I watched the first “Terrifier” and found it pretty bad but I’ve heard that the series gets better. But on hearing that in the third one it gets revealed why Art the clown cannot be killed; it makes me less interested in the series. This is because I feel that unkillable slasher villains are boring by definition. But I wasn’t sure why I felt this way and it lead to this piece of writing
Micheal Myers is shot at the end of Halloween and his body disappears. Originally, I had written “of course, the body disappears” but I realized that was inaccurate. The slasher disappearing has become a cliché but this was the origination of the cliché, the twist at the end of the film. Modern audiences don’t even register Myer’s disappearance as a twist because it has become what every slasher film did in its wake.
I personally find the disappearance of Meyers incredibly effective in that I don’t take it literally. It’s not that Myers is unkillable it’s more like his consciousness become omnipresent. His actions have changed the world for Laurie Stroud. It’s like the way that a person with PTSD will never see the outside world as safe again.
This is all thrown away by the economic necessity of having Myers return in sequel after sequel. The metaphorical has become thuddingly literal and the scary psychopath of yesteryear has now become a creature with profound powers.
Similarly, the sequels felt the need to explain Myers and make him Laurie Stroud’s relative, when it was much scarier that he was just a random cipher who decided to make her life miserable.
This same problem happens to most of the 1980s franchises, the ending of the original “Nightmare on Elm Street” in which Nancy defeats Freddy by turning her back on her fears and taking away the power he gave him, is powerful and daring. This is squandered by the thrown-together last scene where Freddy predicably returns. In general, the “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchise relentlessly throws away the promise of the first movie in it’s subsequent follow-ups. How much more interesting would “Dream Warriors” have been if the dream warriors were able to actually fight Freddy on his own turf?
It’s not just the anticlimax, it’s the focus on the killer as a returning hero that makes the slasher genre one of the least interesting for me aspects of horror.
For me, the way slashers reduce their killer to a supernatural entity makes the films much less frightening. It’s when the killers are human that is scarier to me and precisely what 1970s entries in the genre get right.
Leatherface was a frightening part of the original “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, but the other family members were what made the movie terrifying. Leatherface is so monstrous that he is barely human. In contrast, the family are fully and recognizably human but take joy in the suffering of other people. It’s the humanity of the killer that makes them more terrifying. The degraded humanity of the Sawyer clan creates context that makes Leatherface believable.
The inhumanity of man to man is the scariest part of traditional slashers and the most difficult to capture without it just becoming merely tasteless torture porn. Or a joyless reimagining of factual true crime.
That is why most slasher films try to preserve their “fun” by distancing their killers from ordinary humanity. Because by making their killer an ancient unkillable evil, they avoid the moral squeamishness of them being an ordinary person.
There was an effective billboard about the Palestinian genocide posted around Halloween. “This year the horror is real”. As effective (and accurate) this was, it was pretty misguided about what the horror genre is about.
Horror tends to steer clear from real-life atrocity unless it’s being portrayed in a metaphorical way. No horror fans are watching footage of Auschwitz or reading up on the genocide of the Rohingya people.
For the same reason even though the central metaphor of horror is death, there aren’t any horror films that just show an old person dying in a hospital. Atrocity, no less than the reality of death, is too upsetting for the horror genre. This is not to say that horror can’t be about atrocity or cruelty, but it needs a curtain of metaphor to be digestible as art. A good example of a misstep in this regard is the beginning of Abel Ferrara’s “The Addiction” which starts off embarrassingly with actual footage from Auschwitz. I actually like “The Addiction” but it’s the worst part of the movie.
So 80’s slashers began to lean on the idea of an unkillable killer, sometimes with godlike powers and the genre became incredibly boring. The problem is for me that many of the films robbed of the tension of what is going to happen, begin to inhabit the territory between comedy and horror.
The later “Nightmare on Elm Street” films are neither funny nor scary. Freddy Krueger who was a terrifying villain with a lot of personality in the first film, has lost all the malice he had because they had to forget what he originally was. The anti-hero of the current films couldn’t be associated with the child-killer of the first movie.
This is why the revival of the slasher is disappointing because series such as “Terrifier” are already veering into the same territory which we know from experience leads to horror becoming played out camp.
The kind of horror I like is the eerie. The horror that leaves you with an unsettling note, that’s why my favorite horror writer is Robert Aickman. Many of his stories end with the characters escaping but being marked and haunted by experience. It’s the feeling that you have escaped death temporarily, but it still lies in wait for you.
I’m going to close with the ending of Aickman’s story “The Hospice” because it pulls this off brilliantly. The main character, Maybury has spent an awful night at the title Hospice and has possibly witnessed a murder but is able to escape. He is set free by the owner of the Hospice, Faulkner and is given a ride with a hearse that is conveying a body out of the Hospice:
“I shall waive that too, Mr Maybury,” replied Falkner, “in the present circumstances. We have a duty to hasten. We have others to think of. I shall simply say how glad we have all been to have you with us.” He held out his hand. “Good-bye, Mr Maybury.”
Maybury was compelled to travel with the coffin itself, because there simply was not room for him on the front seat, where a director of the firm, a corpulent man, had to be accommodated with the driver. The nearness of death compelled a respectful silence among the company in the rear compartment, especially when a living stranger was in the midst; and Maybury alighted unobtrusively when a bus stop was reached. One of the undertaker’s men said that he should not have to wait long.