Like I said, I’m on a slasher kick right now. I didn’t plan it to align with the release of Scream VI, and while I do plan to see it, I don’t want to rush around in the name of relevance or whatever. In return, I’ll do a two for one. First up, Psycho.
- So a lot of sources, especially academic sources, trace Psycho as the major influence on the slasher genre, presaging the Golden Age of slashers — between Halloween (1978) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Which, by the way, you can track a similar life cycle for other genre Golden Ages: the Western started with your traditional upstanding white-hat stuff, but as the public lost interest directors got more experimental. The Searchers (1956) is considered the best Western, but it’s thought of for its more psychological elements. Spaghetti Westerns came the decade after, like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), which is actually the best Western.
- Oh, yeah, so Psycho. It’s funny — I don’t have a ton of evidence for this, but I feel like Psycho had a lot of reverse whodunnit DNA. The psychoanalyst literally does a parlor room scene at the end. Could you trace some lineage from mystery, to thriller, to slasher? Would that lineage include The Bat, which like Psycho had some of the earliest spoiler warnings?
- Carol J. Clover named the “Final Girl” archetype, and she points out that out of the Final Girl comes pretty much every difference between Psycho and more straight up slashers. I liked the clever planning in Psycho, but it was pretty distributed between leads. Slashers are partially defined by the ineptitude of everyone but the Final Girl.
And Friday the 13th!
- Less to say about this one. It was a tough watch. The snake that gets killed early on is real — which, bummer, I watched Friday the 13th instead of Halloween because I heard a dog dies in Halloween, but the real life dog is A-OK. And, you know, it’s not a very sensitive movie. Just a disclaimer, I guess.
- It didn’t have a lot of plot. That’s not a knock on it, it’s sort of what I expected, but I didn’t expect the degree to which it’s just disconnected killings. More modern slashers, I feel like, try much harder to tie things together. Not to talk out of class or anything, but from some interviews I’ve read I feel like the director, Sean Cunningham, was really just pulling stuff out of his ass. Which worked, all things considered.
- Carol J. Clover also pointed out how genre is similar to folklore, with “free exchange of themes” and “archetypal characters.” Sequels are “better taken as remakes than sequels.” I thought that was neat! All of Clover’s slasher scholarship is extremely neat! (Also, jumping back to Psycho, I’m interested in the interaction between an auteur “artwork” versus a folkloric genre. That, I think is the big big difference between Psycho and the slasher.)
- One unmitigated positive: the score. Particularly the “ki ki ki, ma ma ma.” When I learned (just moments ago) that it’s from the syllables “kill her, mommy,” my heart sank because of how unimaginably dumb that is. Then it soared again, tetherball-like, because it’s actually extremely good. Ah, the human condition.