What's your Favorite Scary Movie?

Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees, Freddy Kruger, Chucky, and Leatherface are just a few of  the iconic names in pop culture brought about by slasher movies. Most people could probably point out features about some of them. These slasher icons have graced the big and small screens for around 40 years, keeping many of us up at night worrying about if you locked your front door and checked your closet. Slasher movies are so intertwined with horror they are often used interchangeably, but they aren’t the same. Horror is a genre of film that seeks to elicit fear and/or disgust in its audience for entertainment purposes. In the slasher subgenre, a killer stalks a group of people and ends their lives one by one until there is one person remaining (often a ‘final girl’) that stops the killer in its tracks. While it’s a pretty basic concept, slasher movies have dominated the horror genre for a majority of film history, which is why they are so often considered one and the same. But when horror is one of the most popular genres, why have horror movies only been nominated for Best Picture 6 times in history? And how did slashers rise and fall just to rise again?

The Beginning

Blood has always drawn big audiences. Even in ancient times, gladiator battles were watched by all who were able. As times changed, society quickly engineered substitutes for real murder, and opted for false interpretations. Horror was brought to the big screen as soon as the film industry was created, being shown in many silent films and early black and white. These horror films were impactful in monumental ways, but the movie credited with being the first ever slasher would be Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho in 1960. Psycho was a trailblazer in more ways than one, it showed an unmarried couple sleeping in the same bed, it showed a toilet flush for the first time in cinema history, but most importantly: it showed how unsafe you are. It was the tale of an unassuming nice guy who turned out to be a sadistic murderer, even bringing one of the most iconic scenes to this day, the infamous 3 minute long shower kill. 

While Psycho’s success was tremendous, there wouldn’t be another big impact slasher for almost 15 years. 1974 brought two of the most groundbreaking slashers, Black Christmas and A Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Black Christmas told a simple story of a killer working his way through a group of sorority girls. Yet what Black Christmas did was make these characters relatable. They had flaws but were likable and funny, they were human. This was also an aspect of Tobe Hooper’s A Texas Chainsaw Massacre. What Hooper’s classic did differently though, was it showed audiences blood and guts that were rare for a major motion picture at the time. It also brought the ‘based on a true story’ trope that would be slapped at the beginning of many horror movies in the future (whether or not they were actually true). Now once again, slashers would lie dormant for another four years, until the game was changed forever.

Birthing Icons

The so-called “Golden Age” of slasher movies was kicked off in 1978 with the release of John Carpenter’s Halloween. While other films released at the time such as Ridley Scott’s Alien were considered to be more sci-fi upon release, Halloween was a slasher that played it straight up. Halloween brought together all the tropes of slashers into one perfect package. Ideas such as the final girl, a cast of high school teens, and an iconic killer stalking a suburban neighborhood, were all featured in Halloween. The biggest reason for Halloween changing the game for slashers, was the box office. Filmed in only 30 days, Halloween cost about $300,000 to make, and ended up grossing over $70 million. This was seen by everyone in Hollywood at the time and studios began to scramble to replicate it. The goal with these replicas was to make horror films for dirt cheap and it would bring big box office returns. Many of these copycats were profitable, but when it came to stirring up an audience, the most successful one was Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13th in 1980. Friday The 13th wasn’t anything special in comparison to others. So why did it succeed? The time it was released. Friday the 13th was released in May of 1980, 4 months after Ronald Regan took the presidential office. Regan brought a wave of conservative values to Hollywood, and the year 1980 would still to this day be considered one of the tamest years for violence in cinema. So upon its release, Friday the 13th was received horribly by critics and reviewers due to its violence. It was one of the most controversial films of its time, which meant everybody was going to the theater to see it. It made around $60 million at the box office, which in turn led to the first of what nowadays is one of the most common aspects of horror movies, a sequel. With the success of the original, studios discovered sequels would take less work to produce and bring in just as much money. Friday the 13th and Halloween both spawned sequel after sequel, effectively killing the franchises until the profits started declining. Right as audiences seemed bored of watching the stereotypical slashers, Wes Craven revamped (and also killed) slashers with Freddy Kruger and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Where A Nightmare on Elm Street succeeded, was that it brought creativity to a genre that had none to begin with. While movies of the past were shapeless and zombie-like stalkers, Freddy Kruger had personality, cracked jokes, and brought his victims to imaginative dreamscapes that were outside the realm of reality. Where the killers in Halloween and Friday the 13th were just guys in masks, Freddy Kruger was completely fantastical. This led to an onslaught of supernatural stalkers in movies. Notable franchises started in Freddy’s wake would be Child's Play and Hellraiser. From an audience standpoint, this may not seem like a negative, especially when Chucky and the Child's Play movies are one of the most iconic, but it wasn’t exciting from the studio's perspective. The studio’s appeal to slashers came from their ability to be made on low budgets. However, once you up the supernatural aspects, it calls for more special effects which meant a higher budget was required. This led to most of the supernatural franchises outside A Nightmare on Elm Street to do one of two things: Quit after one or two sequels like Candyman, or start releasing sequels to the new home video market instead of theaters like the Child’s Play and Hellraiser franchises. Around this time horror won its first and only award for Best Picture at the Oscars with The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Once again slashers would then lie dormant for many years, not making any social impact or big box office returns until 1996.

The Scream Revival

It’s nearly impossible to convey how much of an impact Wes Craven’s Scream made on not just “slashers”, but on pop culture in 1996. Scream was the perfect concept and came out at the perfect time. It was considered “cool” and “hip” by young adult audiences. It was self aware: The characters knew about Freddy Krueger and can even be seen watching Halloween. It knew what the tropes of slashers were and turned it on its head, but also remained scary and took itself seriously. Where slashers of the 1980s were casting soon-to-be stars like Johnny Depp and Kevin Bacon in their first ever roles, Scream’s marketing campaign was built off the star power of some of the most well known actresses at the time like Drew Barrymore and Courtney Cox. 

Director Wes Craven originally turned down the screenplay for Scream until finding out that Barrymore was attached to the project. Barrymore was set to play the final girl Sidney. Until reading the script and requesting she play Casey Becker, the character killed in the opening scene. She would be the first character seen in the film and get asked the iconic line “What’s your favorite scary movie?.” Which was followed by 10 minutes of exquisitely crafted suspense as the seductive caller slowly turned into a psychotic killer who would eventually murder her. Barrymore’s death put audiences in a state of shock worldwide on opening night, especially when every poster and promotion for the film had her face front and center. 

However, like any successful movie, it spawned multiple attempts to replicate it. While not all bad, studios began casting young stars to get killed by an unknown killer in a whodunit setup, which made these duplications the entire slasher subgenre of the late 1990s. The two best examples of this would be I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Urban Legend (1998). These aren’t bad movies, they just lacked some originality and creativity when it came to the concept and execution. There was a small stint in the late 1990s with found footage movies. The most well-known of these was The Blair Witch Project (1999). It had a simple premise but was portrayed as footage that was real and being filmed by the characters in the movie, giving it a gritty and realistic feel to it. The actors in the film used their real names and were reported missing in advertisements for the movie. The ads were so believable that families of actors began calling the studios to ask if their loved ones had actually gone missing. This would prove to be vital when The Blair Witch Project became the largest budget to box office ratio film of all time. On a budget of $60,000 it grossed around $245 million.

Nostalgia

At the turn of the century, the self awareness and meta commentary brought by Scream was worn out and slashers were becoming disgusting and serious again. This spawned iconic franchises of the early 2000s such as Final Destination (2000). However, the new mantra of 2000s slashers were remakes. Started by the wildly profitable A Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), studios began fighting over the rights of dormant serial killers in hopes of bringing big money just based on the iconic names. Almost every iconic horror movie would be remade, from Halloween (2008) to Friday the 13th (2009). Despised by most horror fans, many of these remakes were received poorly by critics and audiences for lacking any substance and simply making lesser versions of bona fide classics. Along with remakes, A Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake brought back blood and guts to horror cinema. Franchises would begin in the wake of this based on the profitability of gore. Franchises like Saw (2003) and Hostel (2005) would bring audiences to theaters to watch uncensored bloodshed.

After remakes began to filter out, the new seriousness of horror was piggybacked by demonic movies. This led to successful standalones such as Sinister (2012), but more importantly spawned the Insidious and Conjuring franchises, created by James Wan. They remain wildly successful and are still in production to this day, with Insidious: The Red Door releasing in 2023. 

Second Golden Age

For the past 10 years, independent film companies like Blumhouse and A24 are letting directors and writers aim more towards original stand alone movies with bigger messages and meaning behind them. Directors such as Jordan Peele used his films Get Out (2017) and Us (2019) as social commentary on race and class issues in America. Ari Aster, whose first two films  Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019), showed how grief and sadness can overtake a person’s psyche. The power has come back to writers and directors which means horror has no defined shape anymore. It can be over the top campy like Pearl (2022) and Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) or can be metaphorical like It Follows (2014) and The Babadook (2014). Writers and directors can reimagine golden age slashers through movies such as X (2022) and Terrifier (2016). They can even make undefinable slashers like Barbarian (2022) and The Lighthouse (2019). 

Horror movies and slashers are unlike any genre: You scare people with the reality of the world they live in or in a world that is far beyond our own. It’s a genre that is difficult to define, but often underrated. In the modern world where everyday life can feel redundant and uneventful, horror films give that blood-curdling adrenaline rush that makes life exciting. So with all the horror history in mind: What’s your favorite scary movie?

- Parker Fields

Culture Writer