Slashers are back, baby, and you know what that means! A bunch of 12-year-old boys have fully convinced themselves that the scariest thing imaginable is some psychopath with a knife, and there are scary stories being told around campfires in the weird woods of America again.
Okay, wait, hold on, say you (the esteemed readers of The Tartan), what exactly is a slasher flick?
Well, a slasher flick has three major requirements:
- Violence
- A completely unserious villain
- A nonsensical story
Many major and well-loved members of American pop-culture are part of this time-honored and storied tradition.
The “Friday the 13th” franchise? You’re telling me I gotta be afraid of some freak with a hockey mask? Goofy villain, check. Excessive violence? Little kiddy Eshaan averted his eyes for at least 40 percent of those movies. I have no idea how that poor college guy doing ticketing thought this was a good idea, because there was a lot of blood. Check. Nonsensical story?
Look me in the eye and tell me you know what in the hell happened in the franchise. Or why there was a franchise. Why does this maple-syrup swigging hockey mask-wearing idiot get a second, third, or… there are 12 movies?????
The last big thing about slashers is that they’re cheap. They’re really cheap. You can mess around with corn syrup and red 40 and some other shenanigans and get away with a movie that (if you squint, turn the lights off, and film every other shot in low exposure) can almost be imagined to be gorgeous cinematography. So cheap movies with word-of-mouth advertisement and decent box offices — a business major’s dream.
And there’s a new franchise that seems to be doing really well right now. “Terrifier 3” hit theaters recently, and it’s the bookend to a mini-renaissance of horror movies, following the tremendous success of “Scream VI.” The movie cost only about $2 million and has made about 25 times that at the box office, which is insanely impressive. In fact, with the absolute failure that was “Joker 2,” “Terrifier 3” spent a few weeks as the top selling flick in theaters. It’s incredibly impressive that this sort of indie-adjacent filmmaking is coming back in vogue, and it’s something to look forward to if you’ve been missing silly gore and awful flicks in your life.
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