[NOTE: This is a revised version of a presentation I gave for the SQUAD THIRTEEN BOOK LAUNCH. I thought I had some nifty ideas worth exploring, so I’m posting it here.]
WHAT’S THE INSPIRATION FOR SQUAD THIRTEEN? Slasher movies, obviously. It’s actually fairly simple, all these slasher movie villains, the idea of a team up of some kind just inevitably presents itself.
But let’s dig a little bit deeper. The thing with genre is that it gets no respect. Any Genre – fantasy, science fiction, horror, alternate history, it all gets looked down on. Horror especially. And even within subgenres, there’s disrespect – say you’ve written splatterpunk and people don’t even want to be in the same room with you – maximum cooties.
In the field of horror monsters, the most disrespected ‘monster’ is the Slasher.
Oddly, given serial killers and mass shooters, it comes closest to being real. Jack the ripper was a real thing back in the 19th century. In the early 20th century, there were all sorts of lurid newspaper stories about axe murderers.
Funny story about Axe murderers by the way – When I was living up north, we had a house with a fireplace. Anyway, one day, I’m at the hardware store, and they’ve got sale on Axes. So I bought one. I was so thrilled with the purchase, I walked down the street to where my wife was working in a government office to show her this great deal I’d gotten. Visualize if you will, this great grinning galoot in a torn, dirty leather jacket walking into government offices with a humongous axe.
Ten years later they would have shot me on sight. But it was a different, less terrified era, so no one particularly minded. We all made polite chit chat, discussed firewood and fireplaces and the consensus was I had made a very good deal.
But using that axe, chopping a few cords of wood over the next few years, made me appreciate axe murderers. There’s a sense of power to swinging an axe, an inevitable finality, there’s something satisfying about the way it bites in when it makes contact. And if you’re facing an axe, well, you know you’re done for. You can wrestle a gun or a knife, but if an axe is swinging at you… So yeah, I get it.
For the record, I’ve never murdered anyone with an axe.
Where was I? There’s Ed Gein from the 1950s, who inspired everything from Psycho to Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Silence of the Lambs. Guys like Bundy, Dahmer, Gacy and in the modern era School Shooters.
Maybe the slasher is just too close to reality. Trust me, you’ll live your entire life and never have to worry about Dracula or the Creature from the Black Lagoon. But if you live in the US… well, they have an active spree shooter twice a week.
But let’s take a moment out to examine the overlooked and mostly disrespected movie slasher. The thing I find fascinating is that the movie slasher – the masked, hulking, unstoppable menace, pathologically fixated, bizarrely armed, is an evolved figure. No one is really responsible for it, it just kind of emerged bit by bit.
That’s a lot different from most movie monsters – Godzilla, Dracula, Frankenstein, Giger’s Xenomorph, the all appeared out of whole cloth, all their attributes defined for them, and thereafter defining their successors and offspring.
The Slasher though? The slasher grew organically.
The deep roots of the Slasher come from all sorts of sources, Agatha Christie and mystery novels. Ed Gein and real life axe murderers. Hitchcock’s Psycho.
But the first generally acknowledge slasher is probably Black Christmas from 1973, as an intruder kills off a series of victims. It’s got a lot of the tropes – the ‘ten little indians’ motif of killing one by one, the mystery of the killer the emphasis on the kills. But in many ways, it’s only the bare bones.
Next came the Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974, heavily inspired by Ed Gein’s house of horrors, and giving us one of the archetypal slasher figures – Leatherface and his chain saw. Oddly, Leatherface isn’t the star, or even the star monster. Typically, he’s a supporting character, and the real core of the movie is the surreal madhouse world of the saw family, both physical and psychologically.
Halloween in 1978 introduced Michael Myers, in many ways the archetype. But even John Carpenter didn’t see Myers and his mask as an iconic figure. After reappearing in a sequel, Myers was abandoned and Halloween III took off in a different direction and failed disastrously. It took six full years to bring Myers back, building his legend with each film. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Carpenter lost control of his creation to Moustapha Akkad and eventually Harvey Weinstein.
Friday the 13th, 1980, didn’t even feature Jason Voorhees. The villain is his mother. Jason only shows up in a cameo at the end as a deformed boy in the lake. He doesn’t appear as the killer until the next movie, and he doesn’t acquire his iconic hockey mask until the third movie. It’s not until the fifth movie that he becomes the unstoppable zombie we all know and love.
Bottom line, the big three, were almost secondary characters in their early movies. They each took time to get going. It was only through their subsequent movies that they moved to the foreground, building their mythology, becoming the iconic monsters of 80s and 90s.
And of course, the big three inspired a lot of other movies. Though arguably, these movies might have come along on their own. I think it was more a movement in a particular direction, a natural product of the culture of the time, than a series of rip offs. When you watch slasher movies, particularly the lesser franchises like Sleepaway Camp or Driller Killer, or the various one offs, Terror Train, Blood Hook, Prom Night, what’s fascinating is how they often depart from the archetype Killer/Slasher. Rather, what unites these movies thematically and visually is less the killer and more the victims. But that’s something we’ll explore another time.
When you look at the Slashers as a genre lot of these movies were cheap and thrown together. There was a lot of bottom of the barrel stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that, people have to learn somewhere.
If you wanted to make a movie, you didn’t have much money or experience, well, Mission Impossible was out of the question. But you might possibly be able to pull off a slasher and you would find a willing audience to actually make some money, particularly as the elements of the genre congealed and became established, the path became ever more well trodden.
Starts with the ‘Ten Little Indians’ murder plotline. All you have to do is get people in a single location together to be killed off one by one. That was an easy script. You needed an isolated location to set your cast in, usually someplace run down and disused… and usually cheap to film in.
You’re not really investing in characters, they’re often tropes or archetypes, so simple killings get boring. You need to jolt the audience. So you go for jump scares. You go for sudden shocking deaths and deaths in shocking gory ways. This was back in an era when they used fake blood by gallons, and people were pretty gleeful in trying to show effects.
The killer has to be mysterious, remember the ‘Ten Little Indians’ storyline pioneered by Agatha Christie and put into service, these movies come out of murder mysteries. To hide the identity, to increase the tension, killers point of view shots became almost universal. You didn’t see the killer because you were looking out of their eyes, even if you weren’t privy to their thoughts. You were a silent passenger.
Which also meant that the killers had to be silent. If they talked, it ruined the mystery, it allowed you access to their thoughts. It was more impressive if they simply showed. There was no witty repartee, lounge comedian one liners would undermine the menace. They simply stalked and killed, and dragged you along.
Because you had to hide the killer, the idea of the killer being masked and literally faceless became a recurring thing – Leatherface, Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, but it became common – masks, hoods, bags. I saw a slasher film set in a bowling alley where the killer wore a bowling ball carrying bag (it was supposed to be a horror comedy). But the point is that masks, while not universal, were ubiquitous.
That spun off more ideas – either the identity of the killer was a mystery, or the motives were a critical mystery. Why was the killer doing this? Some grudge, some past trauma? Excavating motive was often an important plot point.
Alternately, there was something horrific or disturbing about that identity, especially if you already knew who it was. You built the killer up. In Halloween there’s Donald Pleasance always talking about how Michael Myers is absolute soul-less evil, you often saw that kind of talk. Some of the Friday 13th movies dwell on people traumatized by the previous movie. In a throwaway slasher called Blood Hook, about a killer fly fisherman, the killer is spoken of in almost mythic terms.
Because a lot of these movies were made on the cheap by inexperienced crews, you got ineptitude in the production process which gave us people doing stupid things, running into traps and dead ends, splitting up to go looking, sneaking off to have sex, they had to be isolated and vulnerable. So they went to camp, or parties, had sleepovers, went on road trips, got lost, took dares to go into haunted houses or forbidden buildings. It was all mechanics, and deservedly mocked in the Scream series, and by knowing audiences generally.
But those mechanics gave us killers that were seemingly unstoppable, that through the magic of bad writing and bad editing, were impossibly mobile, they’d appear in locations where it seemed impossible for them to get from one point to the other, they’d appear in the perfect locations for mayhem, they’d seem to appear in two places at once. They never did anything but walk, but somehow, they’d catch you no matter how fast you ran. They could soak up horrible injuries and somehow keep on coming, and even when you thought they were dead, they’d just come back anyway, somehow. Sometimes, as with the Scream series, this was explained, a lot of the time it just wasn’t.
And all of this gives us, bit by bit, a classic movie monster emerging – The Slasher – masked or hidden, silent, implacable, hulking, indestructible, seemingly unstoppable, prone to teleportation, often mythical and iconic.
At least, right up until the final girl, the lone survivor, when they became stumblebums and finally got put down. Or were unmasked and revealed to be whiny crybabies. But up to those moments, Slashers were simply terrifying and compelling..
And yes, these movies were often brutal, illogical and stupid. But you know what? Their audience loved them. The teenagers of the 80s and 90s ate these movies up like popcorn, even though they and their friends were typically the victims. I knew kids back then, who were absolutely fascinated, they soaked them up. They couldn’t get enough.
That’s kind of a paradox – teens loving movies where they were the victims – but not as much as you might think. Being a teenager in that era was stressful. In the Slasher movies, kids are always killed for being horny, for wanting or actually having sex.
There’s a lot written about the psychosexual aspects of Slashers – that in hunting and killing kids having sex, they’re punishing sex and immorality. That they reflect a punitive approach to sexuality, or a deep underlying misogyny. I think that’s there. But it’s also a very superficial reading.
The audience that seemed to crave these movies weren’t puritans. They weren’t church biddies celebrating each time a slut got what was coming to them. There wasn’t a lot of anti-sex or anti-women sentiment in the audiences, and while misogyny can be found, it’s also found in a lot of the teen sex comedies, or romantic comedies or even the mainstream action movies of the Slashers era.
Rather, I’d invite you to take a look at the audience – teens and young adults. This was an audience that was massively hormonal, going through puberty, or just past it, thinking of sex constantly, wanting it, dreaming of it, seeking it out. They weren’t repulsed by sex, they were desperate for it! They craved it! They craved the idea of it.
But at the same time, this sex they so desperately craved came with those scary downsides – the complexities of relationships that they weren’t sure how to navigate, pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, things as basic as performance. Even how and where to do it, especially where to do it was a subject of uncertainty and potential terror.
No one really expected to be impaled by Jason Voorhees in the middle of the act. But getting caught in the act by your parents arriving home early was a real possibility, and most teens in that situation, would have preferred being killed by Jason. The sex/murder themes of Slashers reflected not misogyny, but the intense desire, and attendant terrors and uncertainties that accompanied that desire.
As cheap and disrespected as they were, these movies actually did speak to their audience. They spoke to an audience of young people whose lives were in transition, who were caught on the cusp of adulthood, still safe, still happy, with their families and friends, but also outgrowing it, wanting desperately to move on, but deeply unsure of what the future held or whether they were ready for it. Childhood, adolescence was coming to an end, the adult world, faceless and impersonal, was waiting for us, and we weren’t sure we could handle it. Slasher movies were a genre made for people on the cusp, still in the final stages of a secure old life, facing an uncertain new life.
No longer children, not yet adults, the saw themselves and their friends in these movies, and the Slasher, with his working class stylings, his facelessness and his relentlessness, represented a world that they weren’t sure how to face. A world and a future that was terrifying.
That’s who the iconic Slasher really was. They were faceless silent ciphers because they represented a faceless anonymous world, one that seemed implacable and indifferent. It’s no coincidence that the Slashers wore overalls or working class gear, that their weapons and kills were so visceral, it represented, the gritty, adult working class reality. The adult world out there didn’t care, neither did Slashers, and either could get you just when you thought you were safe. The world, like the Slashers, were indifferent to your desires and your ideals. It just did its thing… potentially to you.
If young people were the victims in these movies, it was because young people felt like victims, they felt vulnerable and insecure, and that’s what projected on the screen. There was always the survivors to reassure the audience that as bad as it got, with smarts and luck, perseverance and being quick on their feet, they could survive an overwhelming menace.
But as bad as it got, alone in the dark, when the chips were down, and we were on our own facing life without friends or family to rescue us, the final girls or other survivors showed us that we could make it, we could even win.
In the end, I think we disrespected Slashers as an archetype or a genre, not just because to many of them were poorly done or apparently superficial, but because we disrespected the audience and who they were. There are endless movies and novels, stories of “coming of age” – some of them very literary, some genre. But they’re all written or created in hindsight, the products of people who already ‘came of age’ and inevitably look back with a certain kind of outlook.
In this sense, I think Slashers were more authentic. These weren’t movies by fifty year old men and women taking a golden hued trip down memory lane to their ‘coming of age.’ I don’t know how to generalize the people making slasher movies, though as a whole, I’d suspect that they represented a younger, more marginal, more vulnerable group of film makers.
But the audience for slashers weren’t people looking back fondly on puberty. The were going through it. They weren’t revisiting adolescence from positions of lofty maturity and security, they were experiencing adolescence as a maelstrom, a whirlwind of uncertainties, a torrent of desires, impulses, insecurities and terrors. In a sense, it’s the audience, this particular audience that creates the archetypical Slasher.
I’ve called Slashers an organically grown or evolved monster. No one person really created the Slasher, it just grew. I think it grew in response to that particular audience needing something to embody their fears. In that sense, I think the mythic Slasher, is at least as respectable as any other monster. Because ultimately, every monster represents someone’s genuine fear.