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Black Christmas, Friday the 13th, Gregory A. Waller, hippies, Jimmy Carter, slashers, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exorcist, Vera Dika, war
The term “slasher film”, like most categories, is kind of arbitrary. While everyone can agree that the Friday the 13th movies are slasher films, and that films like The Exorcist are not slashers, there are a lot of films that horror fans continue to debate. Was Psycho (1960) a slasher film? How about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) or Black Christmas (1974)?
The best analysis I have ever seen on the topic is an essay called “The Stalker Film, 1978-81”, by Vera Dika, that appeared in a book called American Horrors, edited by Gregory A. Waller. Although Dika used the term “stalker film”, she was clearly talking about a sub-genre of horror that many people would label slashers. Pumpkin Person will use the term “pure slashers” since Dika was describing a very specific type of movie.
According to Dika, this sub-genre typically has a narrative structure that is divided into a past and present event, with the following outline, which I’ve paraphrased:
PAST EVENT:
Some young people do something “wrong”.
The slasher sees a wrongdoing, injury or death.
The slasher suffers a loss.
The slasher kills guilty young people.
PRESENT EVENT:
Something commemorates the past action.
The slasher’s violent impulse resurfaces.
A seer warns the young people.
The young people ignore the warning.
The slasher stalks the young people.
The slasher kills the young people.
The heroine discovers the killings.
The heroine fights the slasher.
The heroine defeats the slasher.
The heroine is alive but the threat isn’t over.
According to Dika, the golden age for this sub-genre was 1978-1981. She quite cleverly correlates this with the American political climate of the time. For these were the final years of the unpopular Carter administration, the president who is credited with never firing a bullet, never dropping a bomb. But many Americans at the time felt humiliated by Carter’s non-violent foreign policy and the outcome of the Vietnam war, and a decade after the 1960s, there was a backlash against the peace and love pot smoking hippie movement. The mood was rife for films about pot smoking love making non-violent teenagers getting slaughtered as brutally as possible, while a conservative virgin heroine uses violence to triumph against the enemy. Dika’s theory nicely explains why slashers were so prolific and popular for such a brief period in American history, with only the most fleeting of revivals.
Pumpkin Person 
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I haven’t read the essay in question, but as you’ve relayed it, it sounds like it’s basically correct, except for the fact that the slasher film, which was a reflection of the coming of the Reagan era, consumed horror throughout that era, not just for that brief period of years. They dominated the genre right to the end of the ’80s. The films were reactionary moral fables wherein bad little boys and (most especially) girls are punished for deviations from stern, Puritanical morality. That’s the core of the slashers, and their defining feature.
The slashers appeared at the end of a particularly great period for horror, a time when filmmakers were taking the genre seriously and producing some truly remarkable films. They were a negation of that trend, and, in fact, helped kill it. I’ve long viewed them as a particularly unfortunate development. Not that there weren’t some good ones, but of an absolutely endless string of productions, the number of keepers can be counted on the fingers of one hand, with digits to spare.
According to the essay, the most prolific period for the pure slasher film (or stalker film as the essay called them) was from 1978-1981. They may have still been popular for the rest of the Reagan era, just not to the same degree. But I too was surprised the essay limited the fad to only those few years.
I’ve always thought the 1980s was the golden age of horror, so I’m not sure if the pure slashers were a negative development.
If we’re to interpret the “stalker movies” as the slashers–a big caveat, but from you description it doesn’t sound like much of a leap–that time-frame is just nonsense. The slasher phenomenon didn’t even take off until FRIDAY THE 13th proved HALLOWEEN hadn’t been a fluke. Stopping in 1981 leaves out the overwhelming majority of these films, and there’s no way to justify that. You’d have to look at something like women-in-prison movies to find a subgenre that follows a formula as rigidly as did the slashers. Except for changes in settings, differences in the talent of those behind the camera, etc., you’re essentially seeing the same movie done over and over again, right on through the end of the ’80s. How can one logically stop in 1981?
I’ve written about this before. This article actually prompted me to re-peruse one I’d written a few years ago that ended up spending a lot of time on defining the subgenre:
http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/2009/07/mainstream-scribe-makes-mess-of-slasher.html
1957-1980 or ’81 was the last Golden Age of horror, with ’68-’81 as the most golden period. This was the era that was smashed and strangled by the slashers. The slashers went on to totally dominate the horror cinema of the ’80s, but when one looks at the best horror of that decade, the first A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET is the only slasher that belongs anywhere near the project.
Vera Dika focused on 1978-1981 because she said, during those years, the American film market was flooded with the greatest number of horror films in recent years (she wrote the essay circa 1987). I agree that the majority of slasher films were not made during those years, but there were perhaps more slasher films made in 1978-1981 than any other three year block of time?
I think your essay that you linked to is interesting…defining a slasher film is tricky. Dika used the term stalker film because she felt the term slasher film had been defined too broadly, as any film with a psychotic mass murderer, while she wanted to discuss films with a very specific narrative and cinematic structure. The films from 1978-1981 she felt best fit the sub-genre were Halloween, Friday the 13th, Prom Night, Terror Train, My Bloody Valentine, Night School, The Burning, Friday the 13th part 2, Graduation Day, Happy Birthday to Me, and Hell Night.
I think a defining feature of this sub-genre is they all focused on a special night: Halloween night, Friday the 13th night, Prom Night, Hell night, Birthday night, Valentine night, . By 1981, many of the notable days on the calender had been used up. We did get Silent Night Deadly Night in the mid 1980s, though Christmas had already been taken (Black Christmas),
“but there were perhaps more slasher films made in 1978-1981 than any other three year block of time?”
The year 1978 saw HALLOWEEN and TOOLBOX MURDERS, and that’s about it. And TERROR TRAIN is almost alone in 1979–entirely alone, off the top of my head. There may be some that are just slipping my mind at the moment, but there certainly aren’t many. The cycle doesn’t really even kick in until 1980 and ’81. I’m at a bit of a disadvantage, obviously, having never read the essay, but the slashers, as I’ve already noted, are rigorous clones. There’s no marked change in them after 1981, and, indeed, there never was any significant change in them. They keep recycling exactly the same formula right to the end. And they’ve never entirely ended, to be sure, but the number of productions plummeted to practically nothing by the end of the ’80s (the long-running franchises, which outlasted all the rest, ended with a whimper after the cycle had run its course). I don’t see how one can logically box them into such a limited period. 1987, the year in which Dika was writing, was the year of the 3rd Elm Street movie–one of the highest-grossing slashers of all time.
I can certainly understand her reluctance regarding the use of “slasher movie.” As I noted in my own little essay, the phrase has been endlessly abused and applied to practically any film that features a killer employing bladed weapons.
The business with so many of these movies being built around a special day was just a convention, not any sort of central element of the formula.
“I don’t see how one can logically box them into such a limited period. 1987, the year in which Dika was writing, was the year of the 3rd Elm Street movie–one of the highest-grossing slashers of all time.”
I don’t think Dika would consider mid 80s horror like Elm Street or Silent Night Deadly Night movies to be part of the sub-genre she’s describing. In her essay, she notes that the most the distinctive feature of the 1978-1981 films is that the killer is either masked or kept off-screen through most of the film. By contrast, mid 80s killers like Freddy and Billy were much more visible. That was a key point in her essay I forgot to mention.
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