Happy Halloween! As I’m editing some posts for the spooky season, I realized I didn’t yet have a brief introductory post to slasher films up yet! I’m not going to get into the weeds over what constitutes a slasher film here, instead using a broad definition that hinges on a killer or small group of killers who stalk and kill a group of people over a short period of storytime.
These films generally end with a Final Girl prevailing – at least temporarily – over the killer. The term final girl comes from a groundbreaking 1992 monograph by UC Berkeley professor Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender and the Modern Horror Film. Clover’s theorization of the final girl is, logically, narrow and specific as befitting an academic text, but in the ensuing decades the concept has permeated the genre and become a self-conscious trope which both acknowledges and perpetuates its own existence.
Horror is one of the most consistently profitable genres so sequelization and an eventual franchise often ensues when a film is even moderately successful, which can require increasingly complicated explanations for how the killer can continue to return in film after film after suffering grievous bodily injury or spending prolonged period of time out of the public eye and, presumably, aging out of the ability to kill attractive young people with the power and speed only a slasher villain seems to possess. This is where anthropology and/or archaeology sometimes enter the frame.
Slasher films have a deep connection to cinematic archaeology, as Basil Glynn discussed at the 2021 Slasher Studies conference in a paper titled “Mute, Masked and Murderous: The 1940s Mummy as Proto-Slasher.” This is a topic which he expands on in his excellent book The Mummy On Screen: Orientalism and Monstrosity in Horror Cinema, and if you’re here reading this then I can pretty much guarantee Basil’s book is right up your alley.
On a slight tangent, there’s a Swedish slasher about a team-building conference coming to Netflix in the U.S. on October 13. The Conference (Konferensen) isn’t about an academic conference per se, but anyone who’s ever organized a conference will identify, if not with the impulse to murder one’s coworkers, than with the beleaguered staffer asked to check the WiFi again while he’s lugging in a large quantity of toilet paper. I haven’t seen this one yet, but it’s gotten a lot of buzz.
Now, where were we? Right. Many iconic slasher films were low-budget productions or the creations of relative newcomers (or both) so a more robust and backstory for the killer really only gets fleshed out (sorry) in later films, which leads to writers incorporating cursed or mystical artifacts, non-Western religions, or extraneous supernatural explanations to explain how the killer can keep popping back up and making with the mayhem despite a ton of corporeal damage and the ravages of age. Others hand over a tidy explanation right out of the gate, such as the Voodoo ritual which enables a killer to transfer his soul to a doll in the first murder-doll Chucky film, Child’s Play (1988). (It happens in the first scene so I don’t think that counts as a spoiler).
Archaeologically speaking, a ritual artifact opportunistically stolen from a collector’s house proves super-handy for mass-murder but has unforeseen (and absolutely hilarious) body-swapping consequences in Freaky (2020). I have longer posts coming about most of these films so I don’t want to bog this post down with too many trailers, but I think the Freaky trailer captures the charms of this quirky horror comedy while also offering up a few glimpses of the archaeologically-inspired concept of ancient Central American culture driving the story.
Freaky is gory, with lavish over-the-top kills that pay loving tribute to the practical effects of 1980s slasher films. So much gorier than I remembered. Seriously, while it’s smart and progressive and hilarious, it’s 10,000 gallons of fake blood in a 1,000 gallon bag. It’s not hard to see a kill coming and cover your eyes accordingly, but I just want to put that out there.
Academia is, of course, an excellent location for a slasher film, since the homicidally-enthused often specifically target attractive, inebriated teens/young adults. I have to mention Freaky director Christopher Landon’s Happy Death Day (2017) and Happy Death Day 2U (2019) because they’re both excellent college campus slashers and are much less gory than Freaky. Freaky, like Scream (1996), is technically a high school slasher – just to be clear.
Urban Legend (1998) features Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) franchise star and all-around horror legend Robert Englund as an anthropology and folklore professor. Candyman (1992) presents us with an anthropology/folklore professor and, more importantly, the violence which ensues when his meddling PhD student spouse and her unwilling classmate/accomplice unleash a killer while conducting fieldwork. The University of Sheffield Centre for the History of the Gothic hosted an extraordinary conference in honor of the 30th anniversary of the film and its sequels and the conference website has some interesting resources: Candyman and the Whole Damn Swarm.
Urban Legends: Final Cut (2000). Scream 2 (1997), and the iconic Black Christmas (1974), Black Christmas (2006), and Black Christmas (2019) lack anthropologists – although at least one of the characters is the daughter of an ethnographic documentarian – but stand out in my opinion in the sorority house/campus slasher sub-genre.
Few, if any, slasher franchises have a sustained connection to archaeology or anthropology either in the storyline or any recurring characters. However, Friday the 13th: the Series (1987-1990), which wasn’t related to the film franchise at all, is worth mentioning because the short-lived television series was about a pair of heirs to an antique shop tracking down all of the cursed antiques their uncle sold.
Circling back to where we started, Debra Hill and John Carpenter’s 1978 slasher classic Halloween starred Final Girl Royalty Jamie Lee Curtis, whose character Laurie Strode stars in 7 out of the 13 films in the franchise. Halloween (1978) is almost certainly the best-crafted movie of the entire bunch, but it’s not my favorite franchise entry. My favorite, which is more folk horror than slasher, is Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982). It’s the only entry which doesn’t center around masked murderer Michael Myers, as Carpenter had hoped each film in the series would be a stand-alone story and it’s the subject of my next post.
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