Editorials
6 Slasher Films That Don’t Get Enough Love!!
Slasher movies were what introduced me to horror. The idea of some huge (yet oddly quiet) man, skulking around in some cryptic mask, looking to viciously murder anyone who crosses his path. Sometimes, the slasher would have motive for doing what he did, so that added another layer of fun to the sub genre. The idea that the bad guy may have been a victim at one point. In that sense, slasher movies are more like revenge movies. They begin with the tragedy befalling a character. Said tragedy changes his appearance and demeanor. Often then, we flash forward as some masked maniac has begun killing everyone. The formula is easy enough to follow, but I have noticed over the years slasher fans always seem to talk about the same movies. The movies that set the tone. The Friday the 13ths and the Halloweens. But what about the hundreds of other slasher movies through the ages? How come they get no love? Well, my sick friends. They are about to.
Man, I love me some Cropsey! Yes, The Burning may have been very similar to Friday the 13th, but why is that a bad thing? The Burning was about Cropsey, the caretaker at a summer camp (for apparently really cruel children). One night some of the campers decided they want to scare the guy, but in the process of trying to scare him, they kind of burn him alive. You know, we have all been there? You try to prank someone and mistakenly maim them. Man, I hate when that happens.
Anyway, Cropsey does not actually die. He just spends five years at a hospital getting skin grafts and shit. They release him and he pretty much makes his way to a camp and starts murdering kids. I know murdering kids at a camp is nothing new, but man, that canoe scene is one of my faves of the 80’s. Fisher Stevens seems genuinely shocked he gets his fingers cut off. That never fails to make me laugh. Makeup master Tom Savini at his early best.
Oh, and let it be known. A young Jason Alexander (with hair) is in this movie. It is worth seeing just for that. Well, that, and when Cropsey busts out a blow torch in the final stretch of the film. Yeah, that’s pretty badass, too.
Long before “Dexter” was showing us how to kill people on Showtime, Leslie Vernon was showing us how to kill people in this brilliant mockumentary. A movie that follows the exploits of a man named Leslie Vernon (sort of a real life Jason Vorhees with charisma) as he goes about, doing his thing. The Vernon character is so charming, you tend to forget the fact that he is a murdering monster pretty quick. Then he reminds you again.
The film is satire of the slasher genre, while also being a love letter to the genre. We follow Leslie as he addresses such things as picking victims, ways to kill, and how to get away with it. The movie bounces back and forth from satire, and it hits you during the last half hour that it was all an elaborate set up for the finale of the film.
I will not tell you more than that, as I do not want to spoil this gem of a film for you.
Peeping Tom is on the list for one simple reason. It was WAY ahead of its time. We are talking about a film from 1960. On top of that, the way the kills go down in this movie are still incredibly chilling. Why? Well, that is the whole point of the film. The Peeping Tom in mention is a man who has a camera mounted and running at all times. He essentially films all his murders, and we see them from the perspective of the camera. Think the modern remake of Maniac and you have a good idea.
Mark, the main character in this movie, has an Anthony Perkins in Psycho levels of creepy to him. He is an odd and quiet man, and the more we find out about his past, the more what he does seems to make sense. Granted, it dos not justify his actions, but at least validates why he does them.
Again, I am being cryptic and vague on purpose. See this movie. Also, someone needs to remake it, stat. The voyeurism themes would lend themselves well to our technological age.
Okay, I am gonna be honest with you about this one. StageFright is on the list because of that fucking owl head. I know Lord of Tears is coming soon, so this feels really topical to bring up. Something about a human that looks like an owl is very disturbing. StageFright is about a group of actors who start getting offed, one by one. They hear of a legend of a murder known as The Night Owl, and once they bring him up, it is like they summoned him.
But this is a slasher, so you know the owl is just one of the people in the cast. But who? Well, that is not important. What is important is that the owl head is creepy a fuck (even though you know field of vision would be all but non existent with it on) and the final half hour has some cool twists and turns.
But mainly, that owl head.
So wait, you have a killer cop roaming the streets of New York city, and Bruce Campbell is in this movie? Two stronger selling points, I have never heard. While every other aspect of it may just seem generic, sometimes all you needed for a good slasher was to change the setting, and change the antagonist.
I will be honest with you. Another reason this is on the list is because the idea of a cop being a murderous fiend is pretty scary. Why? Because your mind set it to do whatever a cop tells you. We have all been conditioned to respect them as authority. So the very idea that a cop would be the murderous monster sends a chill down your spine.
Granted, other than that, this is typical slasher fare, but the cop thing sets it above most other slasher clones and gets some points for originality.
I will admit, this one (much like StageFright) is on the list for the killer’s ensemble. In this case, the killer wears an old hag mask that, for some reason, fucking freaks me out. The actual movie is sort of by-the-numbers, but man, that hag mask? That thing is terrifying. Oh, and extra points for the ice skate scene.
Rarely do we get to see ice ballet and slasher films meet up so gloriously. Okay, so what slasher films do you think are underrated? Take to the comments and let us know. Then go toss a like over here, and then go read about< a href="http://remycarreiro.com/soul-stealing-cinema-seasoning-house/" target="blank">the one film from this year that really fucked with my head.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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