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DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 3, No. 35 |
 Is the 'SLASHER' ERA Finally Over? |
 The advertising logo for 'Halloween Resurrection' |
Poor box office results
may signal public's bored
of TheColumnists.com
When my wife and I slipped into the movie theater playing "Halloween Resurrection" a few weeks ago, we hoped we'd find good seats on the aisle with a clear view of the screen. No problem, it turned out. We were the only moviegoers in the place.
Well, there was that woman who wandered in after us, with a little girl in tow and an infant in her arms. But as soon as the opening credits came on, she got up and left with her kids, obviously not in the right theater for "Scooby Doo."
I figured it was an ominous sign for the latest sequel to John Carpenter's original 'Halloween" when the theater shifted "Halloween Resurrection" to a single showing per day--at 10 p.m.--for the second week of the booking.
I'm pretty sure "Jason
X," the latest sequel to that other long-running "slasher"
franchise--"Friday the 13th"--also is tanking at the
box office. "Jason X" came into my town without notice
and left before I could even drive down the freeway to see it.
Though "Halloween H20" did pretty hot business in 1998,
it's likely the long run of that franchise may be nearing its
end. In "Halloween Resurrection," the eighth sequel
since the 1978 original, original heroine Jamie Lee Curtis, making
a cameo appearance, actually dies, right vowing to see her demonized
slasher brother, Michael Myers, "in hell." It's easy
to imagine demon Michael being resurrected yet again--it's happened
to him in every film so far--but harder to buy such a comeback
for his regular human sister.
Meanwhile, Jason Voorhees, the hockey-masked slasher from the "Friday the 13th" franchise, already has come back from Hell just for "Jason X," which takes place aboard an orbitting space station. Previously, another sequel had been titled "The Final Friday," but we know how credible that claim turned out to be.
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from the 'Friday the 13th' films and puts him aboard an orbitting space station. |
Aside from these two belated sequels in 2002, most of the other "slasher" franchises seem to be dead meat. Freddy Kreuger, the razor-fingered slasher-ghost from director Wes Craven's original "A Nightmare on Elm Street," has been off screen ever since "Wes Craven's New Nightmare" in the 1990s. Though the long-awaited "Freddy vs. Jason" duel of slasher villains from the "Nightmare" and "Friday" series finally starts shooting this summer, it may be a little late for the train. Craven's "Scream" franchise has petered out after three in the series and the "I Know What You Did Last Summer" series lasted only for two films.
Nothing kills a franchise like audience boredom. All the complaints about the anti-social messages transported by the "slasher" movies probably had nothing to do with the apparent drop-off in public interest in the genre, which some also like to refer to as "dead teen-ager" movies. It's more likely connected to the fact the "slasher" films have become too predictable.
However, I'm encouraged by the emergence of a new genre of quieter, less gory horror films in the early years of the new century. I'm thinking about "The Sixth Sense," the chilling "I see dead people!" movie by M. Night Shymalyan; Alejandro Amenabar's "The Others," another gore-free, but frightening ghost movie; Robert Zemeckis' "What Lies Beneath," the creepy Harrison Ford thriller, and a growing number of really classy horror movies done on much bigger budgets with big stars.
Maybe this is a genuine trend in horror movies, based on the extremely strong box office performance of all those films mentioned above. Nothing succeeds like success. If a quiet, bloodless horror movie is a mega hit, studio types might conclude that's what the public wants instead of another variation on "Halloween."
I'd like to believe the entertainment industry has discovered that the gentler, scarier, more atmospheric horror films attract a much broader makeup of audience. The older viewers who wouldn't go near a teen-oriented "slasher" picture will turn out to see a thriller starring Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford, Nicole Kidman or somebody well out of the teen-age range. Such films also might even be better "dating" flicks for teens since so many teen females have to be dragged to "slasher" pictures by their boy friends.
The new breed of horror film reminds me of the low-budget classics made by producer Val Lewton at RKO between 1942-46. His gore-free, shadowy thrillers like "Cat People," "I Walked With A Zombie," "Isle of the Dead" and "The Body Snatcher" were artfully made and seldom showed an actual killing on camera. RKO wasn't the only studio making subtle horror movies in the 1940s. Paramount turned out some like "The Uninvited," a haunting ghost story with Ray Milland and Gail Russell, that's as entertaining now as it was in 1944.
Most experts date the "slasher" era from the early 1960s when the trickle down effect of Alfred Hitchcock's revolutionary "Psycho" first began influencing European filmmakers and independent American directors. Though England's Hammer Films really launched the escalation of blood and gore on screen in the late 1950s with its "Horror of Dracula" and "Curse of Frankenstein," it was the Hitchcock film that served as the boilerplate for the dozens of lone blade-wielding slasher-killer characters that began showing up in the films of Italian Dario Argento and later the films of John Carpenter, Wes Craven and other American filmmakers.
(Ironically, Hitchcock never actually showed a knife penetrating the flesh, not even in the immortal shower sequence with Janet Leigh. His imitators--including those who made the three "Psycho" sequels--all let the blood flow freely. Hitchcock's wasn't the first shower sequence in a horror movie either. Val Lewton's "The Seventh Victim" had one in 1943--and it was even less sanguinary than Hitchcock's.)
In the case of the "Halloween," "Friday the 13th" and "Nightmare on Elm Street" series, the sequel-prone killers all were unstoppable demon-ghosts. Though actor Robert Englund ultimately was recognized as the man inside the Freddy mask, the killers in the "Halloween" and "Friday the 13th" series were anonymous, faceless slashers and hardly anybody remembers who was behind those masks.
My personal opinion is that the "slasher" films constituted a very low form of horror movie, especially as the sequels began piling up, and probably inspired any number of real-life psychopaths. If the "slasher" era is indeed running out of gas, I think that calls for a celebration, don't you?
© 2002 by Ron Miller.
The Ron Miller caricature is © 2001 by Jim Hummel. The "Halloween
Resurrection" logo is the property of Dimension Films. The
"Jason X" logo is the property of New Line Cinema.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
teaches classes in mystery and related topics at Whatcom Community
College and Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
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