The Bloody Roots of the Slasher Film
How Italian giallo and the voyeuristic horror of the 1960s and 1970s helped create the 1980s boom time for ‘slashers’.
It’s near-universally agreed that the trope codifier for the slasher is John Carpenter’s 1979 smash hit Halloween (1978), because it established a series of conventions later recycled by a slew of imitators (to varying degrees of success) throughout the 1980s and the postmodern resurgence of the late-1990s.
These tropes include an implacable masked killer (usually male and sometimes supernatural in nature), stalking and murdering a group of promiscuous teenagers around a confined location (small neighborhood, summer camp), on a specific date or annual holiday (Christmas, Halloween), with a murderer’s POV often employed for added voyeuristic kicks. The killer will often have a disturbed past, be disfigured in some way, and find themselves on a collision course with ‘The Final Girl’ — the one teenager who’s resisted adolescent temptations of booze and sex, and can thus defeat the killer. Well, until the inevitable sequel!
But while Halloween may have been the first to use all these tropes in this particular combination, it drew inspiration from a variety of horror and thriller films that proceeded it. So, here we’re going to look at the progenitors of the slasher, and the ways they influenced this popular genre.
Peeping Tom (1960)
A psychological thriller from British director Michael Powell (of Powell & Pressburger fame), Peeping Tom is about a serial killer who murders women with a lethally adapted film camera, which he uses to record their dying expression of fear. Critically savaged for its perceived indulgence of lurid sexuality and violence, it effectively ended Powell’s career, but has since been recognised as a psychologically rich and masterfully directed piece of cinema
Ironically, what upset many audience members on it’s original release was also the element that had the most profound influence on the slasher genre; the voyeuristic killer’s POV that was employed during the murder scenes, which terrified and titillated in equal measure. Peeping Tom’s self-awareness as a film about filmmaking, and commentary on the morbidity of filmmakers and audiences excited by the fearful gaze of the camera, would also set the template for themes explored during the postmodern revival, in particular by Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) and the Scream series (1996–2011).
Blood and Black Lace (1964)
Despite the reactions, Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) wasn’t bloody or explicit in it’s violence and sexuality. The same cannot be said of Mario Bava’s classic thriller Blood and Black Lace (1964), which features scantily-clad models being brutally murder by a masked killer, in an attempt to recover a secret-filled diary set to ruin a major fashion house. It’s the originator of the Italian giallo — a horror sub-genre that combined detective mysteries with lurid lighting and bloody violence, taking its name from the yellow covered paperback novels that were highly popular in Italy.
But as well as its impact on Italian cinema, Blood and Black Lace would also prove a formative influence on the slasher genre. The featureless mask of the killer was clearly an inspiration for Michael Myer’s blank visage, as well as the killer’s use of a unique identifiable weapon — in this case a spiked glove. Beyond aesthetics, the lack of set-up and direct focus on the killings, and how they are staged to both shock and excite was a unique structure for the time, and carried over into many a lesser slasher film. It’s only a shame that they did not borrow more of Bava’s artistry and visual flair.
A Bay of Blood (1971)
Although thought of primarily as an American genre, the slasher owes a big debt to Italian cinema, and none more so than the films of Mario Bava. After effectively inventing the giallo, Bava would experiment in a variety of genres including comic-books (Danger Diabolik, 1968) and science-fiction (Plant of the Vampires, 1965), before returning again to horror with A Bay of Blood (1971). The convoluted plot concerns the murderous activities of several parties involved in the inheritance of the titular bay, and while it has a similar murder-mystery structure to Bava’s other giallo, the focus was stronger on the gory details of the set-piece killings. Bava essentially created the body-count trope that also become synonymous with slashers.
A Bay of Blood’s influence was more profoundly felt on on the Friday the 13th franchise than any other single film. Over the first two Friday’s, almost every murder scene from A Bay of Blood is recreated (like the lovers-impaled-in-bed, heads decapitated by axe and machete’s to the face). Unfortunately, it’s script deficiencies, such as people unrelated to the plot turning up just to be killed, muddled characterisation and dreadful dialogue, were also inherited by a slew of imitators.
Black Christmas (1974)
Prior to Halloween, the closest movie to it’s now familiar mould was proto-slasher Black Christmas (1974). Based partly on the urban legend of “The Babysitter and The Man Upstairs”, Black Christmas is the story of a group of sorority sisters coming together to celebrate the season, who are menaced by a series of threatening phone calls before being stalked and murdered. In an unusual feature that didn’t carry over to many subsequent slashers, the fate of The Final Girl is ambiguous and the killer’s identity never revealed.
The impact of Black Christmas on the genre is apparent in many other ways, however. Its campus and sorority house setting became a staple of direct-to-video knock-offs, most obviously the Sorority House Massacre series (1986–1990), as did the ‘menacing phone call’ trope inspired by the aforementioned urban legend. But perhaps its biggest influence was the seasonal setting, a simple plot device that justifies a group of teenagers cutting loose together in one place, as well as capitalising on seasonal release date hype. A vast number of ‘80s slashers would follow the trend, including Halloween, Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine (1981), April Fool’s Day (1986), Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) and New Year’s Evil (1980).
When a Stranger Calls (1979)
A psychological thriller that draws more directly on “The Baby Sitter and The Man Upstairs” than Black Christmas, When A Stranger Calls dials the ‘menacing phone call’ trope up to eleven, building an entire movie around it. It proves most effective in the films opening 20-minutes, where Jill Johnson (Carol Kane) is babysitting alone when she receives a phone call asking if she’s checked the children. Initially dismissing it a joke, the calls become more frequent and threatening, terrifying Jill into calling the police. The cops are able to trace the next call and find it’s coming from inside the house — -allowing Jill to escape before the police discover the children had been murdered before the calls even began.
Often recognised as one the scariest sequences of all time, it no doubt served as inspiration for Scream’s infamous opening with Drew Barrymore home alone — although screenwriter Kevin Williamson gave it a postmodern twist with the character’s pop-culture knowledge being used against her. With the ‘90s second wave of slashers mostly moving away from superhuman villains like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, Scream capitalised on what When a Stranger Calls saw in the humble telephone’s potential as a frightening non-physical weapon.
