I had seen films in the theater before I was 17 years old, and I’ve even written about that experience here once before, but when I was 17, a perfect storm blew into my life. I finally had my driver’s license and a car, I lived in the suburbs and hung out with a group of bored, like-minded, teenage boys, and the Golden Age of the slasher film was about to begin. In the fall of 1978, John Carpenter unleashed Michael Myers on the world and the gruesome genre was born, big shiny knife in hand.
Halloween’s influence on horror films in general, and slasher films in particular, can’t be overstated. It contained every element that would soon become a cliché: a psychotic maniac wielding a sharp implement, a group of dumb horny teenagers destined to be slaughtered, an isolated location, a sole survivor, a sequel-friendly ending.
I don’t remember seeing Halloween in the theaters, or Friday the 13th 1, 2, and, 3, or My Bloody Valentine or Happy Birthday to Me. But plop down my dollars to see them I did, along with many other long forgotten films. It may seem strange that this documentary-making, classical guitar-playing, Yasujiro Ozu-loving man discovered his passion for cinema via these films; all I can say is, “We were all young once.”
That I don’t remember these films is not always a testament to their quality, but more to their nature. Slasher films are like fast-fading nightmares. An unrelenting bogeyman chases us, and no matter how fast or far we run, he is there not far behind, in striking distance. We wake up in a cold sweat, frightened, but the dream quickly evaporates. Similar sequence of event after watching one of these films, except the lights came up, we exited the theater and walked to the Golden Eagle diner, and “discussed” the film for a few minutes. Then the film evaporated.
Thankfully, J. A. Kerswell is here to remind us of the films. A first flip through The Slasher Movie Book brought back some of the more imaginative set pieces. Oh yes, I do remember that scene in Happy Birthday to Me, where the teenage boy’s scarf gets caught in the wheel of an overturned motorcycle and the spokes shear his face off. Oh, and death by sish kebab! And of course, Friday the 13th 3 in 3D, where Jason Voorhees shot a spearfishing gun at the audience and with his bare hands crushed a man’s skull with such force that his eye flew out of its socket and landed in our laps. It’s all coming back to me now.
The images in The Slasher Movie Book are pulp-iliciously gorgeous and kudos to Paul Wright who designed the book; he makes great use of a multitude of creepy stills, garish posters, and lurid video sleeves (many from Mexico and Japan). This book may not be printed on glossy paper, but don’t let that fool you, this is a coffee table book for those who like their coffee table books full of sensational, politically incorrect, and gory imagery.
The impulse with such a book is to flip through it, stop at a random page, read the caption, maybe look up a favorite movie in the index, and then put it back on the coffee table. But I’d recommend reading the text and starting at the beginning. Kerswell does an exceptional job of tracing the slasher film’s forbearers: Grand Guignol theatre, silent films such as The Cat and the Canary, Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, Psycho, Italian giallo, and on an on, detailing the elements the slasher film cannibalized from each. Researching this book must have been fun.
1978-1984, The Golden Age (no ironic quotations marks here), gets the most ink, and rightfully so. However, here the book is more a series synopses without much criticism or insight. But to his credit Kerswell manages to keep the plot summaries somewhat fresh, a formidable task considering the sameness of the stories and that there are only so many synonyms for “kill.” Kerswell also lists the box office figures for most of the films, and I find this odd and disturbing. I suppose he’s trying to chart the rise and fall of the genre’s popularity, but a more effective way of doing this might have been to create a simple graph: number of films produced each year, combined grosses of the films year to year. Reading how much each film grossed becomes a little tedious.
The Slasher Movie Book is extensive, but by Kerswell’s own admission, not complete. Still it’s a fine compendium and contains its share of obscuros, such as Blood Beat, a strange little number from Wisconsin that features “a seven-foot-tall samurai conjured up by female masturbation” and from Sweden, the “deliciously demented” Blood Tracks, wherein “a poodle-permed rock band and its groupies [are] attacked by mutants during a photoshoot in the mountains.” They’d both be in my Netflix queue, that is if Netflix carried them.
It’s a good and entertaining survey of the genre, but I think the definitive version remains to be written. The pulpy feel and look of the book fit the genre, but it would have been nice if the book contained some interviews with the filmmakers and not merely quotes lifted from other sources. I would have enjoyed an egg-head thought piece as well, perhaps placing the birth and popularity of the films in a socio-historic context. But for now, The Slasher Movie Book will have to do on your coffee table, you know, the one made of bones and VHS cassette boxes.
The Slasher Movie Book, by J. A. Kerswell, published by Chicago Review Press, is on sale June 1, 2012, at bookstores and on Amazon.