The Slasher Problem

Imagine you're reading a story about someone who's trapped in a room with a hungry tiger. As a normal, comparatively weak human being they have no hope of besting the tiger in a fight. However, in the far corner of the room is a high-caliber hunting rifle: the perfect defense against a dangerous predator, if they could only get to it. Through trickery and careful maneuvering, the protagonist finally manages to secure the rifle. They turn it on the tiger, aim, fire, and the shot hits the animal directly between the eyes. The tiger immediately falls to the ground. It's a wound deadly enough to kill anything, after all.

Then the tiger gets up.

This scene exists in nearly every slasher movie that I am aware of. In Halloween, it happens when Laurie stabs Michael Myers in the throat with a knitting needle and he falls out of a second story window. In the newest Texas chainsaw massacre, it happens when Sally empties a full magazine of deer slugs into Leatherface's chest and he keeps beheading as if she had merely suggested he go away. In the original Friday the 13th, it happens when Alice declares "he's still out there", as the final line of the movie.

To paraphrase Hitchcock, suspense is rooted in the audience's anticipation of danger. Another way you might describe that feeling is "uncertainty of outcome". An immortal antagonist precludes any uncertainty surrounding the end of the story, removing the possibility of the protagonist's survival. If the audience knows for certain that the protagonist has no chance of standing against the villain and succeeding, the movie's ability to inspire fear is declawed. The audience is no longer watching a horror movie, but an elaborate execution.

This is not to say that I dislike slasher movies, or discount them as an important subgenre under the umbrella of horror. I have watched and enjoyed all of the movies mentioned above, and many more besides. It is also not to say that I don't understand the reason behind this trope of the genre. Cash flow is at the root of more than one regrettable trend in moviemaking. It is, however, me saying that there is a solution for this problem and to find it we need to look at two separate movies: Alien, and Speak No Evil.

While the argument can (and I'm sure will) be made that Alien belongs to the subgenre of extraterrestrial or outer space horror, it is also a classic example of the slasher genre.

• The movie centers around an antagonist that is much more agile, durable and physically dangerous than the protagonists.
• The movie is broken up into sequences of "stalk and kill" scenes where the antagonist hunts the protagonists.
• The protagonist narrowly escapes the antagonist through luck and cunning.

So why does Alien work where Halloween doesn't? It's simple: the Alien is mortal. Even though it has hydrochloric acid for blood and each one of its limbs is a whip, a spear and a sword all at once, even though it can eat a full clip from a machine gun and come back for seconds, at the end of the day the Alien is just an animal. It can be outsmarted. It can be killed.

The Alien franchise works for a variety of reasons, but chief among them is their ability to create suspense. The viewer never knows until the last possible moment who will come out on top. Even if the Alien somehow survives something that should have killed it, it appears as wounded. It limps, it bleeds. This, as much as anything in the universe of these movies tells the viewer that the protagonist has a chance. That there is a possibility, however slim, that they will make it out of this alive. This makes every encounter more impactful, every bump or clank in the dark hallways of the ship more terrifying. Even if repeated exposure through sequels has revealed certain patterns in the way Alien's stories tend to shake out, I still find these movies gripping and disturbing where other films in the genre may fail to meet the mark.

Speak No Evil, admittedly, requires a looser interpretation of the slasher label. It is also much less popular in the states. The movie centers around Bjorn and Louise; a Danish couple who make friends with a Dutch couple (Patrick and Karin) while on vacation in Italy. They are invited by their new friends to visit them at their remote house in the rural Netherlands, where Patrick and Karin's behavior grows steadily more disturbing and unhinged until it reaches its violent conclusion.

SNE deals less in overt violence (until the final act) and more in a kind of creeping dread. Bjorn and Louise are the boiled frogs, Patrick and Karin's violations of social mores serve as the flame beneath the pot. None of their transgressions are necessarily damning on their own, but when examined as a whole they become a deliberate plot to erode the boundaries of their prey. By the time Bjorn and Louise notice the boiling water, it's already too late. For the purposes of this article, let's think of these transgressions as the "Stalk and Kill" sequences.

We also need to reframe what "more agile, durable and physically dangerous" means in the context of this movie. Patrick and Karin are not trained killers, supernatural entities or apex predators from a distant planet. The advantage they have over their prey is that they play by a different set of rules. Bjorn and Louise notice all the things being done around them and to them, but a strict set of behavioral norms prevents them from protesting openly. It's not that they can't defend themselves. They won't. Therein lies their disadvantage, and the axis of the movie's suspense.

So what do I believe slashers can learn from these two movies?

Horror, more than any other genre, lives and dies by the audience's ability to suspend their disbelief. Zombie outbreaks, hauntings, and lich-like masked murderers stalking promiscuous teens are all stories that must be treated with realism in proportion to the absurdity of their premise. The instant a viewer's immersion is broken, the moment the movie reminds them that they're watching a horror movie, the suspense wilts into camp. And if the director's objective is to make a movie that causes its audience check the backseats of their cars as they leave the theater, to become camp is to die.

A villain who can be shot, blown up and thrown into a wood chipper before returning to kill again is camp. A villain who can be stabbed through the trachea and defenestrated before disappearing soundlessly into the night is camp. Villains are only frightening (in the context of slasher movies) if they can be undone. This does not mean that they have to die. Alien's cinematic universe gets around the problem of a mortal antagonist by making the alien a part of a species. There are potentially millions of aliens to be fought, escaped and survived. Speak No Evil creates tension through rigid social codes of politeness and passivity instead of literal violence.

I will add the disclaimer here that this is an opinion piece. I'm not a film scholar, a literary scholar, or any other kind of scholar. I'm just a guy who loves movies and books, but I genuinely believe that though it may take some lateral thinking, a slasher movie that maintains its tension until the final moments is possible. It has been done before, and for the future of the medium I hope it is done again.