Slasher film

A slasher film is a subgenre of horror films involving a killer or a group of killers stalking and murdering a group of people, often by use of bladed or sharp tools. Although the term "slasher" may occasionally be used informally as a generic term for any horror film involving murder, film analysts cite an established set of characteristics which set slasher films apart from other horror subgenres, such as monster movies, splatter films, supernatural and psychological horror films.

Critics cite psychological horror films such as Peeping Tom (1960) and Psycho (1960) and the Italian giallo films as early influences. The genre hit its peak between 1978 and 1984 in an era referred to as the "Golden Age" of slasher films. Notable slasher films include Black Christmas (1974), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), My Bloody Valentine (1981), Sleepaway Camp (1983), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Child's Play (1988), Candyman (1992), Scream (1996), I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), Urban Legend (1998) and Terrifier (2016). Many slasher films released decades ago continue to attract cult followings. The slasher canon can be divided into three eras: the classical (1974–1993), the self-referential (1994–2000) and the neoslasher cycle (2000–2013).

Slasher films typically adhere to a specific formula: a past wrongful action causes severe trauma that is reinforced by a commemoration or anniversary that reactivates or re-inspires the killer. Built around stalk-and-murder sequences, the films draw upon the audience's feelings of catharsis, recreation, and displacement, as related to sexual pleasure. Paste magazine's definition notes that, "slasher villains are human beings, or were human beings at some point ... Slasher villains are human killers whose actions are objectively evil, because they’re meant to be bound by human morality. That’s part of the fear that the genre is meant to prey upon, the idea that killers walk among us." Films with similar structures that have non-human antagonists lacking a conscience, such as Alien or The Terminator, are not traditionally considered slasher films (though many slasher antagonists are superhuman, have supernatural traits, or possess slightly warped or abstract anthropomorphic forms both physically and metaphysically).

The final girl trope is discussed in film studies as being a young woman (occasionally a young man) left alone to face the killer's advances in the movie's end. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), the heroine in Halloween, is an example of a typical final girl. Final girls are often, like Laurie Strode, virgins among sexually active teens. Others have called the trope "self-mythologising" based on a handful of especially high-profile examples, asserting that its prominence has been overstated – particularly the innocent, virginal qualities ascribed to putative final girls – and that, in the 21st century, the trope has been filtered through the lens of parody, subversion, and self-aware humour rather than deployed sincerely.

When slasher films become franchises, they typically take on villain protagonist characteristics, with the series following the continued efforts of their antagonists, rather than any of the killer's disposable victims, including any individual entry's heroes or final survivor(s) (who, in so far as they continue to appear within the series, are often killed off immediately after their next on-screen appearance, which has become its own trope). Examples of antiheroes around whom the respective series have become centered include Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Chucky and Leatherface. The antagonist is envisioned and embedded into the public psyche as the main and most marketable/recognisable character, even if his screentime is dwarfed in any specific film by the nominal protagonists. The Scream film series is a rarity that follows its heroine Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) rather than masked killer Ghostface, whose identity changes from film to film, and is only revealed in each entry's finale.

Another alleged trope frequently associated with slasher discourse – and horror more broadly – is that of the "black character(s) dying first" (often formulated as "always dying first"). Actual analyses of the films, such as a 2013 investigative piece in Complex, have found that the trope is largely self-mythologising as opposed to being a statistical reality (per Complex, in only 10% of the fifty analysed movies, all containing one or more speaking black characters, did any of them die first).

The appeal of watching people inflict violence upon each other dates back thousands of years to Ancient Rome. The seventeenth century fairy tale, Bluebeard, "can be seen as one of the slasher film’s progenitors." So too can the late 19th century horror plays produced at the Grand Guignol; Maurice Tourneur's The Lunatics (1912) used visceral violence to attract the Guignol's audience. In the United States, public outcry over films like this eventually led to the passage of the Hays Code in 1930. The Hays Code is one of the entertainment industry's earliest set of guidelines restricting sexuality and violence deemed unacceptable.

Crime writer Mary Roberts Rinehart influenced horror literature with her novel The Circular Staircase (1908), adapted into the silent film The Bat (1926), about guests in a remote mansion menaced by a killer in a grotesque mask. Its success led to a series of "old dark house" films including The Cat and the Canary (1927), based on John Willard's 1922 stage play, and Universal Pictures' The Old Dark House (1932), based on the novel by J.B. Priestley. In both films, the town dwellers are pitted against strange country folk, a recurring theme in later horror films. Along with the "madman on the loose" plotline, these films employed several influences upon the slasher genre, such as lengthy point of view shots and a "sins of the father" catalyst to propel the plot's mayhem.