This was breached in another thread, but I thought it would be fun to discuss one of the most popular types of movies, at least around here based on the number of scripts that are from that genre (I have one).

These slashers usually fall into two categories: the "super-gory, there's the killer look-out!" variety and the "there's a mysterious killer, whoever could it be" variety.

In variety one, we have classics such as Halloween, Friday the 13th (all except for Part 1 & 2), Nightmare on Elm Street (all except Part 1), and countless others.

In variety two, we have Psycho, Scream, Friday the 13th (part 1 & 2 only), A Nightmare on Elm Street (Part 1 only), and most of the modern slashers.

What's your favorite? What can be done to help this tired genre? What would the perfect slasher movie HAVE to have to be successul in your opinion? Almost everyone here loves or has a secret fetish for slashers, so let's be honest.

For starters let's stop writing in the genre, leave it alone for a few months and let people start caring again. I could honestly care less about that genre or board at this time, it hurts itself that we have all of these know it all kids saying they wrote the best script ever and when they get some views they don't ever plan to change things... It's simple.

My hope in this is that those kids who love this genre might get something out of this thread and instead of the same tired script....again...we get something that might be just a little better. Besides, I've always had a small affinity for the genre, but anything original seems to be out of reach.

I'm not really looking to talk about how this film or that film is better than another, just the genre in general and what is killing it right now. It goes through its own ups and downs. Psycho brought it up in 1960. It lulled until 1978 with Halloween. And then lulled agaion until 1996 with Scream. What will it take to bring this genre back from the dead?

Less pg-13 films and more of everything else they've lost. Scream wasn't great but it was okay, now we have nothing but boring same old seen it before films. Not that they are bad but they are average, average in this day and age is the new bad.

The one thing that could help it is new blood ie writers that aren't closed minded or to rich to care, Ian off this site I believe writes slashers (Somewhat, I don't want to cheapen what he does by calling it that) They are above average but even from listening to people who option scripts in this genre producers, directors whoever these indy guys are they want the same old predictable crap.

What we need is more PURE low budget film makers who want to make a good product not just enough to make them some money and a mansion.

As I recall, Halloween began as a low budget horror film. It was made because Mustafa Akkad had some leftover money and decided to do it. Imagine that problem...

The big problem is that predictable is safe, and that's what they think they are getting. The people who write these bad scripts are the ones who watch these bad films and think they are the best thing ever while us old schoolers who have actually watched films older than we are know where we came from and know this stuff is crap.

I think one thing that could help the newbie writers and even established ones is to stop going to see the new stuff and go back to the classics like Vincent Price and almost everything Alfred Hitchcock has ever done. The Thriller (the precurser to the slasher) is attributed to Hitchcock, and his movies all show the early days of that bastard step child. Psycho is primarily a thriller, not a slasher, but it is called the grandfather of slashers.

The Lodger, Hitchcock's first film and a silent one, is very loosely about Jack the Ripper. Is the Lodger the killer? The film has a rather high body count and a solid plot for a silent movie from 1926. It even has a twist...that I won't tell you. Forget Psycho, The Lodger beat it by 34 years. Same basic idea as the modern slashers: someone is doing the killing and can you stop him? It takes it necessarily from a different angle than modern films by showing the people around the Lodger and aftermath of the killings, but it's just a slasher - one of the oldest.

If we go back to the basics instead of trying to match what isn't working nowadays, there may be hope.

I think it is possible to have a PG-13 slasher...after all, we need a good plot, and rarely do plots take high ratings; it's the language and effects. Only a handful of films have a high rating due to pure content. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is rated X because of the content. Nothing could be cut to reduce the rating. Halloween was shown on TV with a few alterations and lost little of its scare factor. And in 1978, that meant a lot of cuts.

I think the slasher flicks of today tried to be too smart, even for themselves. I can't really say more than what George has said. Psycho, Halloween (Haven't see The Lodger) really are the prime examples of the genre (moreso Halloween than Psycho). Scream re-invented it.

For me, when I was really getting into moves and writing - Scream came out and I thought it was one of the best movies I had seen to that point (What can I say, I was a teenager when it came out - the prime audience target). I even loved I Know What You Did Last Summer...but then it completely spiraled out of control. Scream 2 was okay, Scream 3 was poor, Last Summer sequal was terrible...the list goes on and on.

Want a fantastic slasher movie made in the last few years? Club Dread by Broken Lizard. It's fantastic spoof that actually plays better than most in the genre lately.

I love horror movies, and that's what I write. I've yet to write anything slasher related and I don't think I will. I agree that we need to get back to basics, or introduce something new to the tired genre of the late 90's.

Let's make the horror in the movie psychological. Let's explore the characters deeper. I don't need a body count, I'd like to explore the reasons for the killings. Why? What purpose?

I want that twist that...but doesn't every Hollywood Producer.

Rambled on for too long,
Good Night.

Yeah, people want the same old crap. The one scary film lately was The Grudge, it really messes with the mind. What can I say, I'm an easy scare.

But a scare doesn't make a film good, just music and sound effects.

I think when I was younger Childs Play would really mess with me, I was in my early early teens I believe when I seen a few of them and damn they really led to a fear of horror films ha-ha. I haven't watched the original 3 ever since, seriously.

But Bride and Seed made the series a comedic look at the life of puppet killers? I enjoy those films for what they are but they aren't exactly a bright spot in the genre, they kind of feed into the predictable Hollywood views. But hey as long as we get to see Jennifer Tilly run around in tight clothes, what more can we ask for?

I can't really think of anything special that can be done, unless you read through horror scripts, mainly slashers and give some reviews to help the writer.

I do find a weakness in the genre has to do with all the sequels. THe first one tends to be frightening, but the sequels tend to be comedic action flicks, totally undoing the fear of the first. In Nightmare 1, Freddy was rarely seen and rarely said anything. In the rest, he had that last smart comment before the kill. Only the bloody nature of the film made it the slasher, but the horror was gone. The same has happened in the Child's Play films; comedy and action but no horror.

The Slasher seems to be more of a subgenre of other genres. Cameron's Aliens did not try to hide what he was doing. He didn't call it a horror film, but an action film and it was shot like one. The original was horror, but the second had a much higher body count, quite bit of suspense, and more disturbing images. If this this had the same script, been reclassified as a horror film and shot and acted like one, it would have failed.

I think MacDuff has a very solid point. We need to care about the characters before they're hacked. We need an emotional attachment, otherwise we don't care when they're killed. If there is a real sense of loss by their deaths, then the movie has already cimbedthe ranks from bring slasher to a good movie, almost regardless of plot. I say "almost".

As for the Grudge, it is a slasher or a supernatural thriller film? Or can we call it a supernatural slasher? Do we have to resort to revenge-seeking ghosts to be scary?

And I will admit, also, that I'm trying to find for myself what can be done about this genre. One thing that I'm gathering is that there needs to be more suspense in these films....more tension. One thing that master Hitchcock said about suspense: Watching the bomb explode does not create suspense; it is watching the bomb drop and wondering whether it will explode. Or something to that effect.

I thought about this when I was watching Halloween. We see a girl walk out of the house, down the sidewalk, cross the street, trip up onto the curb, walk up the sidewalk to the other house, knock on the door, look around, then the door is answered. All the while we know there is a killer out there.

To not build suspense, we see the girl go out the door of her house, and then cut straight to the interior of her friend's house as she knocks. Just pondering.

I think we need to revert back to the lead up to each murder. I mean, jeez - it's a murder! There should be some consequences, some guilt, some shock with the audience. There's too much "Stab, Stab onto the next victim!".

I've never thought about writing a movie like this, but if I was ever to lay something down, I think I will make it a post modern Agatha Christie style Whodunnit, mixed with the fear and build up ala Hitchcock with some gore. My characters would be memorable!

I was following this thread, and off-and-on today I have been trying to come up with anything new that could possibly be done within the confines of this genre.

I have an idea now, but don't want to waste a new thread on such a half-baked plan for a story.  I'll just toss it out here for comments.

What if you do a standard slasher, but set it in a nursing home?  Instead of generic, partying teenagers, you would have geriatrics battling a crazed lunatic in their midst.  "Bubba Ho-Tep" had some of this, but you would play this straight, not for laughs.  I'm betting that a nursing home at night could be a pretty scary place...

Is it crazy enough to work?  Or as ridiculous as it sounds?

I'll tell you a true scary story that took place in a nursing home...

My wife and I were looking at nursing homes for my now late mother-in-law.  One of the first places just seemed dreary and without hope for the residents.  On all the floors, the residents just sat in wheelchairs and staired off into space.

While walking along a corridor, and elderly woman grabbed my hand.  We looked at each other and she said, "Goodbye forever."

I grabbed my wife and we left.


I had started working on a horror.slasher fiilm of my own, which is ironic because I don't like the genre.  I guess I'm just trying to see how I would write one.  I put this story on the backburner and started writing a short mockumentary, which I'm really fired up about.  I hope to have the first draft of this done in a week.


Phil

I've noticed a lot of people tend to overwrite the characters of a slasher to make them to the point of being cut out and unbelievable. You have the Jock (he'll die), the cheerleader (she'll die), the innocent girl (she'll live), the geek (he'll tell you everything about the plot and may or may not die), and on and on.

Some of the best stories come out of life. Phil, your situation in the home is perfect fodder for a slasher. Some of the best stories present REAL people in real and mundane situations. Let's look at Laurie Strode's day in Halloween: she does an errand for dad, goes to school, is going to babysit for someone, walks home with her friends, talks on the phone, does her homework...I mean, this is seriously boring stuff, but we can believe it. A good thriller or slasher should take the mundane and twist it really hard to be something weird.

As you walk through somewhere today, think "what is the worst thing that could happen here?" That is a story. To go slasher, you might think, "what kind of killer might come out of this place and why?" Perhaps sitting at home tonight, you think, "If a killer broke in tonight, what would I do, and why would he do it?"

Normal, mundane people are the characters in a good slasher. Sure they have a problem, but it is honestly rarely drugs, alcohol, and porn. Don't make the dead characters obvious. Make them your best friends.

I think a good way to do it these days would be to have two different story and character arcs going on. You have a story going on...doesn't have to be a horror. It has it's own conflict, characters and desires. Then you throw in the spark. It can be anything, something to disturb the story, throw things into chaos and watch for the exiting outcome.

Too many slashers are based around the slasher killing as many characters as he/she can (and most are teenagers). If you as a writer why he has chosen teenagers, most likely the answer would be "because that's the what I've always known". If you look back to the Halloweens, there were reasons why the youth were targeted, but now it seems to be the easiest solution.

I must admit, my interested has been peaked by this topic, but I don't think I would even consider writing anything until I knew excactly the purpose of the script, and offered something different to the genre that is tired.


MacDuff

MacDuff, that's ingenious if I understood you correctly. I followed that something else starts the story out, basically a non-slasher plot. Then the slasher plot disrupts that story, leaving the character to fend for their life while simultaneously trying to finish the original story since the character would still be motivated to do that.

I think the reason teenagers were originally used (in Halloween) was because that was just how old Laurie Strode and her friends were. It fit the story. In Friday the 13th, they were camp counselors and not all of them were kids. In Halloween 2, most of the victims were adults. The teenager tends to be the target because of the "rules." (Scream lays these all out.) Teenagers are more apt to be irresponsible with the 'sin' factor. Little do these writers understand that adults can blow kids out of the water on the sin factor.

My only slasher to date, Vengeance, has a high body count, but the main character is a housewife in her 20's. The youngest victims are college students (not original, but hey, it fits the story). The reason behind the story is actually more of an adult topic and reasoning. It's not a great script, but I don't hate it.

Being a slasher fan and horror addict, I felt I may aswell drop in with my opinion!

I have to say I agree with everything that has been said, and by a bizarre coincidence I have just sent it to Don a script that hopefully fulfills most of these ideas. (Name of my script is Season Of The Devil )

What has been said, basically I have attempted to put into my script and have been always looking to change the way horror is nowadays. It is too comedic, too predictable, the characters are the same and the settings are always the same.

Now, my script is only the second one I have written, and Im not using this as a promotion to read it, but I went into writing it wanting to create something new and different.

Whether I have done or not, what you have been discussing is exactly what I have tried to do, which is breathe new life into the horror genre. We shall see!

I feel horror is non stop. There is no end to it. Sure, this is the genre that is most despised and rejected because it relates to death,  and murder and violence ect.

But that is what is so amazing and so expanding about it, there is no boundary with horror or slasher flicks. You are dealing with the unknown, so you can create something that does not exist and make it part of everyday life. Jason , Myers, Freddy, Pinhead, Chucky. They all stand out and are part of everyday life!

I certainly agree the copycat films have to stop, the slasher is in MTV world at the moment and music and culture is a big part in what is and what isnt.

The good looking girls and guys, the dream settings, the stereotypes you have all mentioned above need to end to make a horror film a proper horror film.

Thats jsut part of my view, I was so pleased to read people write about this and I agree with everyone that has posted.

A horror film is something you want to leave the cinema and not want to see that film ever again. But you will always remember it.

And go and see it next week.



Cheers