Slasher Film
The horror genre's bread-and-butter throughout the 1980s, the slasher film generally features explicit violence and gore, usually at the hands of masked -- and at times unstoppable -- serial killers and psychopaths. These films rose in number after the huge success of John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) and 1980's Friday the 13th and dominated (and some would argue, destroyed) the horror genre throughout the '80s and '90s; these two decades alone produced over 100 similar films. Though seeds of this type of film can be seen in the more artful '70s work of Italian filmmakers Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci and American exploitation films, it was Halloween that nailed down the oft-mimicked formula. Generally the killers' motivation is rooted in the past, and they spend the film hunting their prey -- generally women or groups of hedonistic teenagers often engaging in pre-marital sex. The groups quickly die off in number, frequently leaving one survivor -- usually a woman -- to battle the killer. The threat is often defeated, though never entirely, leaving room for numerous sequels, as in the Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street series. The subgenre began to die out from repetition and boredom in the late 1980s, but was revived again in the '90s with the success of the postmodern slasher Scream -- which acted both as a straight, suspenseful slasher film and also as a parody, satirizing the above-mentioned cliches with a knowing sense of playfulness.
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