Influencers, Final Girls and Chainsaws

Watching the latest offerings from both the Scream and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchises back to back made for a grim double-bill at Casa de Spartan. Not only were they a complete waste of time, but they further highlighted the continuous problems with the slasher subgenre. Can you believe Terrifier (2016) and Hush (2016), the last great slashers, in my opinion, were released over five years ago and we've had nada since then? Sure, there have been a handful of films like Haunt (2018), that have entertained me, but they were nowhere the mean-spirited levels of the majestic slashers of yesteryear. Truth be told, it's a sub-genre that has become little more than a soap-opera for me, to the point it has effectively cross-pollinated into actual soap-operas. It's hardly a new phenomenon, I remember sitting in the cinema back in the day feeling like one important yet clumsily delivered plot revelation from Scream 2 (1997), belonged right out of a storyline from Sunset Beach, or something. This lazy, mind-numbing distraction has legitimately hijacked slashers since then and has gotten bad to worse. We are now at the point where the teen drama aspect consumes the majority of the film's running time, while the stalk and kill is virtually minimal. It has reached the point where I'm yearning for the return of TV shows like Harper's Island again - at least that was a better series than Scream's and addressed the issue raised here.

Another issue that's more than apparent in the modern slasher, is its lack of an iconic villain. Antagonists like Chromeskull, The Collector and Jigsaw were effectively the millennials answer to Jason, Michael and Freddy, but with the exception of perhaps Jigsaw, are any of them really in the pop cultural lexicon? Doubtful. Art the Clown might very well be the only Gen Z offering that immediately comes to my mind, but he's far too underground to have crossed over to a mainstream audience. As a result, film studios too scared to take a risk with creating anything new, squat over the sacred bones of familiar franchises and unload like Vegard Vinge's art paintings. We've now reached the point where the respective continuities of Messrs Krueger and Voorhees make more sense than Michael Myers and Leatherface's confusing reboots, since the former have been untouched for over a decade. How are you going to do away with the Halloween sequels, where Jamie Lee Curtis reprised her role as Laurie Strode - Halloween II (1981), Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998), Halloween: Resurrection (2002), and then have the audacity to pretend they never existed, while comically repeating similar mistakes altogether with the recent Halloween (2018) and Halloween Kills (2021) films? All this could have been sensibly avoided with time and effort in the creativity department with a new I.P, rather than flogging a dead horse all over again.

The cast has also changed. Attitudes and behaviour exhibited by the latest batches of cannon fodder in today's Gen Z casts are almost as psychotic as the very antagonists they're faced up against. It's gotten to the point where I find myself relieved when the latest intolerable brat is dispatched in the most gruesome way imaginable, putting us all out of the terrible misery of their wasted presence. Sure some of these traits were evident in various characters during the eighties and nineties, but they were usually intentional, spoilt preppy types who served as secondary villains. However, in the 2020s, even the heroic final girls of today are unbearable. It came as no surprise that the biggest talking point from Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) was the bus scene, where an age-defying Leatherface made swift business of a bus full of young influencers. Its two antagonists locked themselves in the toilet as their friends were left to face their grizzly doom like lambs to the slaughter. For me, it was a huge relief from all incessant and unnecessary social commentary that came as being detrimental to the film. If only Candyman (2021) also observed this facet, since it completely neglected to understand the fundamentals of being a horror film first and foremost and let social commentary take all precedence. Taking into account Bernard Rose's original Candyman (1992), which dealt with similar issues (racial inequality and gentrification), it's shocking how the recent film failed to convey these points with the same level of efficiency as its predecessor thirty years ago. Talk about whatever, just remember this is a horror film!

Personally, I think the slasher format has fallen victim by thinking it could cater to the most common demographic, while sacrificing an integral part of its formula in adhering to changing attitudes. In my review of Abel Ferrara's The Addiction (1995), I pointed out how the horror film had effectively gone underground to a certain degree in the nineties and that's effectively what's happening again here to some extent. The obvious difference here is governing bodies such as the M.P.A. as well as the B.B.F.C. played an overzealous censorous hand the first time around, but here, it's alarmingly brought upon by the very audience itself. I'm somewhat grateful for the ownership rights issues over Jason Voorhees dragging on for so long, since he would have succumbed by the same way as poor Leatherface and Michael Myers by now. I'm actually thankful Freddy Krueger remained unscathed, apart from that poor remake. Could you imagine a wisecracking Freddy Krueger featured in a problematic scene like the scene below in this current era?

Freddy vs. Jason (Kia's death scene)

(Ronnie Yu, 2003)