Butcher Block is a weekly series celebrating horror’s most extreme films and the minds behind them. Dedicated to graphic gore and splatter, each week will explore the dark, the disturbed, and the depraved in horror, and the blood and guts involved. For the films that use special effects of gore as an art form, and the fans that revel in the carnage, this series is for you.
1982’s The Slayer doesn’t come up in conversations about slashers too often. Up until Arrow Video’s 2017 Blu-ray release, it’d been relatively obscure and difficult to find. Also, with a small cast comes a small body count, therefore this slasher tends to be slower in pace than most. Then there’s the creature on the cover box; it doesn’t actually make an appearance until the final moments of the film. So those expecting a fun creature killer in the vein of Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger will wind up disappointed. But it does deliver extremely well executed deaths, and the non-chronological order of the narrative combined with ambiguity presents a unique choose-your-own interpretation ending.
The plot is simple, on paper anyway. Two couples head to an island for a vacation getaway, but being that it’s off season, they’re isolated and alone. The peace and quiet is interrupted by Kay, an artist plagued by nightmares that insists those nightmares will cause the group’s doom. Only her friend Brooke is somewhat sympathetic; Kay’s husband David and brother Eric are positive her imagination is running wild. Sure enough, they start dying one by one.
Directed and co-written by J.S. Cardone, the writer behind The Stepfather and Prom Night reboots, The Slayer foreshadows the character deaths in the opening scenes. From there it’s a waiting game for the killer to claim victims. The deaths aren’t exactly creative, but the gore effects are fantastic. Decapitations, fish hooks through throats, and a pitchfork through a chest all look realistic thanks to special effects makeup creator Robert Short (Chopping Mall, Beetlejuice, Legion tv series).
For the pitchfork sequence, Short created a replica of the actor’s chest, skewed in proportion to build a spike on rails type of system to pierce through from behind. The rain in the scene and the camera angle works to hide the rigging. Short also created the titular Slayer, which saw actor Carl Kraines (the actor who portrayed the creepy Workman in The Gate) wearing an uncomfortable mechanical head made of urethane foam with a foam latex skin. Being that The Slayer was filmed in Georgia, Short wanted to give the Slayer a very southern, almost zombie-like look.
The gore effects were apparently so well done that it drew the attention of the BBFC, and The Slayer wound up on the Video Nasty list, in the non-prosecuted section. A release with 14-seconds of gore trimmed out finally made it to VHS in the early ‘90s in the UK, and the BBFC eventually cleared it to release uncut in 2001. Like many entries on the Video Nasties list, The Slayer doesn’t really have a whole lot of gore to it to warrant its place on the list, even if well executed.
It’s not the great gore effects (but very low body count) that makes The Slayer stand out, nor is it really the scant appearance of the creature. It’s the weird way in that it presents multiple interpretations of what actually transpired. Cardone gives enough supporting clues and evidence that you could make a case that (SPOILERS) the Slayer was really behind it all, a character snapped and murdered everyone, or it’s all simply a premonition/bad dream. He leaves the ending completely ambiguous. This, with an effective atmosphere, makes The Slayer standout in a sea of slashers.
