Look who’s stalking: how the slasher movie screamed its way back
Like the bloody, bullet-strewn killer at the end of a frenzied high body count climax making one medically impossible last-gasp attempt to kill the final girl, the slasher movie is lurching its way back to life with a dramatic jolt. The easily maligned subgenre had shown brief flashes of reanimation in recent years but we’re now in the thick of a full resurgence and this time it’s taking over both the big and small screen. There’s nowhere to hide.
Earlier this year, Netflix unspooled its ambitious trilogy (acquired from Fox during the pandemic), adaptations of RL Stine’s teen novels about a town gripped by a killer curse and earlier this month, it also released , a tale of high schoolers targeted by someone who knows their darkest secrets. Friday saw the launch of David Gordon Green’s , the second in his new trilogy which made a whopping $50m in the US over the weekend, the same week that Amazon kicked off its Gen-Z remake of , the 1997 slasher now transformed into an eight-part series, and SyFy launched a new sequel series to Child’s Play called as well as an update of Roger Corman’s . We’ve also just seen, back after an 11-year absence with the original trio onboard, released months before a reboot of on Netflix, A24’s “socially subversive” , written by the Cat Person author Kristen Roupenian, pandemic slasher and then, of course, . There’s also a “social media remake” planned of 90s schlocker , a new take on the evil Santa horror and Charlize Theron is producing a HBO Max series based on self-referential summer novel which will compete with Universal’s adaptation of the similarly themed .
