It’s almost summer, and that can only mean one thing around these parts: the return of Summer of Blood, Antagony & Ecstasy’s season-long exploration of the most debased and hated genre in the history of cinema, the slasher film.
Now, having spent 2007 exhausting the two biggest slasher franchises, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, and using 2008 to sweep up the next two, Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I found myself stuck: without any more mega-franchises to plunder, where ought I take the 2009 edition of this most special of features? The obvious answer, and one that I’m certain many of my good friends would prefer, is “absolutely nowhere”, but I don’t write for those people.
After deliberation and kicking around a few ideas, here’s what I’ve come up with: instead of focusing so much on the slasher during its golden years, 1978 through 1989, I decided to take a peak at the “frame” so to speak of the slasher: what came before, what came after. So this year is going to be a bit of a hodgepodge, a free-form whirl through psycho killer history.
First up is a spate of Italian giallo films, a genre of murder mysteries on the Agatha Christie model, only with vastly more extreme violence; the gialli are usually cited as the most direct influence on the structure and style of the slashers, the missing link if you will between the British and American psycho films of the 1960s and the implacable like of Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and so on. I’ll be looking at several directors and different types of gialli, from the film that arguably got the whole ball rolling to a late entry that showcases what the genre was up to several years into the American slasher boom.
A special holiday surprise jumps us ahead about to the great slasher Renaissance kicked off by writer Kevin Williamson in two antithetically different franchises, one of which changed the face of horror movies for many years, until the rise of torture porn came and made everything weird and unpleasant.
Then, since I can’t completely ignore the 1980s, we’re going to end the summer as every summer should end, at summer camp; perhaps the most iconic slasher movie setting of all.
5/23 – The Girl Who Knew Too Much
5/30 – The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
6/6 – The Black Belly of the Tarantula
6/13 – Twitch of the Death Nerve
6/20 – Don’t Torture a Duckling
6/27 – Opera
7/4 – Easily-Guessed Mystery Film
7/11 – Scream
7/18 – I Know What You Did Last Summer
7/25 – Scream 2
8/1 – I Still Know What You Did Last Summer
8/8 – Scream 3
8/15 – The Burning
8/22 – Sleepaway Camp
8/29 – Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers
9/5 – Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland