But make no mistake: This isn’t a guilty-pleasure slasher it’s an endurance test littered with looped dialogue, stilted performances, and questionable stylistic choices. Reportedly shot on a budget of $20,000, this woodland slasher has accrued a cult reputation since its release. On that note, how many of these movies, which range from the independently produced to major-studio affairs, are actually worth a damn? From the supernatural to the occult to the quintessential teen, here’s every 1981 slasher, ranked for your displeasure. Quick to produce and easy to score distribution, the slashers flooding cinemas 40 years ago varied in both quality and coherence. With no chance to broker streaming deals or corner the nascent home-video market, horror producers partnered with major distributors keen to pack mall multiplexes with youngsters who were happy to see their demographic skewered, bludgeoned, and sliced and diced onscreen. The apex of the subgenre’s wave, 1981, saw a staggering amount of them released into theaters. That’s nothing compared with the golden age of slashers. Carpenter’s baby has been refashioned within that group too Halloween Kills, the central chapter in Blumhouse’s reboot trilogy, is now in theaters breaking pandemic box-office records. Now, original franchises are returning with sequels or reboots of Scream, Candyman, and Child’s Play, all resurrected for eager horror hounds. The latter kick-started a new cycle of teen slashers stretching into the early aughts and sputtering back to life again in the late aughts with a spate of remakes. Despite their ardent supporters and subsequent reappropriation as cult favorites, franchise sequels and straight-to-video efforts put the slasher to sleep until the mid-’90s, when Wes Craven’s back-to-back meta-whammy of New Nightmare and Scream revived the gasping genre.
Its swift rise was matched by a swift decline in both quantity and quality, however. While horror purists know 1974’s Black Christmas was the first to hone the slasher tropes introduced in Peeping Tom and Psycho, both from 1960, the early ’80s saw the subgenre reach its peak. Also known as body-count movies, slashers aren’t beholden to a strict set of guidelines but instead include a loose set of criteria cooked down to one central idea: A killer stalks and murders a group of people.Ĭarpenter’s 1978 hit might have perfected this model, but that film’s first imitator, Friday the 13th, two years later, signaled how easily the format could swiftly be replicated, generating millions at the box office. The premise of John Carpenter’s Halloween stands in for the very definition of a modern slasher film. Photos: Universal MGM Paramount TromaĪn escaped asylum patient in a white mask stalks a quiet, unsuspecting suburb prowling for teenagers to mutilate.
0 kommentar(er)
