american slasher

Laurie Strode is babysitting on Halloween night and a man in a white mask has been standing across the street for most of the afternoon. Halloween was 1978, made for about three hundred thousand dollars against a box office near seventy million, and every independent producer in the country spent the next six years financing a copy: a holiday or a summer camp, a group of teenagers, a killer whose face you never get, and one survivor who works out what is happening before anybody believes her. Carol Clover coined the term Final Girl in a 1987 essay and pointed out that the audience is made to watch through her whichever way it came in. The killer's point-of-view camera stands in for his look before he is ever shown on screen, and the kills are staged as set pieces, so you spend the film counting who is left. The cycle never stayed inside those six years: Scream's killer calls the house to ask what your favorite scary movie is before he starts, quizzing his victims on the rules Halloween had already written, so the audience counting along already knows them too.

Distinguish from Giallo supplies the black gloves, the killer's point of view and the murder staged for its own beauty, and Italian films had been doing all three since the mid-sixties. The American cycle strips out the amateur detective and the convoluted whodunit that giallo keeps, and puts a teenager in a house instead. J-Horror shares the low budget and the unstoppable antagonist, but the threat there is a curse that spreads by contact or by recording, and nobody can arm themselves against it.