The Blood Pack: Five Essential Slasher Films
Written by Matt
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“There is one sure-fire way to kick-start a film career:
Take eight teenagers to a house and chop ‘em up.”
- Dov S-S Simens

        Choosing a quintet of essential slasher films is not easy. Not because there are so many slasher films to choose from, but because there are so few really good ones. For decades now, young filmmakers and actors have used the sex-and-slaughter formula as a potential calling card to bigger and better Hollywood things, but all too often, those industry intros have been outros at the same time. I would contend that there are more, and worse, bad films in the slasher horror genre than in perhaps any other. But I also believe that when a slasher picture is created by filmmakers who really know what they’re doing, the elements of cinematography, editing, makeup, art direction, music and sound come together to create an experience that ranks among the most cinematically satisfying available. Aspiring horror filmmakers, and anyone looking for a good jolt this Halloween, would do well to study the five examples listed below. Bloody, outside the box, and sure to provoke argument, here, in alphabetical order, are my five essential slasher flicks.

FREDDY VS. JASON (2003, Ronny Yu): With this blood-splattered smackdown, Hong Kong action helmer Yu and screenwriters Damian Shannon and Mark Swift (who also wrote the recent Friday the 13^th remake / reboot) have created the most entertaining film to feature either fedora-hatted, razor-fingered boogeyman Freddy Krueger or indestructible hockey-masked killing machine Jason Voorhees. Shannon and Swift craft an inventive story that brings modern horror’s two most iconic mad killers together in a way that plays fair with their respective mythologies and still provides plenty of room for the kind of limbs-flying, viscera-spewing mayhem we go to these movies for in the first place. The killers’ potential victims are among the most engaging and sympathetic in slasher cinema, each with their own backstory that keeps the action compelling even when Freddy and Jason aren’t onscreen. But it’s when these two take the spotlight that this film really shines. Robert Englund, channeling the less jokey, more menacing Freddy of Wes Craven’s original Nightmare on Elm Street, does series-best work here (I seriously wouldn’t have complained if he’d gotten a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination), and Ken Kirzinger, hulking and utterly implacable, is the only Jason who’s ever actually frightened me. The film is beautifully shot and edited to turn on a dime, and Yu stages his brutal set pieces with maximum flair, particularly a dazzling sequence in which Jason attacks a rave in a cornfield. The film builds beautifully to the final, explosive showdown between the two madmen, a sprawling battle that more than lives up to the hype. As a classic monster face-off, this film leaves the Alien Vs. Predator pictures in the dust, and it represents the slasher genre as its most fun.

HALLOWEEN (1978, John Carpenter): Halloween is the slasher film for cinema classicists, a picture that relies less on blood and entrails than it does on shadows, silence, and sudden jolts from the far side of the screen. It’s an expert deployment of the cinematic tricks that suspense filmmakers have been using since the dawn of cinema, and in its tale of a psychotic masked killer preying on innocent-but-amoral teenage victims, it laid the foundation for a horror subgenre that is still going strong 30-plus years later. Many of Carpenter’s stylistic tropes here have become staples of the slasher film genre: the P.O.V. shots that transform our gazes into that of the killer (the cinematographer was Dean Cundey, who went on to work for many years with Steven Spielberg), the slow-walking slasher who somehow magically materializes in his victims’ paths, and of course, the now-clichéd the-killer’s-not-really-dead climax. Watch the film today, and you’ll be surprised by how few victims Michael Myers claims, and by how relatively bloodless the killings depicted onscreen are. But that in no way diminishes him as a threat or as a force for evil. Halloween made the careers of Carpenter and of chief onscreen screamer Jamie Lee Curtis, and it provided a magnificent role for Donald Pleasence as a psychiatrist who once wanted to cure Michael Myers of his depravity, and now wants nothing more than to personally put him in the grave. Top it all off with the greatest score in horror film history, and you have a film that is required viewing in film schools across the country, and that should be required viewing every October 31^st.

HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER (1989, John McNaughton): Henry was actually made in 1985, but it took four years for the filmmakers to find a distributor brave enough to release it. Watching the picture, it’s not hard to see what made potential distributors squeamish. McNaughton’s low-budget wonder is the slasher film stripped to its bare essence, the tale of a dead-eyed, affectless drifter whose brutal, loveless upbringing and social disenfranchisement have only made him capable of interacting with others by taking their lives in horrifically graphic fashion. Amidst a backdrop of Chicago squalor, Henry plies his bloody trade with the help of his old cellmate Otis, who at first is appalled by his pal’s murderous ways but who eventually becomes a more enthusiastic purveyor of slaughter than Henry himself. Caught in the middle is Otis’s ne’er-do-well sister, who somehow seems to be falling for Henry at the behest of Otis, who loves his sister…and wants to express that love the old-fashioned way. Michael Rooker’s Henry is every thousand-yard-staring mug shot brought to chilling life, and Tom Towles’s Otis is arguably the most loathsome character in modern cinema. Henry’s relentlessly grubby milieu and brutal onscreen slayings are appropriately disturbing, but what makes the film doubly terrifying is its relentless commitment to realism (the film is actually based on the true story of spree killers Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole). McNaughton’s film serves as a rebuke to all the flash and stylistic gamesmanship of modern slasher cinema. Here, beneath the masks and the tits and wisecracking ghouls, is what it’s all about: a deeply tormented human being laying utter waste to other human beings just because he can. The first time I saw Henry, I said to myself, “Wow, that was excellent. I never need to see that again.” This is essential horror viewing…once.

SCREAM (1996, Wes Craven): This postmodern scarefest, which resurrected the dormant career of horror master Wes Craven and put ultra-stylized screenwriter Kevin Williamson on the map, provides the unique experience of watching the slasher film watch itself. A ghost-masked killer is stalking the teens of Woodsboro, and all that stands between them and utter destruction is their knowledge of the conventions of horror cinema, laid out in clever fashion by geeky video store clerk Randy (Jamie Kennedy). Scream takes the daring step of presenting smart, sharp-witted characters who are aware of the conventions of the very genre of film in which they’re appearing, and it’s great, perverse fun for the viewer, who is even smarter than these characters, to watch the Woodsboro teens, who know all the mistakes that get slasher-film characters killed, nevertheless bumble into those mistakes and fall right into the killer’s clutches. Craven utilizes every gambit in his considerable bag of tricks, honed by years at the top of the horror game, to deliver shocks and slaughter that are just as potent as in any slasher flick (I was particularly impressed with the killer’s novel usage of a garage door’s swinging pet entrance), while never short-changing the wit Williamson’s generic navel-gazing. Scream also works as a whodunit, with the kids scrambling to discover the identity of Ghostface before he takes them all out; the revelation of the killer’s identity is the film’s gory-crazy highlight. This picture made minor stars out of much of its cast, including Neve Campbell, David Arquette, and the hilarious Matthew Lillard, and its success was largely responsible for the late ‘90s boom in ultra-ironic, self-aware slasher flicks. With the recent success of the Hostel and Saw franchises, the genre has once more retreated into a dead-serious, moralistic stance, but for a few years, it was fun to watch slasher flicks that knew they were slasher flicks, and we have Scream to thank for that.

THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974, Tobe Hooper): If I had been writing today about only one must-see slasher film, this would have been my pick. It’s my favorite modern horror film, and it was ground zero for Halloween and all the slashers that followed. Like Psycho, Tobe Hooper took the inspiration for his macabre masterpiece from the true story of Wisconsin serial slasher Ed Gein, but the freedoms of modern filmmaking allowed him to hew closer to the gory details than Hitchcock was able to, meathooks, human-skin masks, cannibalism and all. The result is some of the most disturbing and visceral images ever seen on film. The story of five innocent kids who just happen to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, Texas Chain Saw is unparalleled in its creation of mood and atmosphere. You can almost smell the rotting flesh and desiccated chicken bones that clutter the battered old house of the film’s family of West Texas murderers, and the killings here happen with none of the flashy lighting and spectacular effects of subsequent slashers. People are hung on meathooks, brained with cattle-pummeling hammers, and run through with chainsaw blades. And it ain’t pretty. This isn’t a bloody film, but it’s a raw and shocking one, and the masked, squealing Leatherface, with titular weapon of choice always at the ready, is the prototypical movie slasher, the one all the others have had to live up to. The last half hour of this film is a relentless rush of brilliant editing, nonstop screaming and roaring chainsaws, as Marilyn Burns (for my money, the best screamer in film history) is chased by the unstoppable Leatherface and finds herself at a horrific family dinner, a perverse bastardization of Norman Rockwell and the film’s most wrenching heart-of-darkness moment. There’s even some room here for social commentary, as the closing of the local slaughterhouse, throwing these professional killers out of work, has left them to pursue their bloody business in the private sector (a potent theme in light of soldiers then returning from Vietnam being branded baby killers). Hooper’s film was remade in 2003, and while this re-do had some solid scares and gross-outs, it couldn’t hold a candle to its ancestor. Though, they try, they don’t make ‘em like this any more. And for my money, this is the only time they made ‘em quite like this.

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