Gallery o' Slasher Movie Title Screens, Part Two!

Here we go, more slasher movie title screens! Now, if you may reaaaallll close attention to detail, you may notice a trend amongst these.

Oh, and if some of them look all cruddy, it's because they are- some of them I've only got on VHS and I had to resort to photographing the TV. I'm not so bad that I'd cut off a title, though- believe me, Curtains did that all by itself. For the record, both that movie and The Burning are red font on a black background. Ah, the sometimes-pain-in-the-ass-i-ness of lo-fi...

Gallery o' Slasher Movie Title Screens, Part One!

Okay, I admit it. I've got full-blown slasher fever! It's not as exotic and mysterious as dengue fever, nor as quaint as typhoid fever, nor as controversial as jungle fever, nor as irritating as Pac-Man fever, nor as tasty as the fever for the flavor of a Pringles, but I assure you: it's just as real. I can't help it! Between all the slasher talk during SHOCKtober, Diet! Diet! My Darling! entering pre-production, talkin' 'bout the genre with The Vault of Horror's B-Sol (for a forthcoming episode of his series Conversations in the Dark), watching The Funhouse for Film Club, and discussing why I love them so much on that radio show I did, slashers are totally ruling my life right now. It's awesome!

Today I choose to fan the flames of my heart a bit by posting this totally pointless gallery of slasher movie title screens. This is just part one, though, so don't think it the end of my foolery.

The screen for The House on Sorority makes it look like a Lifetime movie. This is not an insult.

School's in...

...over at the website for Diet! Diet! My Darling!, wherein I'm teachin' folks about slasher movies. It's just a brief overview, really, and nothing new for my fellow horror geeks...but who knows who's going to wander into that website, all lost and confused? We don't want them to clutch their pearls and faint, do we? No! We want them to learn, to live, and to love like we do in true one of us! fashion. Click to check it out!

urgh! (a new blog post)

I say unto me, woe, my friends, for October has come and gone with nary a peep from yours truly. NARY A PEEP I SAY! It's a sad state of affairs, to be sure, when my most favoritest time of the year fails to spark a fire in me. But spark it did not! I've been experiencing...not exactly writer's block, per se, but rather, perhaps, writer's blah...as well as watcher's blah. Supreme unmotivation. I've hardly watched anything lately, and when I have managed to park it ("it" meaning "my ass") in front of a movie, it hasn't been horror-related. Sure, the recent Lifetime Movie Network Tori Spelling double feature got me all ten kinds of pumped (umm...back-to-back Co-Ed Call Girl and Awake to Danger, y'all...that's some mid-90s primo Tori action right there! Oh my god, I love Co-Ed Call Girl, especially when Tori's pimp starts talking about the incredible power she seems to have over men...), but that's not really Final Girl fodder. Or is it?

Meh. Though I haven't been jazzed enough lately to put cyber-pen to cyber-paper, I suppose it's time to get back on the cyber-horse. Maybe November can become the new October or something, and my love affair with horror movies will burst into passionate flames once more and I'll wonder why we ever spent a moment apart. Recommend something for me in the comments and maybe sparks will fly.

Lest you think I've simply been sitting here staring at the wall instead of posting, let me assure you: that's only 68% true. I've still been giving AMC their weekly dose of me...I just haven't been talking about it here. But today is the first day of the rest of my life, yes? Yes! So here are links to all the columns I've neglected to mention in recent...holy crap, in recent weeks. Fucking A, I suck!

- I wrote about William Castle and the lost art of gimmick movie-making.

- I created a DIY slashers guide, expanding a bit on my original Slashers 101 series.

- Great moments in gore, y'all.

- Resident Evil! I love Resident Evil!

- A wee recommendations guide.

- I reviewed Roger Corman's The Haunted Palace, starring Vincent Price and Lon Chaney, Jr. It's currently available to watch at amctv.com.

So, I've been writing. I've also been working some Ghostella's Haunted Tomb "magic"; I'd finished and uploaded the season finale, only to discover a need for reshoots. It's totally my fault and it's not really a big deal, but it's a pain in the arse all the same and the episode won't be up until next week, most likely. I can totally tease you about it, though, by saying this: I've got a special guest star! My special guest star is Lena Headey! Yes, the same Lena Headey who stars as Sarah Connor in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Yes, the same Lena Headey who starred as Queen Gorgo in 300. Yes (and perhaps most importantly), the same Lena Headey who starred as a super-sexy cave-diving scientist in The Cave. Lena Headey in Ghostella's Haunted Tomb? As the kids today might say, WTF? I wouldn't believe it either if I were you, but here's some photographic evidence in the form of a "screen" "cap" from the film.

I don't know why I put that in quotes; this really is a screencap.


I know; I still don't believe it, either.

So there's that. I've also been painting a bit. For all my fellow BioShock nerds out there, I made this set: a Little Sister and a Big Daddy:


FYI for all you citizens of Squaresville out there, BioShock is a video game.

I made this dizzazzling set for a friend's birthday: it's 4 glass coasters that double as picture frames, featuring Television's Greatest Geriatric Detectives!




Neat, huh? The pictures are about 1.5" square, and they come in the sweet-n-spinny holder rack thingy. If anyone is interested in...say, a set featuring horror type folks or what have you (I mean, like, coasters featuring Freddy, Michael, Jason, and Leatherface? Or Universal Monsters? Fuck yeah!), just get in touch with me. I'm open for coaster commissions and painting commissions, and I've got galleries on my MySpace and Facebook pages for you social networking goons out there.

Anytinkle, that's about that. Yeah, I think it's high time I made out with Final Girl again, don't you think? I've been so lax I have nary a clue as to what's going on in the horror world at all; I haven't checked the news in weeks. What have I missed? Have they remade the remake of Dawn of the Dead yet? Is Saw MCMVII due anytime soon? I'm so out of the loop; let's catch up over a coffee, preferably one from Dunkin' Donuts.

Oh, and one more thing before I go: You probably haven't heard much about it, but tomorrow is Election Day here in the US. I don't know what your political stripe is, and (aduh and adoy) Final Girl isn't about politics. Regardless, I'm urging any Californians out there to vote NO on Proposition 8. Let's not make discrimination legal, okay?

Here's one particularly eye-opening TV spot, which just so happens to star someone you're probably familiar with by now, Bridget McManus (stand up comedian, talk show host, Final Girl Film Club member, Ghostella's Haunted Tomb star, and my pal).



Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go find something to watch.

Location, Location, Location

In keeping with the topic I re-introduced yesterday, I give you the next element of the slasher film: the setting.

Because the characters in these films are most often teenagers (so is the audience, predominately), the location is usually in accordance: the mall (The Initiation), college (The House on Sorority Row, Black Christmas), high school (Graduation Day) and of course...summer camp (Friday the 13th, The Burning, Sleepaway Camp). In fact, a majority of the Friday the 13th films feature one of the most well-known horror movie locations: Camp Crystal Lake.

While slashers can obviously take place anywhere, they are most often set somewhere remote or isolated. The less isolated the spot, the easier it is for people to get away- and that would ruin all the fun. Still, it's a take-it-on-faith situation for the audience, because in a majority of these films, the characters could get away if they really tried. In Halloween, when Laurie Strode's knocks go unanswered at one house, why didn't she keep trying? On occasion, the location itself does prevent escape: in Terror Train, for example, the teen revellers are on...a train. In April Fool's Day, everyone's trapped on an island. Despite the title, Friday the 13th VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan is set largely on a boat. It's only in the final act that finds Jason loose on the streets of New York City.

And what of this? What about slashers that take place largely in urban settings? Given the need for isolation as a plot device, the big city setting seems to go against logic. Films like F13 VIII, Night School, and Maniac work largely because they rely on the perceived indifference and anonymity afforded one in the city. The victim may be surrounded by thousands of people, but none of them will go out of their way to help. It's not that far-fetched...I remember the "Death Rides the 6!" headline on the front page of the New York Post. A man died in his seat on the subway, but everyone around assumed he was just sleeping so he rode the rails all day.

Just because a location may be familiar to the film characters, don't expect the intimate knowledge to always give them a leg up on the killer. Sometimes characters can use the setting to their advantage- think of Nancy's booby-trapped house in A Nightmare on Elm Street. But more often the killer will know all the shortcuts and ins-and-outs that the victims know, and he'll still get 'em! That's movie magic for ya!

These silly movies can even have an effect on perceptions of locations in the real world. Sure, Jaws had audiences freaked out about hitting the beach...Psycho changed the way people felt about the shower...but who hasn't almost immediately thought of "ki ki ki ma ma ma" when in the woods after seeing Friday the 13th?

Dust Off Your Notebooks, Part 1

Way back in July, when I was but a wee lass, I began a series of posts you could call Slashers 101, intended to be a little primer on what it takes to make a slasher a "slasher" and not...umm...something else.

Part One deals mainly with the killer. What makes Jason Voorhees a slasher maniac while the dude from Cobra- the guy who uses a knife, the guy who Cobra takes down!- is just a run-of-the-mill crazy guy? PS- I loves me some Cobra.

Part Two is about the weapons employed by said killers.

I got that far, and then I got crazy busy with other stuff and I disappeared into the ether for a while.But now seems like as good a time as any to pick it up again, eh? All right then...

Next up is the slasher hallmark that can either turn you on or turn your stomach: gore, or to use a more general term, special effects. Most folks tend to cite Herschell Gordon Lewis's Blood Feast(1963) as the flick that started the trend towards the disgusting in on-screen horror. The art of makeup and effects had advanced from the days of neck bolts on the monster in Frankenstein (1931) to the realistic portrayal of dismemberment in Lewis's extravagoreza (I just made that word up). The boundaries were beginning to be expanded to discover just how far one could go with movie violence- why stop at a simple spot of blood on the shirt when you can actually see the blade entering the chest?

For bringing explicit gore to the slasher film, the world has one man to thank- Tom Savini. While his effects work was already garnering attention (such as Dawn of the Dead in 1978), it was Savini's work in 1980's Friday the 13th that changed the face of the slasher. Just two years earlier, in Halloween, John Carpenter gave the industry one of the earliest slashers, and there's barely a drop of blood to be seen. But from the moment hitchhiker Annie's throat is cut to the decapitation of Mrs. Voorhees (and those clutching hands!), there's not much you don't see in Friday the 13th as the counselors of Camp Crystal Lake are slaughtered one by one. Again, it's the intimacy of the killing that's remarkable. At times, it's still difficult to figure out just how Savini works his magic- I'm thinking particularly of the scene that finds Kevin Bacon smoking a post-coital joint in bed. As he lies there, an arrow head comes up from under the bed through his throat- and damn if it doesn't still look 100% real to this day. There's no cutaway. There's no computer graphics. There's just amazing- if bloody- makeup effects.

Sure, there are other names in the special effects canon: Rick Baker (whose efforts in 1981's An American Werewolf in London garnered him the first Oscar awarded for Best Makeup), Stan Winston (Terminator, Wrong Turn), Rob Bottin (John Carpenter's The Thing)...all geniuses in their own right. The realm of the slasher, however, is ruled by Savini. There's too many memorable moments to list comprehensively, but when I think back to scenes like Jason's unmasked face sliding down the machete at the end of Friday the 13th Part 4, well, I can't help but wonder where Savini's Oscar is. Love the gore or hate it, you can't help but shake your head in wonder...or nausea.

There are certainly slasher films that are virtually, if not completely, gore-free, as I noted earlier with the mention of Halloween. For MY dollar, these can be the scariest, most effective examples of the genre. Subtlety can go a long, long way. Without a doubt, however, on-screen blood-n-guts are a staple for the slasher. Just ask Jason Voorhees.

Take Out Your Notebooks, Part II

What other benchmarks are there to help distinguish the slasher from other types of movies? Yesterday I touched on the folks donig all the slashin'- the killers. It seems logical to follow that up with a discussion about their tools of the trade- THE WEAPONS.

Take a guess how the genre got its name...go on, take a stab at it (nyuk nyuk). You got it, kids- the weapon of choice in these movies tends to be along the lines of a knife. Anything that can be used to stab or cut is fair game: razors, pitchforks, swords, corkscrews, drills, spears, hedgeclippers, you name it. Sure there's wild departures: in the Sleepaway Camp movies, for example, Angela uses everything from a lawnmower to an outhouse to dispatch the "deserving". Sometimes a killer has his or her "signature" weapon- where would Freddy Krueger be without his razor glove? And you can't separate Leatherface from his beloved, can you? Ah, a weirdo and his chainsaw. Even when something as random as a lawnmower is used, however, there's still somehow an intimacy to the killings. The killer and victim get right up close- chances are you won't see a gun or a stick of dynamite used to get the job done.

Despite the murder throughout the films, though, as Adam Rockoff points out in Going to Pieces (mentioned yesterday), slashers tend to be far less brutal than the average action film. Whereas Sylvester Stallone can gun down, slice up, and gut countless Vietcong baddies (Rambo) to audience cheers, the relative low body count of the average slasher is met with cries of "Depravity!". So what's the difference? Well, it's pretty much the "intimacy" I was talking about. The characters who get killed aren't merely faceless thugs, but rather they're men and women we've gotten to know throughout the movie. Whether we actually like them or not is another story entirely- I mean, who wasn't glad when whiny ol' Franklin got it in Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Sometimes we identify with these characters, sometimes we care about them- and that makes it seem juuuust a little more brutal and a little more shocking when they get the axe.

Out, out, damn Franklin!

Rockoff also notes the perceived phallic nature of stabbing a victim- of entering their body in a brutal and violent fashion without their permission. This metaphor is used to bolster the argument that slasher movies are not only hyperviolent, but also they're inherently sexist and demeaning to women. To paraphrase Freud, however...sometimes a knife is just a knife. The argument is also weakened when one tallies up the number of men dispatched in these movies. Even Michael Myers, who spends his time killing his "sister" over and over again, does away with a fella or a dog every now and then.

One movie that seems to want us to believe that a drill can be much
more than just a drill is Slumber Party Massacre. In this trashy flick written and directed by women (feminist-lesbian writer Rita Mae Brown and Roger Corman editor Amy Jones, respectively), the freshly-escaped-from-the-nuthouse killer uses a 2-odd-foot drill to kill off high school girls (as well as a few unfortunate males). Slumber Party Massacre walks a very strange line, zigzagging between parody, exploitation, and social commentary. The box art/one-sheet is a photo shot from behind the killer, waist-down, with said drill dangling between his legs. As he taunts our Final Girl with his drill in the climactic showdown, he creepily mutters some date-rape speak: "C'mon...you know you want it". She responds by "castrating" an inch or two from his drill's tip. Lest you think it's all an empowering, sly parable about rape, however, the movie also smacks of the stereotypical: there's just about more boob shots in SPM than found in most slashers. Rather than strictly pandering to the male audience, maybe it's all just a big fantasy for Rita Mae Brown herself. Watch the movie and ask yourself, just how many female handymen (handywomen?) can one town have?

Take Out Your Notebooks, Part I

Hey, what's this blog all about, anyway? What separates the "slasher" from any other horror movie? I was asked by a friend to define the genre...a movie about Jeffrey Dahmer would be about a psycho- would that be a slasher? No. In Midwest Obsession, Courtney Thorne-Smith goes after Tracey Gold with a knife, is that a slasher? As much as I love that movie, no, it's not. Yeah, you read that right- Midwest Obsession falls on the "good-bad" side of the "good-bad/bad-bad" line for me, as a majority of Lifetime movies do. How can you not love a movie where Ms. Thorne-Smith not only dresses like a member of Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation while attempting to dispatch Ms. Gold, but also utters classic lines such as "You may recognize me. I'm the Dairy Princess!"?!? Oops, sorry. Off on a tangent there. So...what makes a slasher a slasher?

A good place to start to learn about the genre is Adam Rockoff's excellent book, Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978-1986. Rockoff gives an overview of the slasher's heyday, and also provides plot synopses, stills, and background info on most of the films of the period. I'll use his book as a jumping-off point.

While inevitably there will be movies that straddle genres- heck, there's even rare movies that define a new genre- films defined as "slashers" tend to play by a certain set of rules and contain specific elements. Let's start with the most obvious: THE KILLER. As Rockoff puts it, the killer is

usually an ordinary person who has suffered some terrible-and sometimes not so terrible- trauma.

The trauma can be inflicted upon the killer or a family member, it matters not. Conveniently, these events tend to occur on a date easily remembered: see April Fool's Day, My Bloody Valentine, Happy Birthday to Me, Prom Night, Mother's Day...the list goes on. On the anniversary of this special day, the killer sets out to avenge him/herself or the family member done wrong by killing those responsible (as poor Kenny did to the ones who made him twirl around in Terror Train), symbolic representations of the guilty (Friday the 13th), or relatives of the perpetrators (A Nightmare on Elm Street). So you see, the killer isn't usually just some random psycho- he's a psycho with a vendetta. The biggest exception to this rule is of course Halloween, which strived very hard (and succeeded) in emphasizing that Michael Myers is ephemeral, almost supernatural. There's no explaining him- he's the boogeyman. The events that cause someone to become a killer are often shown in a prologue so we know the killer's motivations. To my mind, vengeance killing is alot less frightening than the "pure evil" of a boogeyman, but that's another essay entirely. Jason Voorhees has taken on some supernatural elements since his beginnings- indestructibility and re-generation, for example- but this stems from the success of his first film and thoughts of "franchise" more than anything else.

But what about gender? Aren't the killers always men who want to cut up pretty young women? Nope- not always. There are plenty of slashers with a female killer, such as Night School, Friday the 13th, Happy Birthday to Me, and Sleepaway Camp 2 & 3. Most often, the killer's gender is kept ambiguous- at times, such as in Friday the 13th, tricks are employed to point to a male killer: Mrs. Voorhees drove a truck, wore boots and flannel. Had she driven that truck to Lilith Fair, we might not have been so surprised when she turned out to be a she. But as it was, even when we finally saw her, we thought she was there to help! Shock, surprise! Sleepaway Camp Part 1 is another story altogether, however, when the she turns out to be a he...ah, good old Angela.

Now that we have a decent idea of just who's stalking in these movies and why, we can dig into other elements that make a slasher a slasher and not a Lifetime Movie. I'll continue on with the lesson in the next post. In the meantime, keep your eyes on your own paper, or else!