1960 · The roots
A motel, a camera and a shower
Every slasher has the same grandfather: Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960). By killing Janet Leigh in the first act, Hitchcock broke a rule audiences did not know existed. Nobody was safe, and the monster was a mild young man named Norman who liked stuffing birds. The same year, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom in Britain followed a killer who filmed his victims. It was so reviled that it damaged Powell's career, and it is now seen as a masterpiece about the act of watching.
In Italy, filmmakers like Mario Bava pushed further. His Bay of Blood (1971) is a body-count film years before the term existed, and the stylish Italian giallo thrillers, with their black gloves and lurid colours, fed straight into the American wave.
1974 to 1984 · The golden age
Haddonfield, Crystal Lake and Elm Street
Bob Clark's Black Christmas (1974) set a killer loose in a sorority house and used his point of view to stalk the audience as well. The same year Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre turned a Texas farmhouse into a slaughterhouse and made Leatherface an icon, all with surprisingly little blood on screen.
Then came John Carpenter's Halloween (1978). Made on a tiny budget, it gave us Michael Myers in a modified white mask, a five-note piano theme and Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode. It was one of the most profitable independent films of its time and it wrote the template: a holiday, a small town, teenagers, a killer who will not stay down.
Friday the 13th (1980) took that template to summer camp, and Jason Voorhees took over the franchise from his mother in the sequels, picking up his hockey mask in Part III. In 1984 Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street moved the killer into dreams. Freddy Krueger could strike the moment you fell asleep, which made the safest place in the house the most dangerous.
Theory by the fire
The final girl
In 1992 film scholar Carol J. Clover published Men, Women, and Chain Saws and gave a name to the hero these films kept returning to: the final girl. She is watchful and resourceful, she notices the danger before her friends do, and she is the one left standing at dawn. Laurie Strode, Nancy Thompson in Elm Street and Sally Hardesty in Chain Saw are the classic examples.
The idea changed how people talked about the genre. Slashers had been dismissed as cheap and cruel. Clover argued that audiences, including young men, were invited to identify with a young woman who survived. Modern slashers play with the trope openly, from Ready or Not to Ti West's X (2022) and its prequel Pearl.
1996 onward · Rebirth
Scream and the rules of survival
By the early 1990s the slasher had sunk into direct-to-video sequels. Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson revived it with Scream (1996), a film in which the teenagers have seen every horror movie and the killer, Ghostface, has too. It was funny, vicious and a huge hit, and it launched a wave of glossy teen slashers.
The genre has kept reinventing itself since. David Gordon Green's Halloween (2018) brought back an older, armed Laurie Strode. Happy Death Day (2017) crossed the slasher with Groundhog Day. Our watchlist, in order: Psycho, Black Christmas, Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream and X.
Next: Things That Crawl and Bite