Halloween, Friday the 13th and Nightmare are part of a highly codified horror film subgenre called “slasher”. What is this type of film?
Halloween is coming and it's the perfect time to get scared by embarking on horror movie marathons. If you're into film horror, names like Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, Freddy, and Ghostface (yes, the villain of Scream !) surely remind you of a few sleepless nights. But did you know that the films from which these three killers come are part of a very specific subcategory of cinema , the slashers?
Like many other genres, the exact origins of slasher are rather hazy. However, we agree that Psychosis , by Hitchcock, with his mad killer pretending to be a dead woman , is the father of all these films.
More vaguely, we could also quote They were ten as a source of inspiration. In this mystery novel by Agatha Christie (previously titled The Ten Little Niggers ), the members of a group find themselves isolated on an island and are mysteriously murdered one after the other .
Some also cite Black Christmas (1974) as a reference. We find in this feature film several codes that we will find in the slashers of the following decades.
In reality,all these works had their importance in the creation of the genre . And we consider that it really saw the light of day in 1978, with the release of the cult The Night of the Masks , by John Carpenter. Its original title? Halloween .
If Freddy and Jason have different weapons of choice, we notice that their operating modes have several similarities. Indeed, slasher is defined by a series of informal conventions . Of course, nothing is set in stone and a film can break certain codes to differentiate itself.
But usually a slasher has as main ingredients:
Slasher had its heyday in the 80s before falling into disuse. The fault, in particular, with too many suites and less and less convincing. Examples ? The Freddy franchise has no less than 9 films, some Chucky sequels have not even had the right to a cinema release...
Nevertheless, these films had a colossal influence on the media :they gave birth to iconic characters, marked (not to say traumatized) many minds and even inspired many parodies and pastiches .
But 42 years after the release of the very first Halloween , nostalgia and horror seem to go hand in hand! Ghostface is about to make a comeback, and this Wednesday, October 20 was marked by the release of Halloween Kills , a distant sequel in which Laurie Strode once again faces the indestructible Michael Myers .
