The Slasher Cycle Theory

Today some deep thoughts on slasher cinema from that deep thinkin’ pumpkinhead, Jeff Carter, author of Criterion from Crossroad Press and keeper of the Compendium Of Monsters.

Hallowe’en greetings, Ed-Heads.

I like to watch and review an entire horror franchise every October (see previous posts here and here). While every franchise has its ups and downs, nothing could prepare me for the mind shattering downward spiral of the Howling sequels. To spare you that suffering, I’ve pulled back for a wider look at the franchises in general.

In film school we were taught about Christian Metz’s ‘Genre Cycle Theory’. He wrote that each film genre begins in the Experimental Stage, evolves into the Classic Stage, devolves into the Parody Stage and ends in its Deconstruction Stage. With luck, the genre is reborn and the cycle continues.

You can see these rhythms play out across all forms of cinema. Without the masterful deconstruction of the Western genre in Clint Eastwood’s ‘Unforgiven’, we would never have received Paul Hogan’s ‘Lightning Jack’.

In my analysis of the great horror franchises, however, I have discovered strange mutations undreamt of by any stuffy French film critic. I give you Jeff C. Carter’s ‘Slasher Cycle Theory’.

These are more than just common tropes. They are essential rites of passage, and every great horror franchise must eventually pass through some or all of them:

The Original

Hilarity Ensues

3D!!!

Die Monster Die

Missing Monster

Magic!

Spaaaaaaace

Return to Roots

Das Preboot

Hilarity Ensues – while this sounds like Metz’s ‘Parody Stage’, these are not outright parodies like the Wayans brothers’ ‘Scary Movie’ series. This is when humor is injected into the horror, for better or worse.

Examples: Nightmare on Elm Street Part 4, Friday the 13^th Part 6, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Child’s Play 4, Howling 3, Phantasm 2.

This doesn’t even scratch the surface of Howling 3: The Marsupials

3D!!! – For a genre that must constantly innovate, the gimmick of jumping off the screen is irresistible.

Examples: Nightmare on Elm Street Part 6, Friday the 13^th Part 3, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 7.

Get ready to dodge Dream Demons.

Die, Monster, Die – Slashers are notoriously hard to kill, but sometimes a tired franchise needs the promise of a ‘final chapter’ to get its viewers back.

Examples:  Nightmare on Elm Street Part 6, Friday the 13^th Part 4, Halloween H20

Fairly convincing….

Magic! – Sometimes the monsters are human, and sometimes there is a supernatural evil at work. During the Magic! stage, however, we get into some Harry Potter sh*t. I’m talking spells, dream demons and magic swords.

Examples: Nightmare on Elm Street Part 6, Friday the 13^th Part 6, 7, 9, Halloween 5 & 6, Howling 2

When being a werewolf is the least interesting thing about you…

Missing Monster – Probably the strangest mutation is when sequels lack their own main character.

Examples:  Friday the 13^th Part 5, Halloween 3, Hellraiser 8

Doesn’t count.

Spaaaaace – In these movies, no one can hear you scream.

Examples: Jason X (Friday the 13^th Part 10), Hellraiser 4, Leprechaun 4

Houston, we have a problem.

Return to Roots – With luck a franchise will shake off the gimmicks and return to its roots. Unlike the ‘Classic Stage’, which codifies the core elements, this is a hard won perspective about what audiences love about the series. Next to the originals, these are often the only scary movies in the franchise.

Examples: Nightmare on Elm Street Part 7,Halloween 7,Child’s Play 6, Phantasm 5

You can’t keep a Good Guy down.

Das Preboot – The unhallowed graves of infamous monsters are rarely left undisturbed. More often than not they are desecrated, updated and demystified with lousy prequels and reboots.

Examples: Nightmare on Elm Street 9, Friday the 13^th Part 12, Halloween 9, Howling 4, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 5.

How can the ‘Slasher Cycle Theory’ help you? Let the growing pains of our favorite franchises inspire you. The next time you’re feeling stale, try some magic, or take a trip to space. If that doesn’t help you return to your roots, perhaps you can go Back 2 Tha Hood.

Jeff On Jason: The Top Ten Friday The 13th Movies

Hey all, turning the blog over today to my friend and sometime collaborator Jeff Carter (his story of submersible terror, The Wager, appeared beside my own Tell Tom Tildrum in Tales From The Bell Club, and we’re working on an RPG together for Heroic Journey Publishing), whose blog, The Monster Compendium, can be found on my sidebar. Check it out – it’s a trove of obscure stuff from around the world, general geekery, and of course, all things Carterian.

Jeff, like me, is a horror movie fan, and he hosts our annual Black-O-Ween celebration, in which we view one or two African American themed horror movies from the golden age of blaxploitation (past showings include Blacula, Blackenstein, Sugar Hill, JD’s Revenge, The Thing With Two Heads, and most recently, Abby and The Beast Must Die).

For the past couple weeks he’s been viewing the Friday The 13th film series, which holds a dear place in my heart as the novelization of Part VI: Jason Lives by Simon Hawke is one of the first books I ever read that made me want to write.

As an end result, he’s put them in order of enjoyment.

Happy Friday the 12th.

————–

Howdy!

Ed’s posted a lot of movie reviews here, as well as his  annual Halloween list of must-see horror.  I thought I’d toss my hockey  mask into the ring with a list of the top ten Friday the 13th movies.

Not many movies get eleven and a half installments and a remake.  Few  characters can take that kind of punishment, but Friday the 13th has  Jason Voorhees, an unstoppable killing machine with an endless hatred of teenaged hijinks.  Having a lead character that wears a mask and  disposable casts of unknowns helps too.

So let’s take a look at the first ten, leaving out Freddy VS. Jason and the 2009 remake.

I reached these rankings through a complicated algorithm that tabulated  kills, scares, the ratio of serious to goofy, amount of Jason or other  core elements, cameos, and continuity.  And no, I will not show my work.

So here they are, from worst to best:

10) Friday the 13th Part 5: A New Beginning

This movie has a lot of detractors, but the algorithm nearly spat this out for one fatal flaw:  Jason is not in the movie!

Just a guy

9) Friday the 13th Part 7: New Blood

This was a powerfully close tie for last place.  The story: A psychic  girl  accidentally uses one of her 9 million powers to resurrect Jason from the bottom of Camp Crystal Lake.  Most of the kills occur off screen, a  strange choice for a slasher flick.  In the movie’s defense, the MPAA  apparently cut it to ribbons before its theatrical release and then slashed it even more viciously for home video.  That being said, the end result is boring and inane.

8) Friday the 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan

This movie was almost hallucinatory with its surreal, incoherent jumbled plot. Psychic visions, drug addled gangs of rapists, nuclear waste.  The Crystal Lake High graduating class take a cruise ship to New  York…from Crystal Lake? Via Canada?  I don’t understand the geography, but distances clearly don’t matter in this film.  Jason teleports,  TELEPORTS, more than once.

Why take public transportation when you can teleport?

Perhaps this can all be explained by a certain shift: Marijuana has been  replaced with cocaine as the drug of choice.  Don’t miss the cameo by a young Kelly Hu, who is tempted to snort up with the line “the night  time is the right time”.

7) Jason X

Many would say that this half sci-fi/half farce cyborg flick is the worst of the series, but  clearly the rankings say otherwise.  Yes, the movie was goofy and cheesy and cheap, but unless you were kidnapped and brought to a sneak  preview, you must have known all that going in.

The movie was set  in the distant future to avoid any continuity conflict with Freddy VS.  Jason, which was being developed at the time.  So let’s talk about  continuity – in my algorithm, continuity not only addresses the  preservation of the established timeline, facts, and use of core  elements, but also the broader scope of the Friday the 13th events and  their impact on the wider world.

In this future world Jason is still infamous.  Scientists and soldiers both want his body for his  amazing regenerative properties and black market collectors will pay top dollar for such a gruesome piece of history.

The movie is campy  and self aware, and I really liked it.  I must confess that I had  thought it would be higher in the rankings than the extremely silly self parody of Part 6, but the algorithm does not lie.

Look for the cameo by Director David Cronenberg and a fun performance from genre veteran Peter Mensah.

The highlight is a clever gambit by the space students to distract Jason: a holodeck simulation of Camp Crystal Lake, complete with vapid,  indestructible teenagers.

Jason is going to work out some issues.

6)  Friday the 13th Part 6: Jason Lives

This was a relaunch after the supposed ‘Final Chapter’ Part 4 and the  failure of Part 5.  This was also a parody, an inevitable stage in the  cycle of any genre.

The ‘kid who would be Jason’, Tommy Jarvis  from Pt. 4, digs up Jason’s grave to destroy his remains.  Jason is brought back to life by  lightning.

Jason has now transformed from tough, super strong mutant to indestructible  super zombie.  A magic ritual of sorts is also used to ‘bind’ and trap  Jason at the end, hinting at the mystical nature of Jason’s past.

I didn’t care for this one.  The forced attempts at humor undercut any  sense of horror.  I don’t need a movie to parody itself, I can mock it  just fine, thank you very much.

There is a nice nod to another long running series in the intro that I rather liked, however.

“The name’s Voorhees. Jason, Voorhees.”

5) Friday the 13th Part 4: The Final Chapter

Now we’re talking.  This movie had a lot of meat for the algorithm to chew  on: Cameos (Crispin Glover! Corey Haim!), Core elements (fighting Jason  with psychology!) and tons of kills and scares.  In the continuity  department, we see Pamela Voorhees’ tombstone and the character Rob, who is seeking revenge for his sister who got killed in Part 2.

“I’m YOU, Jason. And you are cool, so I popped my collar.”

4) Friday the 13th Part 9: Jason Goes To Hell

I know people hate this movie like O.G. Star Wars fans hate Return of the Jedi for its ewok shenanigans.  Fortunately, the algorithm is beyond  your petty emotions.  It’s all in the data.  Consider the cast: Erin  Gray (Buck Rogers!) as Mrs. Kimble nee Voorhees, Steven Williams (21  Jump Street! X-Files!) as the world’s most ruthless serial killer hunter and John D. Le May, who stars in this movie AND the Friday the 13th TV  series!

This movie has world building in spades.  It features the  Necronomicon Ex Mortis, the ACTUAL book of the dead from the Evil Dead  movies!  Jason is such a well-known terror that the FBI forms a special  task force to lure him out and destroy him with overwhelming firepower.

When they succeed (or did they?) the entire country watches TV news reports  about the incident with relief.  One local business celebrates with a  “Jason is Dead” sale and special hockey mask shaped burgers.

I could totally go for a Jason burger right now

This movie suffers from a lack of Jason – after the FBI blows up his body,  the evil energies that inhabit his body begin to leap from body to body, seeking a body with the cursed Voorhees bloodline that can either  resurrect or destroy him.  This is another stage in Jason’s life cycle,  from deformed child to hulking freak to super zombie to this, the dark  scion of a strange occult ritual.  Fortunately, Jason is in the  beginning and end of this movie, and does a lot of crazy killing in  between.

The final cameo opened the movie up, in a big way that  blew the minds of horror fans everywhere:  after Jason is destroyed by  his ancestor with a magic sword/knife/demon broadsword, Freddy Krueger’s glove bursts up from Hell to snatch the iconic hockey mask.

MIND…BLOWN.

3) Friday the 13th Part 2

Taking the bronze medal is part 2, a strong sequel to the original with an  almost perfect score on continuity and core elements.  Jason steps out  of the lake and onto the center stage, killing teenagers and preserving  his mother’s rotting head and grody sweater on an altar.

Some people put their mother on a pedestal. Some put them on an altar.

A savvy co-ed dons the crusty sweater at the end to mess with Jason’s  mind.  The only core elements missing are the machete and hockey mask – at this point Jason is rocking a sack with an eye hole in it.

The bag-heads soon switched to fat suits, but it was not until they adopted gangsta personas and renamed the group CB4 that they reached stardom.

This movie also has the original harbinger, crazy Ralph.  This colorful  local warned the teenagers in the first movie to stay away from Camp  Crystal Lake.  They didn’t listen, but crazy Ralph was so iconic that he became part of the slasher genre formula.

“It’s got a DEATH CURRRRSE!!!…and many scenic bike paths.”

2) Friday the 13th 3D

Ah, back when all movies with a part 3 were in 3D.  It was a simpler time.

This movie exploited the full potential of the third dimension more fully  than James Cameron’s AVATAR.  Seriously, if it could swing, float, jump, fly or pop out at the audience, it was comin’ atcha.  Not just spear  guns and pitchforks, either.  Yo-yos, popcorn, snakes, EVERYTHING.

Comin’ Atcha!

The tone was a little more silly, but only to pump up the cheap thrills.   There was plenty of scares and violent, creative death to go around.   Jason finally gets his hockey mask here, which is why part 3D gets the  silver medal.  The only thing missing is Jason’s mother…

1) Friday the 13th

The origin story of the most gifted, prolific and hardest working slasher  in history.  We learn who Jason was, meet his devoted mother, and learn  our way around Camp Crystal Lake.

Jason’s mother, Pamela Voorhees, is easily one of the most original and compelling characters of any  slasher film.  That wild eyed old lady in the christmas sweater with the blade?  She’s fueled by grief, maternal love and righteous fury.

“Kee Kee Kee Kee…Kah Kah Kah Kah can only truly be whispered through dentures.”

JAWS stopped night swimming. This stopped lake swimming.

This movie ends with the only image from the series as iconic as the hockey  mask: the slimy body of a freakish child erupting from depths of a  watery grave.

——

Jeff C. Carter’s most recent work in print appears in AVENIR ECLECTIA Volume 1, now available in paperback and Kindle from Amazon.  Get more Halloween stuff at his blog Compendium of Monsters and say hey on Facebookand Goodreads.

Don’t Forget Your Masks: The Greatest Halloween Movie Ever Is….

Halloween III: Season of The Witch is the greatest Halloween movie ever.  In terms of the holiday and in terms of the series.

Yeah, I said it.

Time to go to guns.

Why’s it the best in the series?

We have Jason Voorhees, we have Freddy Krueger, the other two top tier 80’s horror icons. Now in layman’s terms, I would liken Jason to Sylvester Stallone and Freddy to Arnold Schwarzenegger. One guy was the silent kill ‘em all type, the other sure killed ‘em all but always made with the snappy puns.

Michael Meyers is the Jean Claude Van Damme of horror. What does he bring to the table? Well he looks like Schwarzenegger, he talks worse than Stallone, and he can do the splits. IE, Nothing. He’s just not as interesting to watch. Jason’s mask is cooler, his motive is more compelling (just why is Michael Meyers indestructible anyway?), and Meyers shares his name with the guy who played Austin Powers. Oh and Freddy? He’s got a great look, a signature weapon, and he can enter your dreams. Forget about it.

Uh…anybody down there? It’s me. Mike.

He’s comin’ home tonight…YEAH BABY!

I know there’s a lot of love for the original Halloween, I know it was innovative in terms of mood and editing and invigorating the slasher genre and all that, but I’m gonna say it now. It’s just not very interesting. It’s a lot of stalking and cheap jump scares and glimpsed stabbings without any rhyme or reason. Psycho without the Janet Leigh subplot, or the great acting, or Hitch to pull it together.

Now I’m not knocking John Carpenter. The man is responsible for movies that are beloved in my home. Big Trouble In Little China. The Thing. Escape From New York. Christine and (see where I’m going?) Halloween III: Season of The Witch.

I know, I know, he barely had a hand in this one. Just produced and did the (awesome) score.

I maintain that had this movie been released simply as Season of The Witch and not under the Halloween series banner, it would not have been so venomously panned, so perennially derided by Michael Meyers fans, who believe me, are an angry lot when they wanna be. Nope, the Halloween series moniker actually sullies this movie.

The Night NOBODY Came Home

It’s the quintessential Halloween movie.

How can I say that?

‘Cause it’s like a really good Christmas movie. It takes place during the season, it’s decked with all the trimmings you’d expect, and indeed, the holiday is an important part of the plot. Finally, it leaves you with a feeling appropriate to the season.

But this is Halloween, not Christmas.

Does it take place during the holiday? Check. It’s even in the title, champ.

 Does it feature all the tropes and idioms we associate with Halloween? Let’s see, kids in masks getting candy? Check. Masks that kill them actually, so double check. Spookie movies on TV? How about (in a really cool self-reference move) Hallo ‘Michael Meyers’ ween itself? Spooky black magic type stuff? How’s a charmingly sinister toy company CEO whose actually grand poobah of an international witch cult bent on enacting an ages old mass child sacrifice using freaky magically charged chips of one of the Stonehenge triptychs in kids’ masks on Halloween night grab ya?

Uh…check. And is the holiday itself integral to the plot? We covered that already. Does it leave you with a feeling appropriate to the season?

Oh hell yes.

Because it’s scary (what’s scarier than the impending, grotesque death of millions of children?), it’s got a cool John Carpenter score, and it’s fun. It’s fun as hell.

The great Dan “Niceshootin’what’syournameson?” O’Herlihy as the villainous Conal Cochran

When I tell people the plot they roll their eyes. But this is a GREAT Halloween movie. It’s obviously not meant to be taken entirely serious. It’s a conspiracy based in a town of smiling Irish people who use clockwork people as muscle!! The deaths are over the top violent and bloody – one chick tampers with one of the masks and has her face melted! And they’re using a piece of freakin’ Stonehenge to cause BUGS TO POP OUT OF CHILDREN’S FACES!

How’d they get this giant triptych over to America without anybody noticing? Well, the bad guy just says you wouldn’t believe the amount of trouble it took. That’s the only explanation we get. But come on, if you watched this much of it, does it really matter?

Oh yeah, and who’s the hero? Who’s the George Bailey equivalent in a Halloween holiday movie from John Carpenter? Who’s the would-be savior of little children everywhere? Tom M.F.’n Atkins. An odious, tail chasin’ surgeon whose kids ignore him and who knocks back the sauce in nearly every scene.

Tom Atkins pleads with the networks as Dr. Dan Challis

This movie is such a cool departure from the usual chase ’em and cut ’em snoozefest that is Halloween the series! Because seriously, after Part II, what does Michael do differently?

I dare anybody to watch the video below and not be humming the jingle all day…..

Seriously, you need to re-think your avoidance of this movie. Go to the video store or get it offa Netflix. I almost guarantee it’ll
be available. I won’t be hoarding it, ‘cause I own it. Love this movie.

And I’m not the only one.

http://www.watchthemagicpumpkin.com/film.htm

Happy Halloween, y’all.