The rise of the American slasher has always been inseparable from the real-life brutality of its time. With stories like Friday The 13th, When a Stranger Calls, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and more, Hollywood’s most gruesome genre was born from the unease that crept into people’s lives through newspaper articles, TV newscasts, and the unavoidable fact that America was maybe not as exceptional as its people sometimes like to believe. 

In the 1960s and 70s, the United States waged a losing war in Vietnam, and for nearly two decades, those at home were reminded of its toll every night after dinner when the news would end with a reel of names of soldiers, young boys, who died in the war that day. This uncomfortably direct presentation of the war’s ultimate cost had far-reaching effects. For one, it would alter how we witnessed other wars in decades to come, like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, which no longer included solemn displays of the names of every soldier as newscasters once provided. In the early aughts, we grew wary of that head-on admission of elongated failure.

But decades before, when people were still seeing names of mostly young men, some of whom they would likely ultimately be familiar with – neighbors, cousins, brothers – we sought an unusual catharsis through film. The slasher movie was born in the 1960s with movies like Peeping Tom and Psycho, and as our war in Vietnam dragged on, the slasher rose to infamy. It became the poetic language of filmmakers seeking an explanation for a world they could no longer understand by way of gruesome scenes of murder and terror. Leatherface, Jason Voorhees, and so many more slashers today still stand tall as the icons of the genre, and their origins are forever connected to the violence of their times.

In Mafia 3, Hangar 13 sought to continue the series’ intertwined, decades-spanning tale of organized crime with a new protagonist, Lincoln Clay. The game was rightfully pitched as a revenge tale. Clay’s quest is a familiar one in that regard. But given the road he left behind in Vietnam and the new path he paves for himself and the rest of the fictional bayou city, New Bordeaux, in 1968 it’s clear Lincoln Clay carries with him the spirit of a great American slasher.

Every great slasher has an origin story, like a corrupted superhero tale to explain how the monster was born. In Mafia 3, Lincoln Clay’s story begins in Vietnam where he is recruited by the CIA and serves in the 5th Special Forces Group, in real life one of the most decorated active duty groups in the US military. In the Vietnam War, President Kennedy activated the 5th SFG due to their unique abilities in dealing with insurgency combat, and for Lincoln, like so many in the real war, that meant he had seen some things he would never forget.

Lincoln’s wartime memories play out in Mafia 3 through flashbacks and dialogue. Once he recounts how a Vietnamese woman holding a pig and her baby could only take one with her during an evacuation, and she painfully chose the pig, immediately leaving the baby to drown. It’s these sorts of experiences that directors like Tobe Hooper may have read about in the 60s and 70s, leading him to grapple with senseless violence in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. But for Lincoln, the Vietnam War served not as metaphorical brushstrokes in a horror story, he became the horror story, and brought it home with him when he returned in 1968 to New Bordeaux, the game’s fictional New Orleans analog.

We didn’t call it post-traumatic stress disorder back then, but it certainly still existed. Lincoln’s shell shock makes him a sympathetic character, and his eventual betrayal by the Italian mafia, which slaughters his surrogate family in cold blood, makes him worth rooting for; but his means to the end he seeks – total retribution – are uncomfortable. When Lincoln survives a killing blow to his head, and is left for dead in a burned down bar surrounded by the corpses of everyone he knew and loved, he is rescued by his close friend Father James, who later recalls not understanding how Lincoln survived the attack. “Luck? Divine providence? Something else?” Lincoln’s origin story as a slasher is born. Like Jason Voorhees rising out of Camp Crystal Lake to avenge his mother’s death, his rebirth is almost supernatural. 

As the player, you can almost squint and see the world through his eyes. After all, as a biracial man in America’s deep south circa 1968, Lincoln certainly wasn’t welcome in most places, and now the only home he’s ever known outside of a military unit had been burned to the ground. To some extent, you want to root for him, but the methods Lincoln uses throughout Mafia 3 are often just as brutal as any famous horror villain.

For Lincoln, Hammurabi’s Code wasn’t nearly enough. For every figurative eye Lincoln lost to the mob, he took three in gruesome fashion. The 6′ 4″ 270-pound veteran stands like a tower over the mafia goons he slaughters across the story, and Hangar 13 equipped him with the strength to match his size. Lincoln can body slam people at will. If wielding a knife, he can approach an enemy and jam it down their neck. He lifts people out of their chairs and breaks their necks like he’s fluffing a pillow. If ever any mafiosos were resting in a sleeping bag, I have no doubt Lincoln would swing them at a tree like a baseball bat. The developers animated Lincoln with sheer, dominating power in every move. His sprint ability looks earth-shattering. His size and speed combination is akin to any of Hollywood’s most terrifying killers. Hangar 13 even refers to the stealth elements of Mafia 3 as “stalking.” Lincoln was a trained killer and one of the very best at his craft. He brought his skills home from the war and unleashed them on an unwitting city. 

Lincoln displays corpses of his victims for surviving enemies to find. He openly admits his campaign of terror isn’t about “street justice”; instead, he tells Father James it’s about “makin’ that bastard [Sal Marcano] feel what it’s like to lose everythin’, watch as I take it all away from him.” Lincoln deploys every trick he learned in a violent service tour in Vietnam and it’s in this way he embodies the spirit of the slasher. He isn’t a metaphor for the carnage people lived through in that era, he is that carnage. He witnessed it overseas, administered it, and brought it home with him. Father James captures it best in a monologue from the game’s documentary-style interviews. 

“It’s hard to explain what it’s like coming home from war. Elation. Fear. Guilt. Imagine being trapped in a dark room and there is no way out. And every fear, every nightmare you ever had, is in that room with you. And there’s no escape. From any of it. And then one day a door opens and you’re free to go. Just like that. The thing is, you made your peace with your terror, and your fear of death. And now part of you is afraid to leave it behind. But what choice do you have? Every soldier has to walk through that door, one way or another.”

Like the filmmakers who carried the slasher genre to its heights of the 70s and 80s, Clay had made his peace with the terror. It became a part of him, inseparable from the man he hoped to be. Raised in an orphanage, sent to a foreign country to fight a misguided war, then returned home to watch the only family he’s ever known end up snuffed out in an instant, Lincoln Clay’s fate was sealed. He rose from the blood-pooled floors of a massacre like a supernatural stalker with a machete, and though Mafia 3 is a lot of things – revenge story, crime drama, sociopolitical commentary – Lincoln Clay’s campaign of brutal violence bears all the markings of a Vietnam-fueled slasher story.