Slasher movies
No splatter flick ever won Best Picture, except for the one that did
It started, god help me, with Cocaine Bear.
Who knew what to expect? If I had been bored at home, with too much of the internet unscrolled — a too-stocked Steam library, a too-ready river of streaming services — this mid-budget meme movie could have come and gone without ever crossing my desk. A guy came to the theater in a big rubber bear costume, spiritual precursor to DJ Jazzy Jeff, and like… Look, we’re all just here to have a good time. But after watching enough haha fun facts get vaccuumed into uber-clickable headlines and regurgitated as Oscars sight gags, you get a good sense of which dead horses arrive pre-beaten.
But in those halcyon pre-Kimmel days, Cocaine Bear made for a great excuse to go out to dinner with some friends. We dragged our barbecue-laden bodies through concessions, passed the time in a packed theater, and sat around till the small hours talking about slashers.
I mean, is Cocaine Bear a slasher? I liked Fear Street a whole lot, caught pieces of Scream at a Halloween party before seeing last year’s reboot in theaters. Otherwise I was clueless. I lacked context for the art form as a whole. Outside of some core set, how far could you twist a genre label until it snapped?
That question chased me through the dark forests and narrow hallways of half a dozen slasher flicks, and a whole dismembered heap of journal articles, book chapters, think pieces on one of the least charmed categories of cinema.
I wanted to prove something about the way we judge movies, and what we lose when we’re set on respectability. Check your locks, cover your mirrors, and don’t sneak off.
Hollywood’s bloodiest decade
I think genre is best viewed in hindsight. Like, if you stood up on the shoulders of X and the latest Scream release, you’d see a valley about two decades long. Then, beyond the ‘90s meta-slashers like I Know What You Did Last Summer and the original Scream — I say “meta” because Scream is a slasher-satire, and because IKWYDLS director Jim Gillespie wanted the challenge of using every slasher trope but still scoring scares — beyond those foothills, you’d see the tall peak of a golden age.
(Be kind, I am very new to the genre! I’m gonna go at a pretty breakneck clip, but want to acknoweldge that horror fans are the most wonderful and dedicated subset of moviewatchers in the world, and I hope they share the wealth of their experience in the comments! Please!)
John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) provides a good center of gravity for talking about slashers that were “the first.” It set off the US slasher craze, and defined tropes that fans would come to expect. Depending on the breadth of your definition, you could whiddle back much further. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Black Christmas came out within days of each other in October 1974, almost half a decade prior.
Articles with titles like “The REAL First Slasher” abound. Torso (1973), Ten Little Indians (1965), Blood and Black Lace (1964), Peeping Tom and Psycho (1960). Let’s just say Halloween is the most copied US slasher. It’s at least considered the start of the golden age.
In 1980 you get Friday the 13th, another straight-up-and-down slasher about lots of people dying, and not really about anything else. By 1981 and the release of, for example, the frat comedy/horror Final Exam — weirdly one of the few slashers I’d seen, critically panned and my girlfriend’s personal favorite — you start seeing a lot more movies written off as cheapy fast-follows to the success of Halloween. People were bored. So something interesting happened.
Look at the Golden Age of Westerns, from 1940 to 1960. Early on you got a lot of white hats, damsels, Texas Rangers. When people got bored after twenty years of tumbleweeds, directors were forced to get creative. They got psychological. The Searchers, born in the twilight of ‘50s, explored a cowboy’s battlemind and is often considered the greatest western ever made. Then you get spaghetti westerns, which are actually the greatest westerns ever made.
What I’m working around to is this: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) closed out the golden age, and it’s highly regarded, but it’s also the most tenuously linked to its mother genre. Killers generally had some kind of supernatural hardiness and omnipresence, but they weren’t literally jumping out of nightmares. They didn’t replace you in your bedsheets with a fountain of blood.
More to the point, they weren’t generally rhetorical, whereas NOES wants to convey a youth empowerment narrative. It has a “Themes” section on Wikipedia.
Looking backward from the peak of the Golden Age of Slashers, you start to see why that is.
Slashers on cave walls
Let’s talk about Psycho, because it’s in the Google snippet for “first slasher” and the proto-slasher I’m most familiar with. (Regretably, since Hitchcock was a huge jerk.)
People who know way more about this stuff than me avow its influence on the slasher. When I watched it though, I got a strong sense that it built on the shoulders of whodunnits. There’s mystery around its killings, which resolves when a psychoanalyst character rounds up the cast and describes in exacting detail the nature of the crime — an ersatz parlor room scene.
Critics aware of Psycho’s marketing campaign know, but rarely mention, that the film adapts a horror novel. It takes inspiration from real life, from popular ideas about psychoanalysis, from the lineage of murder stories that came before. Ten Little Indians adapts Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, both a proto-slasher and classic whodunnit. These stories cast a much longer shadow than 1978 and the “first” slasher.
Compare that with “the babysitter and the man upstairs,” an urban legend spread through the ‘50s, adapted into Black Christmas, and then retrofitted for an early clown-crazed internet. How do these stories influence each other? If Psycho is proto-slasher, is Black Christmas proto-nosleep creepypasta?
Genre doesn’t daisy-chain from artwork to artwork: it spontaneously reflects daydreams and never-ending nightmares. People never stopped fearing that killers walk among us. Young women have infinite good reasons to fear unstable men. Horror and fear evolved together.
Carol J. Clover, the High Priestess of slasher scholarship who named the “Final Girl” archetype, argues in Men, Women, and Chainsaws that each new slasher movie is more like a retelling:
Students of folklore or early literature recognize in the slasher film the hallmarks of oral story: the free exchange of themes and motifs, the archetypal characters and situations, the accumulation of sequels, remakes, imitations. This is a field in which there is in some sense no original, no real or right text, but only variants; a world in which, therefore, the meaning of the individual example lies outside itself.
She notes that horror and pornography are the only two “body” genres, as in they exist primarily to affect the body. “Skin flicks,” “flesh films,” “meat movies.” I truly do not know which refers to which genre.
The difference is one of abstraction, and her example is a real barn burner: The Graduate, a romcom about a boy overcoming desire for his friend’s mother, is two degrees removed from our shadiest psychological depths; Psycho is one degree, a man who kills because he’s repressed an unhealthy relationship with his own mother; then — I could draw you a map, but I think you’ll find your way. Clover cites Taboo.
Slashers, in this view, are about gender in the way porn is about sex. Clover — persuasively, to my mind — distinguishes ‘70s-wave “true” slashers by their introduction of the Final Girl. But she presents no definitive algorithm by which to say “this movie is a genuine slasher” or “this movie isn’t.”
It’s the folklore thing again, the “free exchange of themes and motifs.” It’s ghost stories. It’s commedia dell'arte with more knives and exactly as many clowns. There’s the Killer, the Terrible Place, the Weapon, the Victims, the Shock, but the environment in which the story is told determines everything about how each role is cast.
I started my education in pursuit of a grand claim. A suspicion, but no language to explore it with. Now I’m confident:
No Country for Old Men is a slasher
No sooner do I mention the Coen brothers’ 2007 Best Picture winner than I sort of regret bringing it up. It is no indie darling. What’s more, it’s popular in such a way and among such demographics as bleak, masculine films tend to be. I worry that those who love No Country will groan, and those who love slashers will be upset — maybe rightfully — that I’m smuggling subcultural capital, the genre’s historic unpopularity with critics.
For now let me just say: I love No Country for Old Men for its pedigree and gravity, but moreover I love it as a western. Give me cowboys, give me six guns, give me giddyups. Give me the dry-spoken lonesome drifter. And my love of slashers is young, but ardent. I compare the two because I think they tell us something important together. Their similarities aren’t just whatnot.
Or maybe I’m dead wrong, but let’s at least talk it out:
The Killer. Slashers are extremely repressed, violent because they get off on violence. Anton Chigurh isn’t a fetishist — we aren’t given to understand anything in particular about his mother or his babysitter — but he takes an important step towards slashing by denying personal responsibility for his actions. His emotional maturity is stunted, which leads him to pin life and death on coin flips. Remember The Graduate? We’re talking in degrees-from-pornography.
He clears other slashers in terms of philosophizing, but I don’t think we’re meant to realistically respect his motives. Chigurh just found some escapist dressing to conceal for himself the desire to kill. In the fashion of a Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger, he is just super duper evil.
The Terrible Place. Did you ever see that scene in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly when Blondie has to walk through the desert, no water? Rambling deadly expanses define the frontier. The horror of the Wild West informs everything else about the genre.
Technology makes No Country’s West into something more recognizable, but recognition is another kind of fear. Maybe you’ve passed by that roadside gas station or motel. You might turn a corner and find yourself on an empty street in a quiet town.
This is not nearly the furthest extent you can take this argument, by the way. I saw someone describe No Country as “cosmic horror,” the subgenre in which humanity’s insignificance is a primary theme. Space is, after all, the final frontier.
The Weapon. Here’s the most grievous point I can levy against Chigurh-qua-slasher: he pretty liberally uses firearms. That’s a big no-no for slasher villains.
His captive bolt pistol on the other hand, the weird tank-and-tube apparatus he drags with him, ought to go down in history alongside chainsaws and razor gloves as the most recognizable slasher weapons in history. It’s brutal, awkward as a hockey mask, suggests the same “human cattle” theme as the ultimate pro-vegitarian movie, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Plus, slasher weapons need to be phallic. And like, I’m not a gun guy, but Chigurh’s silenced shotgun has got to be up there.
The Victims. (Spoilers ahead, but I mean, you’re already here.) Carol J. Clover writes at length about the extreme regularity of slasher victims, young women by reputation. No Country is almost totally no-girls-allowed. But there’s one universal slasher trope that I think is a) absolutely core to the genre and b) absolutely core to the rhetoric of No Country: what Clover calls the “comedic ineptitude of the would-be woodsman.”
She’s referring to Little Red Riding Hood, in which a heroic male lumberjack defeats the wolf and saves the leading lady and her grandma. In slashers, any boy who tries to stand up to the killer invariably dies, usually in such a firework of violence that he sets back the heroine’s attempts at escape and survival. No one will come to save the Final Girl — she’s on her own.
No Country for Old Men is, in my view, about would-be woodsmen.
Moss’s abrupt death is one of the movie’s key themes. Bell retires. No one is left to help Carla Jean. Chigurh tells her that her murder will be a result of Moss’s failure, even as he spent the entire movie trying to convince us he’d be the cavalier on a hi-ho-silver charger.
Clover points out that men die in slashers because they make mistakes, and women die because they are women. Moss’s act of selflessness, then his greed, causes his demise. Carla Jean dies by association.
She doesn’t get to stab Chigurh a dozen times, or lock him in a burning house, or dismember him and raise a chainsaw triumphantly overhead. But she delivers a line that cuts through the sackcloth honor, and violence in the name of honor, that No Country’s male characters are driven by. In the legacy of Final Girls, Carla Jean delivers the only rational dialog in the whole script.
“The coin don’t have no say. It’s just you.”
Shock. No Country, like Friday the 13th and Halloween, opens on a double homicide. Before reading anything scholarly, scenes like these gave me the inkling that it had something in common with Hollywood’s least acclaimed genre, despite its artsy-fartsiness. Between quiet breaths of horror, one scene shrieked of it.
Think about a western shootout. It’s one-one, fair and square, high noon. Or, it’s one versus many, a deadeye versus hopelessly inept goons. Moss’s shootout with Chigurh is neither of those. It’s bloody and frantic.
Moss flags down a car to try and run for it. Suddenly, a gunshot shatters the glass and tears through the unnamed driver’s throat. Watch that scene, with all its lone streetlights and tension. Tell me No Country has nothing to do with Halloween.
I promise you what I’m saying isn’t semantic, like “it’s all in Wendy’s head” or “Zion is in the Matrix.” No Country for Old Men leans hard on the slasher, and that’s what art is all about.
We see one movie, and it evokes all of this raw hindbrain fear, violence and survival and sex and moment — the substance from which our connection to stories is built. We watch it, and decide it’s too much. It’s a fun flick, but it’s not art.
Then we watch another movie that, instead of baring the substance, abstracts it for the purpose of sending a message. The second movie is delicate, and it’s beautiful, but it’s also thinner than the ghost story.
Loving one should never preclude loving the other, especially since everything in the one depends on everything in the other. I think about it a little like an equation: the message of No Country + the psychic reality of the slasher = an artwork more powerful than either alone. But the artwork minus the reality is just a textbox. 12 pt. Arial.
The artwork minus the reality is Cocaine Bear. Better yet, it’s Scream VI. Its killer is a legacy admission, but what else does it have in common with the genre it supposedly tributes? Its Final Girl is a Final Marketable Four; its useless male hanger-on is its himbo savior; themes of desperation and gender are replaced by easy-to-internationalize platitudes about family.
I had a great time watching Scream VI. It’s a fun action movie. But there’s nothing ungovernable about it. It has nothing to say, and it has no vocabulary to say it with.
Narrative speaks in genre. Slashers contain fear bigger than all the spilled ink in every Letterboxd account could inscribe, because their fear is known without learning. To think any artwork could affect us without slicing its keyhole of insight across the generational accumulate of genre knowledge — it’s a champed up way to say the artist is beyond human.
Sure, you can lower yourself to the level of something without human connection. Something base, but with, you could say, the stimulant of reason. A wild animal, high off of what they found lying around, without the context to understand where it came from.
Thanks for reading! Still calibrating things like length and time between posts, but I really wanted to do my due dilligence. I feel like this might be a “done when it’s done” affairs. But I know I didn’t cover nearly everything to say about slashers, so I hope the true believers will sound off. We all have lots to learn from them.
Next time, let’s do something breezy: let’s push TikTok further than it’s supposed to go. Subscribe, and I’ll see you there.
DR