Slasher Film - Early Slashers

Early Slashers

Black Christmas (1974) is widely considered the first proper slasher film. Directed by Bob Clark (later the director of A Christmas Story), Black Christmas was one of the earliest films to present some of the characteristics that the slasher subgenre would come to be known for: a mysterious stalker, a set of adolescent or young adult victims, a secluded location with little or no adult supervision, point-of-view camera shots representing the "killer's perspective", a jolting score and graphic depictions of violence and murder. Other films considered early slashers include Silent Night, Bloody Night and Savage Weekend.

It was not until the huge box office success of John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) and Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13th (1980), both of which spawned numerous sequels and remakes and countless imitators, that the slasher genre began to gain widespread popularity.

Halloween, though not the first film of its kind, was the first with a masked killing machine, and also the first film to introduce the concept of the killer being a seemingly indestructible evil force. Through its success, Halloween is often considered the film responsible for the proliferation of the slasher trend, popularizing many of what later became key elements in the genre. A long succession of slasher films were produced, though Halloween actually has far less graphic violence than the later films that defined the slasher genre. Friday the 13th was the first slasher film with an abundance of graphic violence to achieve mainstream popularity, and was also the first to couple this type of murderer character with the sequential murder countdown.