

So with those parameters in mind, let’s get to the slashing.ĥ0. Slashers generally focus on turning murder into a creative exercise.” The Strangers is an exercise in suspense rather than gore. Home invasion movies operate more on tension than violence. As another Paste writer put it during our discussion: “I draw a big distinction between home invasion and slashers, even though they have so much in common. The killers in both films wear masks, for instance, but in both cases they’re stalking a single woman in the confines of her own home, violating the group nature and “body count” rules necessary to slashers. Many home invasion movies, such as The Strangers or Hush, share common elements with the slasher genre. Home invasion movies are not automatically slasher movies A slasher villain may primarily stalk a single protagonist through the course of a film, but he cuts a path through others in order to get there, because it’s the kills themselves that the audience is there to see.ģ. They need at least a modest group of potential victims, and they often need to rack up a few early kills to establish both their modus operandi and threatening credibility. They’re all horror films, but they’re not slasher films. The likes of Ridley Scott’s Alien make for an interesting inclusion on slasher-centric lists, but the unknowable, alien intelligence of the xenomorph removes that intimacy we referenced earlier, which demands a human (or at least formerly human) killer whose actions are objectively “evil.” The xenomorph may be crafty and terrifying, but it’s still a “monster” or “beast” lacking human conscience, as is a werewolf, or the Predator, or a killer shark on the loose. We need a concrete “slasher movie” definition. So, then: Before we embark on listing the 50 best slasher movies of all time, our task is clear. In an extended investigation of this question, we eventually landed on a little-known Italian horror film from 1973 as the first genuine “slasher movie.” From the time of Universal’s The Old Dark House in 1932, Hollywood has been producing films about groups of people being stalked by mysterious killers in a confined setting, and yet we don’t necessarily reevaluate that film as “the first slasher.” Films of the ’40s and ’50s such as And Then There Were None, House of Wax and The Bad Seed incorporated many of the same themes, but it might be fair to say that they lacked the lurid quality that truly makes for a “slasher”-the exploitative edge and shock factor mined by true slashers such as Black Christmas and Halloween in the ’70s and beyond. What’s more complicated is properly defining “slasher,” and deciding when exactly the genre began. But more than anything, slasher movies are an exploration of intimacy-the intimacy and invasiveness of physical violence in our lives, and “the morbid intimacy in the act of killing,” as one Paste staffer recently put it in a discussion of the genre.

Gallons and gallons of red tempera paint or corn syrup-that’s almost a given. A group of horny, not-so-bright teens in a secluded setting, sure.

What do you think of, when you read the words “slasher movie”?Ī killer in a mask, perhaps.
