So while Psycho and Peeping Tom incorporated what later became the traditional slasher formula and were the biggest influence on future filmmakers, I am not including them on the list. As with Film Noir, Giallo and any other sub-genre of film, it took a few filmmakers and a wave of similar movies to develop a terminology to distinguish them apart from other films. It was only around 1981 that “slasher” became initiated as a true sub-genre. When Black Christmas and Texas Chainsaw Massacre were released, the term slasher wasn’t attributed to those films either. If anything it simplifies my life to consider these as proto-slashers and so maybe one day I will write up a list of the films that were the biggest influence on slasher films made after 1970. Horror films in the 1970’s were largely influenced by the emergence in the previous decade of the psychological horror films, but if we were to include Psycho and Peeping Tom, then why not consider the dozens of other films that featured psychosexual killers from before their time, most notably Fritz Lang’s expressionist German masterpiece M (1931), a film featuring Peter Lorre has a creepy child murderer. What are the Best Slasher Films of the 70s and 80s? In Psycho, for example, there is a body count (even if only two), the film features a mystery killer, a knife-wielding maniac, a ‘stalking’ camera technique, and even a twist ending – but no one defined Psycho as a slasher film when it first was released, nor Peeping Tom. So is Psycho a slasher? Is Peeping Tom a slasher? In theory, yes. It was a wise decision, and three months later Psycho hit the big screen, and the rest is what they call history. When Alfred Hitchcock was informed that Powell’s film was banned, he decided to cancel all press screenings for Psycho, in fear that it too would be blackballed from having a theatrical release. The film was immensely controversial critics called it misogynistic, and thus the film was never theatrically released. It also happens to be a major influence on the found footage genre and one of the best films ever made. The film’s plot centres around a man who kills women while using a portable movie camera to record their dying expressions.
For my money, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) is the mother of all slasher films. Some consider Thirteen Women to be the earliest slasher – released all the way back in 1932. So does one consider Scream a slasher film or a neo-slasher, or simply put, a modern slasher? When someone describes Brick, they don’t define it as a noir, but instead neo-noir. In other words, she saw it as a movement. Author Vera Dika rather strictly defines the sub-genre in her book Games of Terror by only including films made between 19.
The definition of a slasher film varies depending on who you ask, but in general, it contains several specific traits that feed into the genre’s formula.
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