What Halloween Kills Means For The Slasher Movie Genre Beyond 2021

Unfortunately, a worldwide pandemic comes when horror has been enjoying a surprising return to the highs of the box office in recent years too. We’ve seen 2017’s Get Out win the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Jordan Peele’s smart and thought-provoking debut direction, and 2018’s A Quiet Place stunned audiences with its overwhelming atmosphere of oh-so-quiet sci-fi thrills.

Then, of course, we’ve seen Blumhouse calling the big shots by nabbing consecutive triumphs under its belt with franchises like The Purge, The Conjuring, and Insidious, to name just a few. That’s without even mentioning how 2018’s Halloween became the highest-grossing slasher movie of all time by raking in $255 million worldwide. Contemporary horror cinema is proving to be thriving with innovation right now.

So what about the infamous subgenre of the slasher itself? How's it holding up as a presumed dead category of horror? Well, two years ago when Gordon-Green’s direct continual sequel pleasantly surprised audiences and critics alike, we ultimately saw just how impactful an exciting slasher film can still be on modern cinema-goers. So does this mean all the optimistic dreamers out there could be correct when they believe the slasher still has some form of fighting chance of being resurrected from the grave?

This millennium we’ve mostly seen a host of failed remakes, dodgy B-movies, and ironic postmodern blunders fail to revive fresh energy into the slasher flick. With the exception of a few high-flying gems (most notably the ingenious scares of Hush and the brilliantly creepy The Strangers), nearly all attempts of revival have headed straight to this century’s overcrowded slasher graveyard - especially Michael Bay’s all-gloss-no-substance remakes (more on these later). But thankfully, we can now hope that Halloween’s rebooting trilogy has found a new winning formula to breathe new revitalising life into beloved slasher franchises.

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