slasher

Theatre of Blood (1973)

Theatre of Blood (1973)

Vincent Price in the role of Edward Sheridan Lionheart is going to chew the scenery so boldly and so vividly in the kinds of important theatrical roles he always wanted to play, but felt his stature and reputation in horror cinema kept out of his reach. Luckily for Vincent Price, and by extension for us, Lionheart's final season was a survey of some of the biggest and juiciest roles in Shakespeare's canon. The Shakespeare plays contained in Theatre of Blood were more likely than not chosen for the inventiveness with which characters are dispatched than for the significance of the plays themselves, but Price does get to wrap his mouth around monologues from Hamlet, Richard III, Shylock, and on and on.

Is it Horror? | Scream (1996)

Is it Horror? | Scream (1996)

Not having really ‘discovered’ horror until my later years, which is to say, the latter half of the 2010s, I completely missed the phenomenon that was Scream, which is just as well, because its references would have flown over my head and landed somewhere in the midst of my high-brow culture intake of the time. Having consumed considerably more genre content since, thanks in large part to this podcast, I was finally in the proper headspace to watch Wes Craven’s 1996 blockbuster.

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

I think there are a handful of reasons why I chose this one for the curriculum. This is not a film that I was naturally drawn to in my childhood when I would be browsing the boxes at the video store. In fact, quite the opposite. And by the time I was in my VHS horror rental prime when I was around the age of 10, the sequel to Sleepaway Camp had already been released. And the video box art for the sequel, even when I was at the tender age of 10, felt to me like it was too silly for my time and attention. The box art for the sequel features a young adult woman. She's hiking through the forest. She's got a backpack on and in that backpack we see Leatherface's chainsaw. We see Jason Voorhees' requisite hockey mask. And we see Freddy Krueger's razor glove. And to me, even at that age, this was preposterously silly. It felt like a parody or a comedy. It didn't feel like something that was going to scare me.

I, Madman (1989)

I, Madman (1989)

I, MADMAN is a bit of a wild card. I've seen it so many times that I can't recall my first viewing. It might have been on VHS. I remember seeing the trailer a lot, probably in theaters before other movies and the poster at the video store, which said, at the top, “Spend the night with a madman.” It’s practically an unknown gem of late-eighties horror. 

Black Christmas (1974)

Black Christmas (1974)

In addition to being a prototypical slasher film, this is the first seasonal slasher movie, or a horror movie that takes place on a holiday, and of course right on its heels would come things like Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN in 1978 and FRIDAY THE 13TH in 1980; plus things like PROM NIGHT, MOTHER’S DAY, MY BLOODY VALENTINE, and SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT, which is of course another Christmas horror movie.

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