Everyone knows the impact John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) had on the evolution of the horror film. Made for a meagre $320,000, it went on to make a veritable killing at the box-office, and is regularly cited as one of the all-time great genre movies. While its premise was not exactly groundbreaking, a gang of ill-fated teens are stalked and slain by a knife-wielding masked maniac; its execution was flawless. Unsurprisingly, studios keen to make a fast buck with the cinematic slaughter of adolescents took note, and by the beginning of the 1980's theatres were overflowing with a multitude of teen slasher flicks.
Carpenter's stroke of genius was not in the concept, but in the setting. In the late 1970's the slasher flick was still in its infancy. There had already been several movies flirting with the stalk and slash formula, Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) being the most notable case for bringing such seemingly depraved subject matter into the mainstream popular consciousness. But it was Halloween that situated this simple concept within an exclusively teenage milieu, with the action unfolding over a background of typical teenage concerns - babysitting, prom dates and sexual discovery. Much like the teenage rebel cinema of the 1950's spoke exclusively to youth audiences in films such as The Wild One (1953) or Rebel Without a Cause (1955); Halloween offered the chance for a new generation of teens to see a film with adolescent matters in mind. Carpenter's film created believable and likeable teens that young audiences could identify with, and by throwing the homicidal Michael Myers into the mix, added a macabre new twist that proved irresistible.
With its steady pace, ominous score and expert understanding of spatial awareness, Halloween remains the artistic highpoint of the teen slasher sub-genre. Yet two years later, the emergence of Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13 th (1980) presented the confirmation of its commercial viability, and was instrumental in the imminent boom. Detailing the gory demise of a group of teenage camp counsellors, the film took the Carpenter blueprint and ran with it, slashing the characterisation and upping the gore quota on its way. Friday the 13 th cynically honed in on the genre's developing formula and conventions, and was an overwhelming commercial success. Essentially the first marketable example of the 'body-count movie', audiences went to see the elaborate death scenes, with the teen sex and scantily clad young ladies adding a voyeuristic bonus to the sleazy proceedings. As with Halloween , this was not an entirely new concept. Bob Clark's seasonal slasher Black Christmas (1974) was an early example of the stalker film set in a sorority house, while Mario Bava's masterful Bay of Blood (1971) (also known under several other titles including 'Twitch of the Death Nerve' and, perversely, 'Last House on the Left Part II', despite having no connection to Wes Craven's film) focused largely on explicit and inventive death scenes. Bava's film was an effective prototype of this 'body-count' cinema, although its bizarre ecological plotline and adult victims held little resonance with young viewers, and it was Cunningham's film that received the notoriety and financial success. Teenage matters prevailed, with an increasing focus on those of the carnal variety, and the method had seemingly been perfected.
And so it began. Teens in terror meant big business, and there were adolescents everywhere itching to see their cinematic equivalents butchered on the big screen. Dismissed in critical or academic circles, the teen slasher was viewed by many as pure exploitation, and seen to be of little more merit than pornography. But these films were primarily concerned with making money, not art, and teen audiences could not get enough. Films ranged from the good - My Bloody Valentine (1981), Happy Birthday To Me (1981), to the bad - Don't Go Into the Woods (1981), Mortuary (1983) and everything in between. Meanwhile, fresh from her success in Halloween , Jamie Lee Curtis became the teen slasher's most marketable star with follow-up roles in Prom Night (1980) and Terror Train (1980). Teenage audiences now truly had a cinema that they could claim as their own. In the most part the films were cheap, fun and nasty, and the fact that they were held in such low regard by adults and the moral majority just made the appeal that much greater for thrill seeking youths.
As time went on the increasingly repetitive nature of the films produced inevitably lead to a decline in popularity. Films like Sorority House Massacre (1986) or Cheerleader Camp (1987) added little to a style that had once seemed so sordidly pleasurable, and by the late 1980's the sub-genre had run its course and fallen off the radar, with fewer and fewer films being made. Meanwhile, the emerging success of the non-horror teen film offered juveniles more opportunities to witness the budding sexualities of pot-smoking teens on the big screen. The commercial triumph of The Breakfast Club (1984) or Pretty in Pink (1986) left the formulaic slashers feeling redundant and dated, and John Hughes and his peers had effectively cornered the market on the restless teenage consumer. By the 1990's the slasher film had effectively ceased in its output. Horror cinema had gone upmarket and the era of the psychological thriller had arrived. The Silence of the Lambs (1990) proved horror could be both nasty and classy, and it appeared that the horrid little slasher film was officially dead. But in the mid-nineties a script by an unknown Kevin Williamson named Scary Movie began circulating around Hollywood , and it was not long before the genre was resurrected and a teen horror renaissance was upon us.
That script emerged on film in 1996 under the new title of Scream . Directed by horror-meister Wes Craven, who had previously achieved great success with the invention of one of cinemas most cherished teen killers Freddy Krueger, the film was a huge hit both commercially and critically. The formula remained much the same, with the requisite masked killer stalking unfortunate high schoolers, only this time the characters were accustomed to the conventions of the slasher film, citing past classics and comparing the events to those found in every other horror film. Having dabbled with post-modernism in his previous effort Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994), Scream took the idea one step further, laying out the genre conventions to the audience before willingly playing them out. If teenage audiences had become increasingly unable to identify with those dim-witted characters that go out into the woods to investigate a strange noise, the kids in Scream were equally annoyed by such impenetrable logic. In blurring the boundaries between fantasy and reality, audiences could once again identify with the unlucky victims as they too had been raised on a diet of trashy teen slashers.
As those good old days of the 1980's golden age proved, where there is one successful slasher flick, there will be many more to follow, and over the next couple of years a barrage of imitators flooded cinemas. The stalk and slash machine was back in business, yet there was some initial reserve as to the future of the genre. Scream had been an undeniable success, but when a film so shrewdly deconstructs a genre, is there anywhere left to go?
Next in line in the splatter revival was the nautical nightmare I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), based on another script by Williamson. While the film toyed with a dash of self-reflexivity, its irony level was dramatically less than that of Scream , and was instead a rather more standard slasher affair. Similarly the lacklustre efforts Urban Legend (1998) and Valentine (2001) were also played mostly straight, essentially feeling like the familiar slashers of two decades before, only with higher production values and some recognisable teen stars attached. While many had predicted the field would be inundated with knowing Scream rip-offs, the genre seemed to make a u-turn, and it soon felt as though nothing had ever changed. The two Scream sequels may have continued to affectionately parody the genre, while the Williamson scripted (although not strictly slasher) film The Faculty (1998) was candid in its homage to the various incarnations of 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers', yet such films surprisingly remained anomalies. Scream , it appeared, did not represent the much-anticipated second death of the beloved sub-genre, but instead gave it another chance of life by rekindling a desire for those familiar shockers of yesterday. Although in true slasher fashion the films that emerged became increasingly listless, and it was their monotony that again led to a decrease in productions. While there was the occasional gem, the sharp chiller Cherry Falls (2000) for example, superfluous sequels to Urban Legend or I Know What You Did Last Summer left most audiences bored instead of scared. The glossy productions and predictable shocks had taken the edge away from the slasher film, and teenagers soon became jaded when a hackneyed uniformity began to once again set in.
Worse still, the Wayans brothers surfaced promptly with the slasher spoof Scary Movie (2000), a slapstick mess that broadly parodied this new-wave of horror films. Taking Scream as its reference point, the film's unsophisticated tendency towards gross-out sight gags undid the work done by Craven and Williamson in their far more subtle satire, and left the slasher feeling more outdated than ever. The slasher spoof had already been attempted before in a film like Return to Horror High (1987), and the Wayans' movie added nothing to a rather tired concept. The film was a colossal hit however, and led to two equally abhorrent sequels, which gravitated away from pure teen slasher parody and instead opened the floodgates to an unscrupulous horror spoof free for all.
So once again the teen slasher film had undergone a swift rise to prominence, followed by a steady slump, all in a matter of a few years. Scream had made the sub-genre a viable commodity once more by establishing characters the horror savvy teen market could relate to. But while the emergence of Scream reinvented a stale concept for a new generation of viewers, the films that followed were simply too keen to get those kids back in the cinema, failing to realise they now expected something more than a lifeless rehash of past efforts. Perhaps in twenty years from now a mischievous young scriptwriter will come along and renovate the treasured teen slasher film once again. If so, we can only hope the films that will inevitably follow can learn from the mistakes of the past and understand that, in the cutthroat world of the stalk and slash market, progression is your only real chance for survival.
Michael Blyth
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