If I may appoint myself an expert on recent cinema history, I'd say that the slasher movie has, by and large, become the most popular sub-category of the horror genre, outdistancing even relentless hordes of zombies in any honest, movie-by-movie tally (I assume. It's not like I've done any research). It also has the least-impressive pedigree, with few seminal works that rise above the level of laughable shit. Acknowledged classics such as the original Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or proto-slasher templates like Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace and Twitch of the Death Nerve, tend to work not because they represent any great leap forward in storytelling, but because talent behind the cameras kept them from being little more than the cynical exploitation the producers intended.
I suppose you could say that about almost any kind of movie, really, considering they're nearly all meant to be money machines. But I have a hard time thinking of any other kind of film, apart from porn, more concerned with the bottom line. If you were to sift through a random sampling of slasher flicks from the 80's, you'd find the vast majority are pure junk, either good only for poking fun at, or dull enough to cure insomnia (My personal favorite is Don't Go In The Woods...Alone, a piece of crap with acting so bad, and scoring so ridiculous, Ed Wood is foaming with rage in the afterlife because he didn't make it himself). Yet the form seems to have captured the imagination of a generation of filmmakers, and doesn't show any signs of letting up. It comes and goes, like a herpes inflammation, and has been around long enough to have what could rightly be called a classical period and a revival period. On the one side you have all those goddamn Friday the 13th movies (which actually get better as they go along, just because each one is sillier than the last), and on the other you have Rob Zombie's ambitious-but-flawed remake of Halloween, which comes at the original story in an unconventional way—telling it from Michael Myers' point of view—but stumbles by failing to make very many of the other characters sympathetic, and as a result leaves a total vacuum of suspense.
(Better yet, you also have Freddy Vs. Jason, an entertaining and funny pairing of two classic horror icons that even scooped Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 1 by being the first movie in American theaters to feature Lone Wolf and Cub-style arterial blood spray.)
In the interest of getting to the main point of this post, I'm going to mention the country cousin of the slasher genre, the City Folk vs. Psycho Hillbillies movie, best represented by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes (or for those of you who prefer hicksploitation of a higher caliber, Deliverance). The main theme of these films is pretty straightforward: urbanites are scared shitless of rural America. Generally speaking, those who live in cities don't think all that highly of people from the country (I have to admit I'm sometimes guilty of this myself, and I grew up in a pretty rural part of Washington state). City folk are smart, cultured, civilized, enlightened, and bathe regularly. People from Backwoods U.S.A. Carry firearms at all times and eat things they find in the road. According to these movies they also eat a substantial amount of human flesh, which should tell you something about the availability of good grocery stores in the American heartland. I'd eat the occasional human being too if the only food outlet within 75 miles was a Wal-Mart.
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| Wal-Mart |
I'd also gladly eat man-flesh if there was a chance it would stop any more of these from getting made. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of the original Chainsaw Massacre, and I also enjoyed the first Wrong Turn movie (I haven't seen any of the others because, I mean, c'mon). But this is a well movie makers have gone to way too often. Massacre, as well The Hills Have Eyes, have both been remade and spawned sequels to those remakes. Along with Wrong Turn and its follow-ups, Mr. Zombie has thrown his hat into the ring with his first feature film, House of 1000 Corpses, and its sequel, the slightly better The Devils's Rejects (wouldn't the fact that the devil rejected them mean that they're not evil enough to get into Hell? Maybe that's the point of the movie—they're in the qualification phase). I'm sure I'm missing a bunch (does Cabin Fever count? It feels like it should). Apart from more graphic gore and contemporary filmmaking techniques, few of those movies differ much from their progenitors.
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| No camping trip is complete without at least one dead Harry Potter |
Then along comes Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil, and turns the whole idea upside down. It bucks the trend in two distinct ways: firstly, it's a comedy instead of a horror film, with a reasonably touching bromance at its core. Second, the rednecks are the victims, not the victimizers. Tucker and Dale are two good-natured country boys looking to fix up an old cabin in the woods in the hopes of making it a vacation getaway. Not far off in the same woods, a group of college students, cleverly patterned after similar characters in vintage slasher movies, have set up camp for their own vacation.
A misunderstanding leads the students to believe Tucker and Dale are bloodthirsty hillbilly psychos out to kill them all, when in fact the greatest danger they face is their own stupidity. Over the course of the film most of them manage to kill themselves or each other, often in very bloody ways (there's even an homage to Fargo when one kid jumps headfirst into a chipper/shredder). Tucker and Dale find themselves threatened by the creepy leader of this pack (the Evil of the title), who harbors a psychotic mistrust and hatred of “hillbillies”. Further carnage ensues.
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| This is still legal in some states |
I don't want to get into too much of a review here. I liked Tucker and Dale; it's amusing and kind of sweet, while also containing a generous amount of blood and gore (though it's actually pretty lightweight compared to some genuine horror fare of recent years). My main point is that this movie, for me anyway, heralds the official end of the slasher/crazy redneck arc. This is it. It's finally come to the parody stage, where making fun of the genre is more relevant than recycling all of its tropes. And that, in my very humble opinion, is exactly where it should stay. Personally, I'm done with it. Maybe I'll never watch another slasher movie again that wasn't made in the 80's and isn't hilarious. Unless some genius comes along and totally revitalizes the idea of a maniac stalking braindead kids, turning it into an art form on a par with violin concertos and breakfast burritos, I'll pass on any new installments. It's the same approach I've taken with zombie movies for the last few years (maybe in another post I'll get a chance to rant about how sick I am of that more-than-way-past-played-out craze).
Of course there'll be many more. How could there not be? Each new generation of filmgoers, lacking any experience with old movie trends, stumbles across tired and overused ideas all the time, and treats them as if they're brand new. There's money to be made off these naïve waifs, and therefore more mileage to be gotten out of clanking, wheezing, redundant horror conventions. As the Child's Play, Elm Street and Scream movies have made apparent, even the notion of making horror films funny and self-referential has become a shopworn cliché. Apart from an occasional rarity like Tucker and Dale, it looks like it's all downhill from here.
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