Forty years on from the release of the original Halloween comes the eleventh Halloween film, the tenth to have featured the iconic slasher antagonist Michael Myers. This time, ignoring all the sequels, Jamie Lee Curtis returns to her iconic role for a fifth time as Laurie Strode and must make a stand once again against the seemingly unstoppable masked figure who has haunted her since she narrowly escaped his killing spree four decades ago.
For the final October Horrorthon of this season, I’ve reviewed a bloodthirsty period horror-mystery, a Netflix television horror series about a the affects of a haunted house on the lives of a family and a creepy home-invasion horror-thriller.
After the huge success of 2012’s sleeper hit The Cabin in the Woods which shook preconceived notions and twisted them in unexpected ways, marking a conscious-turning point for the whole horror genre. Slasher film audiences wanted surprising and original thrillers that were not strict throwbacks. Therefore, most recent slashers films are really slasher elements mixed with other genres, twisting conventional tropes into unexpected takes on the slasher flick. Ironically, the meta-sequel Halloween released this month, deviates from this and almost represents a return to the remakes and reboots of the 2000’s.
The 2000’s in horror was dominated by re-makes and unimaginative copycat films. In this time The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Halloween (2007), Friday the 13th (2009) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), to name a few, all got the re-make treatment with varying success. However, from 2003 to 2013 filmmakers started to test the levels of on-screen violence an audience would accept with extremely violent horrors such as House of 1000 Corpses, Saw and Hostel which all contained very graphic torture sequences and completely deviated from slasher tropes. Almost in response, original low budget North American horrors referencing 80’s old-school slashers emerged and by contrast other indie film-makes started to try and put a new twist on the genre to bring us a mix of interesting slasher flicks.
The Bronze Age began in 1996 with the smash-hit Scream which successfully and single-handedly re-invented the genre. This led to a new breed of slasher films which were more self-aware and originally scripted. However, my top 5 still includes a couple of the heavyweight franchises.
This entry I review three more horrors to have been released this year. The prequel to the popular Purge franchise, a spooky supernatural occult chiller and a uniquely atmospheric period-set Lovekraftian horror.
The introduction of Freddy Krueger brought in a new wave of horror films that relied on special effects, almost completely silencing the smaller low-budget Golden Age features. However, fatigue had still hit the slasher genre and its popularity had declined rapidly. The home video market provided a new outlet for low-budget filmmaking but without major studio backing there was a big decline in quality. Therefore, from 1985 to 1995, the slasher genre was dominated by attempts to cash-in on and refresh existing popular franchises, resulting in numerous sequels.
Here is part 2 of the Golden Age slasher films and this time I’m counting down my top 5 picks. Next will be the Silver Age; 1985-95 slasher films.
As part of the build up to Halloween and the release of the latest Halloween sequel, I am doing a series of slasher rankings for each era. A slasher film is a film within a sub-genre of the horror genre that involves a psychopathic killer stalking and murdering a group of people. But there is an established set of characteristics that set these films apart from other similar sub-genres. The early inspiration for these films were probably psychological thrillers such as 1960’s Peeping Tom and Psycho, but it wasn’t until 1974 that the tropes of young adults being butchered one-by-one by a masked or unseen assailant started to be established by hit films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Black Christmas (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977).
However, the immense popularity of 1978’s Halloween was what fully ushered in the so-called Golden Age of slashers (1978-84) and fully established “the rules”. However, 1974’s Black Christmas is so similar to Halloween, it is almost like a precursor, so I am widening this era to make it into a decade. Here is part 1 of the Golden Age which gets a top ten list because there were so many!
The annual October Horrorfon series returns. My first column is reviewing two critically acclaimed supernatural horror films that were released this year, one concerns a deeply unsettling and terrifying American haunted house/demonic possession and the other is a collection of chilling British ghost stories.
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