Cinema: slasher film

The slasher is a horror subgenre in which a killer, often masked and with a motive left largely unexplained, stalks and murders a group of young people, usually teenagers, one by one. Its most recognizable features are elaborate death scenes, point-of-view shots that place the viewer in the killer's gaze, and a structure in which a surviving heroine, the so-called final girl, confronts the attacker. The scholar Carol Clover popularized this term in her 1992 study of the genre.

The slasher has roots in earlier horror, but it took shape in the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when low-budget films found large audiences. Psycho (1960) by Alfred Hitchcock and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) by Tobe Hooper are decisive precursors, yet the template was fixed by John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980). The latter launched a long franchise and a formula that was repeated endlessly: summer camps, parties and young people whose minor transgressions precede their deaths.

The genre lost momentum in the late 1980s, worn down by sequels, but it returned in 1996 with Wes Craven's Scream, which combined the genre's violence with a knowing reading of its conventions. Since then it has shaped much of teen horror and many films and series that reuse its codes, and its best-known titles remain standard reference points for audiences who love scary movies.