Movie Review: Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film (2006)

I had heard good things about this documentary for quite some time, and I finally had the chance to check it out. It’s pretty good. A lot of it was some stuff I had sort of already known, having watched a lot of the movies featured and also the 8+ hours of documentaries for both the Friday the 13th and Elm Street Franchise, but the movie features some great interviews.

Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream), Sean S. Cunningham (Friday the 13th), and Tom Savini (Friday the 13th, The Burning, The Prowler) are just so interesting to hear speak on this subject, and John Carpenter (Halloween), as well, who I’ve never really seen an interview with.

The slasher film is a really interesting subject to me because it was so damn popular for a period of time, and its roots are incredibly easy to identify in Halloween and also Psycho and Peeping Tom nearly two decades before (the documentary doesn’t focus on the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre). It’s also a genre that seemed to relish in the critical hatred it created, allowing that to increase its popularity. This documentary does have clips from Siskel and Ebert’s famous “Women in Danger” episode, as well as news coverage of protests that broke out against Silent Night, Deadly Night, which I didn’t know anything about.

If you’re interested in slasher movies in any way, this is a great documentary to watch. If you don’t know what movies to watch, this may give you some ideas.

Rating: 7/10