One week later, and I’ve been able to collect my thoughts…
In the early spring of 2007, when I first hit upon an idea that would come to be the bane of my summers – “Wouldn’t it be fun to go, bit by bit, through all the major slasher movies?” – I think I had it in mind that my ultimate goal was sociological, not cinematic. It’s an easy thing to forget all these years later, when ginormous superhero epics are running the boards at the box office, that back in the 1980s, bloody horror films were the big deal. Not that any particular slasher film did Star Wars numbers, but there were so damn many of them, and they were so damn cheap, that for the great part of the decade, any studio that had a stable of hungry young directors who knew a guy that could work miracles with Karo syrup and latex, automatically had a licence to print money. It’s for this reason that I think we can reasonably defend Friday the 13th as the defining franchise of the 1980s, and thus declare Jason Voorhees to be the decade’s primary cinematic icon.
I’d like to think that any force quite that overwhelming in pop culture is inherently worthy of study, yet the only authoritative scholarly text on the subject is Carol J. Clover’s essential Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (which among other things gave us the immortal phrase “Final Girl”). So it seemed like a niche that needed filling.
As it turned out, I wasn’t the one to fill that niche. With a tiny number of exceptions, my analyses inevitably turned to the narrative and formal characteristics of these films, which I don’t count as a failing; it’s customary to regard slashers as a subgenre beneath contempt, worthy of inconsiderate dismissal, and I hope at the very least I’ve done a good job of considering these films at great length before (usually) dismissing them.
Still, what I’ve taken away from this project, personally, is not just the conclusion that slasher movies are made by people who don’t care to do a very good job, but a fairly clear sense of how the genre ebbs and flows, what pressures push it in which directions and why certain trends appear and vanish. Nothing exists in a vacuum, not even vile, slimy slasher movies.
Thus I come to the long and somewhat suprising conclusion that, if I had to pick a favorite series – the one that I could actually find myself watching start to finish again – it would be Friday the 13th. The same series that has not one good movie to its name (though it has two or three halfway decent entries), yet taken as a whole is nothing less than a guided tour of how cinema evolved over a 13 year span, with a weird and disconcerting stopover in 2002. I’ve found it very hard not to think of the other three series in terms of how they relate back to F13: it’s most obvious in the case of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which had such an erratic release pattern that the tremendous shifts between entries are quite dramatic, and easily explained by the five or six or twelve years of evoltion that went on during that time. In other words, if F13 is a gradual process, TCM is a series of markers picking out the major developments in that process.
Then there’s the case of the Halloween series, which started out with a bona fide artistic horror movie, influenced by the frankly avant-garde work coming out of the Italian horror industry around the same time. Watching the decline and fall of the Halloween franchise is probably the most depressing thing that the Summers of Blood have shown me: the process by which art is given over willingly to commerce, watching as what made that series interesting was subsumed into that which was expected and required for maximum ticket sales. And at the same time, the series neverforgot its pretensions so much that it could ever quite give up on its increasingly asinine mythology, until at last we were given the deliberately un-mythological Resurrection, which might well be the most anonymous and impersonal film ever made in any of the four series.
I’m not sure exactly what form this feature is going to take next year. Maybe it’s time to graduate to the ’90s? Or perhaps I should just pay attention to some of the also-rans that contributed to the truly unprecedented wave of slasher films in the ’80s, which is a wellspring that at a mere 15 films per summer, I will never exhaust as long as this blog lives. The four series I’ve looked at were the undisputed big dogs, after all, and there were a lot of scraps being fought over in the land of one-offs and aborted series. We’ll find out. For now, I’m content to bid adieu to the slasher movie for a while. It’s harder work than it looks like, squirreling meaning out of indefensible trash.