6. All Knives, No Guns
A notable fact amongst the vast majority of slasher flicks is the way the poor luckless victims get slayed - or rather how they're not being slayed. Usually when violence within film is discussed, being killed with a handgun is pretty damn common. In horror movies, however, hardly anyone ever gets shot and killed. Hell, the 'slasher genre' is based on the idea of people being killed by weapons that 'slash' - axes, knives, machetes, swords... you get the idea. Apart from the odd scant killing in the
Scream movies by the heroes, the bad guys just never seem to get the memo that it's much easier to just shoot someone than chasing them all over the place. What might this mean? Freudian psychologists have had a field day, describing it as a phallic symbol of male anger. It also might simply boil down to the fact that stabbing someone is more personal and much more of a shocking act in a horror film than the dispassionate shooting down of someone. It'd make the chase scenes more redundant anyway...