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, it cost about three hundred thousand dollars, and the films that copied it ran through American cinemas for the next six years: 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 named that survivor the Final Girl in 1987 and pointed out that the audience is made to watch through her whichever way it came in. The kills are staged as set pieces, so you spend the film counting who is left.

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.

Films here also carry Psychological Horror, Moral Ambiguity, Revenge & Justice, Identity Crisis, Toxic Relationships · Most represented: Wes Craven, Damien Leone, John Carpenter.