Few subgenres in horror are so maligned as the ’90s slasher. Aside from the meta-perfection of Wes Craven’s Scream, many are dismissed as toothless copycats or formulaic retreads of familiar concepts. But there’s a surprising amount of gold to mine in the last gasp of 20th-century horror.

Not only are ’90s slashers usually stylish and fun, but they serve as gateway texts for a new generation. Falling just before the proliferation of smartphones and a new era of geopolitical strife, the decade also feels like a simpler time. Riding a wave of U.S. prosperity, the decade was remarkably free from the international conflicts and xenophobic paranoia that would dominate the next century. Instead, we turned to internal fears.

Many ’90s slashers focus on enemies lurking within our own social circles. From untrustworthy boyfriends to plotting best friends, the villains of these slashers often come from the systems we’ve built to protect ourselves and the places in which we thought we’d be safe. 

Jamie Blanks explores these themes through a gendered lens in a pair of thematic slashers clocking in at the tail end of the trend. Young and hungry, the Australian filmmaker threw his name in the hat to direct Scream, then auditioned for the I Know What You Did Last Summer director’s chair by filming his own speculative trailer. Though he ultimately lost both bids, Phoenix Pictures tapped the 25-year-old to direct an upcoming slasher set on a college campus.

Urban Legend follows a group of unlucky coeds who fall into the gears of familiar folklore. Three years later, he would direct Valentine, a feature adaptation of Tom Savage’s 1997 novel. Reviving the trend of holiday-inspired slashers, the film follows a group of gorgeous young women tormented by a sea of eligible bachelors.

Both films feature villainous women disguised as faceless boogeymen whose motives ultimately revolve around pleasing men. With casts also filled with empowered female characters, Blanks explores the dangerous world women must navigate and the surprising villains intent on tearing them down.

Women get cutthroat in Jamie Blanks’ feature debut, Urban Legend

Though Urban Legend is often dismissed as a copy of Scream, it’s doing something altogether different.

Rather than interrogating the genre itself, the film is a meta-analysis of the urban legends on which we’ve built our system of collective morality. The film begins with a familiar tale. A woman is frightened by a creepy yet ultimately innocent man and fails to notice the actual threat lurking in the back seat of her car. From there, Blanks delivers a smorgasbord of campfire tales, repackaged for a modern world. From The Kidney Heist and The Dead Boyfriend to the blood-curdling Aren’t You Glad You Didn’t Turn On the Lights, each story explores the insidious ways women are taught to navigate an unsafe world. 

Though it does feature a diverse cast, including teen drama stars Jared Leto, Michael Rosenbaum, and Joshua Jackson alongside genre icons Robert Englund and Brad Dourif, Urban Legend is a decidedly female story. The story’s final girl, Natalie (Alicia Witt), is a former cheerleader struggling to heal from a traumatic past. Her friend Sasha (Tara Reid) is an outspoken shock jock known for highlighting female sexuality, while her roommate Tosh (Danielle Harris) is an icy goth who delights in drug-fueled one-night stands. All three are tormented by a parka-clad killer who uses ironic twists on urban legends to punish them for their empowerment.

The urban legends that put them in danger involve some variation of trusting a man and putting themselves in vulnerable positions. The stories exist to remind women that the world is filled with predatory men and that their safety is their own responsibility. Though the killers put them in impossible situations, they are punished for transgressing and not remaining virginal. Tosh dies because she invites a stranger into her room, while Natalie nearly dies on an ill-advised trip to Lovers’ Lane. After years of vocal feminism, Sasha dies because no one believes her cries for help. 

We eventually learn that the killer is Brenda Bates (Rebecca Gayheart), Natalie’s flirtatious best friend. In an elaborate monologue — complete with ’90s-era visual aids — she explains that Natalie unknowingly ruined her promising life. Along with Michelle, the film’s first victim, she participated in a dangerous prank that claimed the life of Brenda’s fiancé. While her grief is, of course, understandable, Brenda’s other complaint is that her latest crush, an ego-centric journalism student, only has eyes for Natalie. The woman who once took her fiancé’s life has now stolen her second chance at happiness. Never mind that the attraction seems to be mostly like with Paul. Brenda cannot blame the man who’s rejected her, but the woman who’s beaten her for his love. 

Natalie is eventually saved by Reese (Loretta Devine), a campus security guard who styles herself after genre icon Pam Grier. But a last-minute twist sees Brenda falling into a rushing river, and we learn that the body was never recovered. In a final stinger, we see Brenda emerge, this time with straight hair, to recount her own story to a new group of coeds. With a green ribbon tied around her neck, the message is clear: the stories we tell to guide women’s actions in a patriarchal world will never truly go away.

They will just be repackaged and sold to us in another format. Even more upsetting, it’s often women passing these messages along to each other, guiding the next generation in hacking survival instead of conquering predators head-on. 

 Flawed characters get struck by Cupid’s bow as Valentine carves its way toward a killer climax

Blanks’ second film narrows this theme by exploring the dangers of modern dating. Valentine follows a group of gorgeous young women struggling to find worthy men. The film opens on a middle school dance in which a dorky boy named Jeremy (Joel Palmer) is rejected by a series of popular girls. Eventually, he finds success with fellow outcast Dorothy (Kate Logie) and the two begin kissing underneath the bleachers. But a group of boys breaks up this scene and, hoping to distance herself from her nerdy beau, Dorothy accuses Jeremy of sexual assault.

As Jeremy’s nose begins to bleed, the boys empty the punch bowl over his head, drag him out from under the bleachers, strip off his clothes, and administer a brutal beating while the rest of his classmates cheer them on. Years later, he will seek bloody revenge, but not on the boys who beat him up, but the girls who would not dance with him. 

Flashing forward thirteen years, we reunite with Kate (Marley Shelton) and her friends as they navigate a world full of awful men. While Shelley (Katherine Heigl) survives an atrocious first date, Paige (Denise Richards) and Lily (Jessica Cauffiel) try their hand at ’90s-era programs like speed dating and video introduction services. Now a beautiful young woman, Dorothy (Jessica Capshaw) is enjoying the spoils of her father’s wealth, but can’t see that her entrepreneurial boyfriend is taking advantage of her generosity. And Kate has just ended a serious relationship with fellow journalist Adam (David Boreanaz), until he deals with an out-of-control drinking problem. From arrogant mansplainers and Playboy artists to lecherous detectives and leering neighbors, these women are plagued with a series of horrifically undateable men, none of whom are worth the gorgeous women’s time. 

While fending off these oafish bachelors, the women receive grotesque and violent valentines promising to do them bodily harm, each signed with Jeremy’s initials. One by one, a killer in a cupid mask taken from that long-ago dance begins picking them off in brutal ways. Each time, a drop of blood flows from his nose, confirming that the killer is Jeremy. But in the decade since the traumatic dance, they’ve lost touch. Any of their disappointing suitors could be Jeremy hiding behind a new name and a handsome persona.

After finding her remaining friends dead at a climactic Valentine’s Day house party, Kate fights with the killer. But just as the killer is about to strike a fatal blow, a mysterious savior shoots him dead. Though she thought he might be the killer just moments ago, Kate rushes into Adam’s arms. He pulls off the killer’s mask to reveal Dorothy’s face underneath. 

Blanks sacrifices clarity for this jaw-dropping final twist and leaves us to piece the details together. Perhaps Dorothy is the real killer, determined to punish her attractive friends for what she views as pretty privilege? In hindsight, this lines up with her insistence that her beautiful friends still see her as an ugly duckling. Or perhaps Adam has been the real killer all along and somehow convinced Dorothy to don his disguise? More likely, they’ve been working together, rekindling their clandestine kiss and vowing to seek revenge against their more popular tormentors. If this is the case, then Adam has saved his ultimate rage for Dorothy herself, the girl who once betrayed him with a false accusation that ruined his life. 

Regardless of who actually committed this gruesome string of murders, we’re left with an uncomfortable climax. Though Kate and her young friends are admittedly cruel to Jeremy at that fateful dance, adolescent rejection should not warrant a death sentence. What’s more, the film opens with a young boy trolling from girl to girl, hoping someone will accept his proposal to dance. As soon as one pretty girl rejects him, he immediately moves on to the next. He doesn’t actually care about any of them and is simply trying to boost his own ego by dancing with a pretty girl. Years before incel became a well-known word, we see that the grudge he’s been harboring for thirteen years is not against the boys who actually assaulted him, but the women who rejected him. 

Though we’ll never know exactly who the killer is or how the whole thing came to an end, we do know that a woman will be blamed for this series of murders. Dorothy will be remembered as the formerly fat girl who sought revenge on her attractive friends after lying about a sexual assault and dooming a boy to institutionalization. Brenda will be remembered as a hysterical woman driven to kill rather than face life without a man. Both have based their happiness on romantic partnership. And they’ve murdered women who found a way to find happiness within themselves.

Natalie, Kate, and their respective friends may enjoy flirting and dating men, but their lives do not revolve around romance or approval from guys who don’t deserve them. But both Dorothy and Brenda debase themselves for men who are not interested, nor are they worthy of either woman’s time. But rather than admit that fact and move on alone, they find it convenient to blame women. Seeking to tear down other women rather than trying to build themselves up. 

The ’90s were not the best time for women. In the midst of third-wave feminism, we created impossibly high standards for female beauty and behavior, and then viciously punished anyone who caught our eye. Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton, just to name a few, proved that no amount of beauty, talent, or success could appease a ravenous crowd addicted to destructive objectification. We told these women to try to be perfect, then tore them apart for the sin of flawed humanity. While men certainly contributed, it was often women leading the charge. This reflected misplaced rage at these impossible expectations that we ourselves could not fulfill. But rather than set our sights on a system designed to dehumanize women, we spent our energy on tearing each other down.

Jamie Blanks’ films, while certainly not perfect, reflect a dangerous world for women. But what makes them stand the test of time is not only presenting a cast full of diverse and empowered female characters, but also allowing young women to be villainous too. After all, women feed the patriarchy too. His films help us examine the enemy lurking within our own ranks.