The slasher genre is in desperate need of a makeover

The slasher genre desperately needs a makeover after the rise of self-awareness and irony has all but killed it.

Back in the early 1980s, if you were headed to a horror flick on a Friday night, statistically speaking, it was probably about a knife-wielding maniac murdering scantily-clad teenagers. In 1981 alone, My Bloody Valentine, The Burning, Friday the 13th Part II, The Prowler, Halloween II, Happy Birthday to Me and Graduation Day were all released in theaters within the span of a few months. And you thought superhero films were being driven into the ground. John Carpenter gave birth to a phenomenon with Halloween, and for better or worse, the genre was changed forever as studios became wise to our thirst for cheap, trashy fun - the scary movie equivalent of fast food. 

Flash forward to 2016, and the slasher movie is nowhere to be found. Various studios are currently scrambling to revive Jason, Freddy and Michael Myers with new reboots, but so far it doesn’t seem to be working out. The latest Friday the 13th has been a production nightmare, undergoing countless rewrites and being delayed three times in the past two years. A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) was a moderate box office success, but no plans for a sequel have been put in place. Halloween Returns, which was meant to re-start Michael Myers’ killing spree after the utter disaster of Halloween II, was recently cancelled a few months after production was announced. What the hell happened?

One reason for this sharp decline is that in past decade, horror films have become overly self-aware. In a world where the slasher has been ruthlessly mocked and picked apart to death, nobody has the guts to create a non-ironic entry anymore. There always must be numerous winks at the camera referencing how stupid this all is, a complete departure from the mostly straight-faced tone present in the genre’s greatest hits. We laughed at Friday the 13th, not with it. Now that the filmmakers are in on the joke, it's not nearly as funny. That's the case on TV as well. In the title sequence for Fox's Scream Queens, the cast members literally wink at the camera and smile, as if to assure us that nobody involved really cares very much about this.

Just look at the few slashers to hit theaters over the past few years. The Cabin in the Woods spends its entire running time deconstructing genre conventions and pointing out how dumb all the tropes are, concluding with the statement that audiences thirst for something unique. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil has a similar goal; Eli Craig turns the story into a farce in which the killers are actually just two dudes caught up in a misunderstanding. Last year's The Final Girls follows a group of teenagers who are transported inside an '80s slasher, and so in the ultimate culmination of this self-aware trend, the characters all realize that they are in a film.

On the very rare occasion that we get a sincere slasher these days, it’s just a throwback to the classics rather than anything genuinely modern. Films like the Hatchet series are not as comedic as something like The Cabin in the Woods, but the directors still intentionally emulate all of the tropes of a grindhouse feature without much a take. They seem to think being conscious of the fact that their movie is trite is an excuse to not do anything different. 

So the reason the slasher has seen such a downturn is that absolutely nobody is interested in treating it seriously and evolving it. We’re stuck reliving the 1980s for all eternity, with filmmakers either satirizing the classics or attempting to ironically recreate them. What few have been willing to do is take things to the next step, as the ending to The Cabin in the Woods called for. Have The Ancient Ones taught us nothing?

In fact, throughout the 2000s, this idea of trying to bring back the old-school hits became quite literal when nearly every single slasher was remade with virtually no alterations. A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), rather than reimagining what a Freddy story might look like if it were created in the 2000s, simply re-films every major scene shot for shot. Have all prints of the original been destroyed? What's the point of this? 

The Friday the 13th 2009 reboot at least gave us some new characters and plot beats, but it still felt shackled to its predecessors like there was some contractual obligation to spoon-feed us exactly what we already enjoyed 30 years ago. Are these movies being made exclusively for people who don’t know how to rent the prior installments? Louis C.K. once noted that he consistently changes his stand-up act because if audiences come to see him twice and he tells the same jokes both times, they'll never come back a third time. Throughout the 2000s, moviegoers were ready to stop going back a third, fourth, and fifth time to see the same old schtick.

One of the only exceptions to this rule was Adam Wingard’s brilliant 2013 film You’re Next. This truly felt like an evolved slasher, which took all of the genre’s tropes to the next level and introduced some ideas that we really have never seen before in horror history. Yet Wingard presents everything with a straight face, never winking at the camera and becoming detached from the material. It's the 2013 equivalent of an '80s slasher rather than a 2013 director unsuccessfully emulating an ‘80s slasher, and that’s exactly what we need more of. Unfortunately, almost nobody saw it.

So can you really blame the general population for not caring about these movies anymore when every one for the past decade has been an uninspired or sarcastic tribute to the ‘80s? The genre needs to let go of the past and move on, ceasing to rely on the same lazy formula and clinging to self-awareness as an excuse. Other subgenres of horror have continued to reinvent themselves, embracing new technology and storylines, so why has the slasher refused to grow up?

Meanwhile, as this unfortunate decline was taking place, Paranormal Activity came along and showed Hollywood that you can still make a horror film on a tight budget and have it become a massive hit, which used to be the whole purpose of a slasher. Oren Peli’s creation pulled in the kind of revenue studios had been aiming for with their constant reboots and parodies, and so resources were quickly diverted away from more Freddy or Jason sequels to other, Paranormal style projects. We got our The Purge, Unfriended, Creep, Oculus and a seemingly endless slate of low budget, usually paranormal pictures that brought in tremendous amounts of money. Now, who needs to spend $30 million on a remake that nobody seems to care about anymore? Instead of viewing this post-Paranormal Activity trend as a sign that we wanted something different, and therefore the slasher needed to be retooled, studios just abandoned the slasher altogether.

That was nine years ago, and with a number of reboots now in production, are we about to experience another slasher renaissance? Or is Hollywood destined to repeat the mistakes of the 2000s?

Recently, Nick Antosca, former writer of the upcoming Friday the 13th reboot, revealed in an interview that the film was originally going to be a period piece taking place in the 1980s and even opening with the classic Paramount logo. This was an awful idea, and it’s reassuring that Paramount ditched it. What we don’t need is any more tired ‘80s throwbacks in which we’re supposed to laugh and applaud because the filmmakers are referencing old movies. The genre’s obsession with looking towards the past has got to go if it hopes to make a comeback.

What we need is a new slasher that is serious, not ironic, and a truly modern story. Maybe the constrained budgets ushered in by Paranormal Activity could actually be a good thing, forcing new filmmakers to be innovative rather than emulate the style of Wes Craven or John Carpenter for the umpteenth time. Let’s hope the new Friday the 13th, now scheduled for 2017, can pull that off and remind the public what was so fun about these films before they descended into parodies of themselves. Otherwise, unlike the villain of the stories themselves, the slasher movie might truly be dead for good.