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    • horror
    • slasher
    • thriller
    | Oct. 31, 2016, 10:17 p.m.
    What exactly makes a classic horror film? Does it have to be scary? Halloween is cited as the movie that kicked off the Slasher sub-genre that dominated horror for more than a decade. I recently sat in for a revival screening in a packed house. Obviously Halloween did something right. It was a massive hit in its original run and continued to grow its audience over that span, placing it in refined company regardless of the genre. I’ve listened to interviews from the initial screenings where theatergoers not yet familiar with the rules of slasher pictures yelled at
    • horror
    • slasher
    | Nov. 1, 2016, 10:36 p.m.
    In 1978 it was enough to call Michael Myers pure evil. By the time of the inevitable sequel, the burden came to mythologize this monster. The 1980s had an obsession with satanic cults and pagan ritual. Paranoid suburbanites saw them in the dark corners of their own communities. John Carpenter’s script pegged this onto Michael Myers. Suddenly the man who spent 15 years mute in an insane asylum was versed in samhain and the ways of the druids. Carpenter may have been keeping in step with times or he may have been looking forward to Halloween 3: Season of
    • horror
    • slasher
    | July 7, 2016, 1:53 a.m.
    Despite John Carpenter’s Halloween laying down the rules for slasher horror, many of the films lumped into that genre were really just updates of the old murder mysteries. You have a killer, you have clues and red herrings, and the suspect is revealed in the final reel. The only concession to the times were in showing a bit more of the killer’s point of view. Schizoid belongs in that lot. A murderer stalks members of a therapy group, but the police who have to handle “40 murders a week” haven’t yet make the connection. It all seems
    • horror
    • slasher
    | Nov. 18, 2017, 7:48 p.m.
    Slasher horror may have no more sympathetic villain than Billy. Forced to watch his parents brutally murdered by a criminal dressed as Santa Claus, he and his young brother grow up in a Catholic orphanage. The Mother Superior is iron-sided emotionally (and later physically), and tries to cure Billy of his natural disdain of Christmas with harsh punishments. As traumatized children in these films are wont to do, Billy grows to be a tall, well-muscled man. One of the well meaning nuns finds him a job in a toy store. All is well and good until Christmas
    • horror
    • low budget
    • slasher
    | Aug. 13, 2017, 4:58 p.m.
    In my youth, as a frequenter of mom and pop and national chain video stores, I thought I possessed the fine ability to sniff out a unworthy film simply from the box art. Sleepaway Camp always failed my test. The box illustration showed an adidas sneaker punctured by a butcher knife, the hallmark of a by the numbers slasher film. I was wrong, I now know. What should have clued me in was how year after year, decade after decade, across all the stores, there always sat a copy of Sleepaway Camp. Other horror and exploitation films came