Review By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

The slasher film has always been one of horror’s most beloved and most brutally criticized subgenres. However, despite the genre’s overexposure by the late 1980’s, the genre has managed to endure with at least the general public as a new wave of gratuitously violent horror films have been embraced by young moviegoers and devoted fans in the present day.

Author Adam Rockoff, an avid horror fan, documented the slasher era of horror extensively in the book Going To Pieces: The Rise And Fall Of The Slasher Film. The movie channel Starz were so impressed with the book that they decided to make a film adaptation of it. The result is a documentary by the same name, which is now available on DVD.

The documentary extensively covers the rise of gratuitous violence in horror films from thrillers like the classics Psycho and Peeping Tom, the graphic Italian horror mystery Twitch Of The Death Nerve, and the crime exploitation cult classic Last House On The Left. The slasher genre fully came into its own in 1978 with the unprecedented critical and commercial success of John Carpenter’s independently released horror classic Halloween.

The genre’s commercial mass exploded in 1980 with the Hollywood-distributed release of the gleefully and gratuitously shameless Friday the 13th. For the next six years after, there were hundreds of variations of the two seminal slashers in theatres like Prom Night, Happy Birthday To Me, and Graduation Day, many distributed by Hollywood studios looking to cash in mostly under the uncertainty of the threat of a writer’s/actor’s strike at the time.

However, the gratuitous violence and sexuality in many of these films’ high-profile releases generated enormous controversy with parents, politicians, and the Hollywood film industry itself. It reached a fever pitch in 1981 with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert devoting an entire edition of their film review program to denouncing the perceived sexism and misogyny of slasher films in general, which there is plenty of footage of here.

While the slasher genre managed to widen its imaginative palette with the critical and commercial success of Wes Craven’s classic A Nightmare On Elm Street, the genre mostly began to burn itself out creatively by the end of the 1980’s with endless sequels, knockoffs, and failed attempts at reinvention (i.e. Friday The 13th Part V: A New Beginning, April Fool’s Day etc) and the genre soon faded to obscurity.

However, after the slasher genre was reinvented by the self-referential Scream in 1996, a short wave of sequels and imitations began to emerge during the heights of teenybopper mania in the late 1990’s which even more quickly grew tired and clichéd itself. In the present day, after clouds of uncertainty like 9/11 and the Iraq war emerged, the horror genre has undoubtedly felt the effects and a return to gratuitous violence has emerged with graphic torture scenes in films like Hostel and the
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