existed featuring characters that are slowly killed one by one, nothing ever matched the gruesome ferocity that typified the slasher genre as we know it today: the vibrant red blood, the excessive sound effects, the depraved look at our primal nature and disturbed human psychology.

That means that for roughly 70 years of a new artistic medium’s existence, something had never been done—then some young, irreverent iconoclasts came along and did it. Of course, the times had been a-changing, and developments in US society facilitated the birth of the genre. As audiences complained about baseless censorship—the kind which would have considered Some Like It Hot (1959) too obscene and offensive to make—and studios continued wantonly ignoring guidelines to deliver audiences scintillating, “shocking” art, the Hays Code steadily deteriorated.

By 1968, the Motion Picture Production Code faded away and was replaced by a modernised system. If not for that, the likes of Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper would have been out of a job: what kind of slasher film would you have without “licentious nudity” and “brutality and possible gruesomeness” in equal excess? Not a very prominent one, I imagine. The Hays Code had something of a forbidden fruit effect: the same guidelines which had spent a little over 30 years depriving audiences of graphic, confronting cinema essentially guaranteed the success of the most graphic, confronting movie genre.

So, one can see how slasher films caught the attention of everyone when they were first released: they were scandalous, and everyone had an opinion about it, be it good or bad. And while video nasties caused an uproar in the UK, and Dario Argento’s giallo flicks were as influential as they were entertaining in Italy, it was Hollywood that defined the slasher film. These were predominantly stories about American youth, told with such visceral appeal that it was impossible for it not to affect you in some form.

In short, the slasher film offended bourgeois sensibilities: such depictions of sex and violence were not just shocking, but unbecoming. However, it was exactly these social mores and middle-class fears that the slasher flick exploited to terrify its audiences. Much like how Werner Herzog conceptualised Count Dracula as a force of change for a staid society in Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) looks at how agents of chaos can encroach upon, infect, and potentially destroy even the safest parts of civilisation.

Such films introduced the scary notion that you’re not safe anywhere when the mentally deranged are loose. Indeed, this theme of bourgeois society being suddenly strewn with violence is one inherent to the slasher genre. Part of the reason why these films were so shocking was that the grisly depictions of evil were incongruous with the places in which they occurred: the summer camp, the school, the traditional village, and most importantly, the suburbs.

It’s by no means an accident that such stories are predominantly set in a small town that is suddenly plagued by the presence of a faceless killer. Carpenter’s Halloween and The Fog (1980) both take place in quiet communities, a tranquillity soon dashed by malevolent forces. According to the likes of Joseph Campbell, this narrative structure has its basis in myth, where a hero must rise and conquer the evil that faces them, returning their tribe to peace and serenity.

Normally, it’s a group of teenagers who must rise to the challenge, and they’re often the objects of the crazed murderer’s aggression, too. Think Friday the 13th (1980), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and Scream (1996), among countless others. Not only does this provide an additional layer of shock (while we’ve probably been desensitised to it at this point, there once was a time when watching adolescents getting stabbed to death was considered indecent), but it also allows for us to engage with the national mood of the time.

Analysing the tone of some slasher flicks, as well as the concerns or preoccupations of its protagonists, can reveal a lot about the contemporary national zeitgeist. For example, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) has been interpreted as the artistic manifestation of a country falling into societal decay amid the Watergate scandal. Similarly, Black Christmas (1974) features feminist critique in a country still reeling from the ruling in the historic Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court ruling.

With this in mind, while the slasher film may be an effective lens to analyse American culture and politics, the genre has particularly served to edify audiences on society’s treatment of women. Indeed, many of these blood-soaked flicks appear to be tailor-made for feminist analysis. The majority of these films feature nubile young women being mercilessly gutted, with only the chaste virgins being spared in the slaughter.

Women are usually the objects of the killer’s obsession. Revealingly, police rarely do anything about the crime until it’s too late: though they are directly connected to the ensuing misogynistic violence, cops argue that an obscene phone call or a creepy guy standing on your lawn isn’t a punishable offence. These sequences frustrate and terrify because the inaction to protect women from harm feels despairingly accurate.

With this in mind, filmmakers revelled in this destruction of the cosy aura we associate with our homes: the safety and security we all associate with our domestic spaces is the first violation in any slasher film, as evidenced in Black Christmas, When a Stranger Calls (1979), and Scream. The phone becomes a link to the outside world, the aura of safety melts away, and women are rendered perpetually afraid by malicious, predominantly male agents.

Of course, it doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to detect the heavy dose of symbolism in these slasher movies. While Slavoj Žižek has argued that Psycho (1960) engages in a Lacanian exploration of the structure of the human mind, most would arrive at the more logical, less ornate conclusion: the knife is symbolic of the penis, and these stories exploit the fear of rape. This theme of repressed sexuality erupting into crazed aggression is explored very earnestly in Peeping Tom (1960) and very ridiculously in The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), but in each film, the stabbing implement is emblematic of phallic violence.

Every slasher director must seemingly take a course in Freudian dream analysis. But overuse of this symbolism and genre tropes have cheapened their original purpose: few slasher films intend on actually frightening these days. Instead, they have become meta-textual products, exercises in postmodernism. The slasher film has buckled under the weight of its legacy: they are burdened with delivering all the genre tropes diehard fans expect to see, while also being wholly original.

Suffice to say, few of these current slashers end up being truly scary. Horror has shifted, the game has changed, and the slasher film has been left behind. The slasher deluge which inundates filmgoers every Halloween today just wants to provide the annual dose of creative gore, with the rebooted Scream (2022) and Scream VI (2023) only striving to deliver good fan service. If scares are had, it’s incidental, a lucky bonus to the thick layers of self-referential narrative devices.

This is a fate which could have been predicted: when Kevin Williamson wrote Scream, he was satirising tired tropes of a genre that was cheapening itself. Yet, only one year later and after the massive success of the Wes Craven-directed cult classic, he wrote I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997). This was a film that doesn’t satirise genre clichés but falls in love with them, just like audiences did.

Much like a child wanting to read their favourite bedtime story, viewers fell in love with the predictability of the format. Who will die next? What rules will be followed and which will be fatally ignored? Don’t wander off on your own. Don’t go and see what that strange noise was. Avoid drugs and alcohol—those will end up getting you stabbed, a lot. Sex will almost certainly get you sliced up. Continue with the assumption that someone in your group is the knife-wielding killer. And, of course, never say: “I’ll be right back.”

Either as pastiche or as homage, we enjoy revelling in these imitators because they remind us of the thrills from better, more iconic offerings which the genre seems to have no intention of recreating in earnest. Though Ti West’s X (2022) experienced great success, I couldn’t find anything that was original, fresh, or imaginative. It was just another derivative slice of slasher gore. Perhaps it’s because even attempting frights (let alone social commentary, symbolism, or common sense) is now anathema to the slasher film; it’s just about having fun.