What is slasher?:
A slasher movie is a horror sub-genre that features a killer murdering people in a brutal manner. The genre is also nicknamed as "slice and dice".
Rather than complicating the narrative through psychological or paranormal activity, slasher movies reduce the genre to simple terms, of a killer on the hunt for blood. There are typically large amounts of violence and visual gore, and typically follow a group of teenagers based on the slasher character archetypes.
In his book; "Horror, the Film Reader", Mark Jancovich defines it as "The films of this sub-genre are supposedly concerned with a process of terrorisation in which a serial killer methodically stalks a group of teenagers who are killed off one by one, and it has been presented as deeply conservative, particularly in its attitudes toward women."
The first slasher is considered to be Psycho (1960), and the first to achieve large box office success was Halloween (1978), which began the first slasher film cycle. This was followed by other films such as 1980's Prom Night and Friday the 13th. The similar narrative structure of these films, as well as shared conventions, classed them under the slasher genre. Although there is much discourse around the original recognition of the new genre, in the book "Blood Money" by Richard Nowell, he says:
"Even though... no stable labelling system had become established by 1980 and 1981 to describe .... Teen slasher films, it is clear that, at this point in time, individuals speaking from all levels of North American film culture, recognised the existence of a new type of film that was distinguished from other films by virtue of the story it told- the story of a blade wielding killer preying on a group of young people."
According to Altman's genre theory, in the slasher genre the structure is the distinct narrative, the label is the term slasher and its conventions, the contract is the audience's expectations, and the blueprint is the producers repurpose of a successful film such as Halloween (1978), and creating a slasher film cycle.
In regards to the labelling of slasher, Nowell ("Blood Money") says:
" In this respect, the teen slasher fulfilled three of the four criteria laid out by Altman, as constituting what he calls a genre… missing is what Altman dubbed the label a name that conveys relatively unambiguously the alignment of structure blueprint and contract in such a way as to demonstrate that speaker/writer and listener/reader recognize that a film features a structure because it has been fashioned to a blueprint thus establishing a contract."
Slasher Film Examples:
