Razors in the Dreamscape: Revisiting A Nightmare on Elm Street and the Slasher Film (Critical Essay‪)‬

The dominant horror subgenre of the late 1970s and most of the 1980s has been called the "splatter film" by John McCarty (1984), the "stalker film" by Vera Dika (1981), and the "slasher film" by Carol Clover (1992). During its heyday, it was one of the most despised of genres, derided by critics as "dead teenager," "slash-and-chop," "teenie-kill," or "slice-'em-up" movies. And even though its most vocal opponents hoped that it would be, at best, a short-lived cycle that would burn out as quickly as it had appeared, the slasher film has proved to be one of the most influential and resilient subcategories of the modern horror film. Beyond just its self-aware resurrection in the late 1990s via Wes Craven's Scream trilogy (1996-2000), the slasher film has left its mark in various ways on the most popular of horror franchises from the 1990s and beyond, including the Final Destination (2000-2009) and Saw (2004-) series, as well as the various remakes and direct spin-offs such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Halloween (2007), My Bloody Valentine (2009), and Friday the 13th (2009). In addition, the very idea of rapidly produced cycles in which sequel follows sequel, which Andrew Tudor (2002) notes is a "genuinely distinctive feature" of the modern horror era, was largely pioneered by slasher franchises in the 1980s. Thus, while the era of the "classical" slasher film has passed, its legacy continues to shape the direction of the horror genre. Because of the slasher film's fundamentally repetitive nature and the sheer number of films traditionally categorized as such, one of the most useful modes of analyzing the genre has been to employ a structural perspective and examine how its basic constituent parts work together to generate meaning. Although there has been some variation in terms of how the structural components of this subgenre have been understood, it is safe to say that, following Carol Clover's (1992) analysis, they all contain, with little variation, the following: a psychotic killer, a terrible place, a variety of weapons of death, a group of young victims, and a "Final Girl" who survives either to be rescued or dispatch the killer herself. While there were dozens of such films produced during this subgenre's heyday in the 1980s, it was dominated in the popular imaginary by three slasher villains who emerged through a series of sequels: Michael Myers (from the Halloween series), Jason Voorhees (from the Friday the 13th series), and Freddy Krueger (from the A Nightmare on Elm Street series).