10 Bandwagons Hollywood Couldn't Resist Jumping On

10. The 1980's Slasher Movie

While John Carpenter's Halloween was by no means the first slasher movie, it may well be the most influential. Made for just $325,000, the movie would go on to earn $70m at the box office in 1978 and inadvertently establish many of the slasher's genre conventions in the process. By the 1980's the slasher movie was Hollywood's go-to option in the horror genre and every October the cinema was virtually swamped by identikit movies featuring an unnamed serial killer stalking a bunch of teenagers, dispatching of them with increasingly violent methods. Halloween got the ball rolling, but it was the commercial success of Friday the 13th in 1980 that really kicked the trend into high gear and soon theaters were deluged with the likes of Graduation Day, Prom Night, My Bloody Valentine, A Nightmare on Elm Street and dozens of others, with the increasing saturation of the marketplace seeing countless slashers suffer from both a critical and commercial backlash that saw the genre quickly dwindle in popularity. The slasher movie boom was already over by the 1980's after a series of box office flops and critically-reviled releases, with only the major franchises continuing to churn out sequels of ever-declining quality. By the end of the decade there were already five Halloween movies, five entries in the Nightmare on Elm Street Series and no less than eight Friday the 13th's, as the genre desperately clung on to any kind of relevance before eventually fading away into obscurity. Until they were all remade, of course.