10 Best Slasher Films Of All Time

Back in the 1950s, horror seemed so genteel: there were mad scientists working out of crumbling castles in some vaguely European locale, flying hubcaps from space that arrived on Earth to reanimate the recent dead and vampires whose good looks were as disarming as their manners.

If a movie took place in the modern day at all, it was usually a black and white affair with a jolly good chap showing the forces of darkness what for when he wasn’t delivering jargon-heavy speeches to his superiors. In short, horror movies back then had little to do with everyday life as we know it.

All of that changed a decade later when filmmakers latched onto the idea of using cold, calculating killers as their antagonists. Eschewing supernatural explanations (at least at first), these films pitted seemingly unstoppable assailants against young women from ordinary backgrounds, and took place in a town that looked just like your own.

Such was the success of slasher films that by the 1980s there seemed to be a new one in theaters every other week. In 1981 alone, viewers could choose between The Burning, Halloween II, Graduation Day, Happy Birthday To Me and My Bloody Valentine, among many others.

Among the countless sequels and clones are 10 movies that shaped the slasher genre and provide an overview from its inception to its ultimate descent into self-parody. If you’re looking for decent horror films for Halloween, you could do worse.

By 1996, the slasher movie had nowhere new to go, so it turned in on itself and began referencing its former glories. If John Carpenter’s Halloween was Psycho for the movie literate generation raised on TV, then Wes Craven’s movie plays to the audience who grew up with the 80s slasher craze.

Kevin Williamson’s script knows we’ve seen those films a hundred times so in the very first scene an assailant taunts his victim (Drew Barrymore) with horror movie trivia, slaughtering her boyfriend when she incorrectly names Jason as the killer in Friday The 13th. (Note to Millennials and other strange beings – this was long before the 2009 remake).

With Craven at the helm and a handful of good actors, Scream stands out from the dregs of 90s horror (Prom Night 4: Deliver Us From Evil, anyone?) and deserved all of its massive success, even though its legacy amounted to little more than three forgettable sequels and an endless succession of tawdry knock-offs (Urban Legend, I Know What You Did Last Summer). The genre’s due for another reinvention, so if you’re an aspiring horror filmmaker, you know what to do.