“It’s almost October, though, and horror is my religion.” – Stephen Graham Jones, ‘My Heart Is A Chainsaw’
Welcome to Subgenre Slam!, a column series I will start today, break for the next two weeks to tell you about the 2025 Lazy & Entitled Fiction Project, and then resume in October. I do hate when people/corporations skip over a month. September rules! We’re outside, we’re grilling, we’re walking to school this year. I’m not trying to take away from that.
But it’s September in an odd-numbered year, and that means there’s a new Lazy & Entitled Fiction Project coming out this year! For anyone unfamiliar with Lazy & Entitled Fiction Projects, these are collaborative novel(la)s that Brendan and I write together. Back in 2023, we released VINE, a roughly 300-page novel-in-stories. We published it as a blog, releasing one chapter every weekday. This year’s project is much shorter, hovering around 130 pages, and we still intend to publish it as a blog—one chapter per day, Monday through Friday. The only thing I want to say about it right now is that it’s a slasher.
Before I get into that, though, lemme tell you another art-outside-of-capitalism project. The timing and phrasing there might make it sound like this is a sponsored hit, but it’s very much the opposite. I just want to talk about a cool project that’s on Kickstarter.
Bijhan Agha is a queer and Muslim comics creator out of Seattle, aiming to create exciting comics for adults and kids. I got to read a preview of the new comic, Time Wars: The Adventure of Zero & One, and my first thought was about how this would be a great one to share with my kid (we are currently working up to reading comics). The colors are vivid and bright, the lines bold, the adventure afoot, and a lot of the description is short sentences with exclamation points, which gives the story a charming Pokemonesque feel. Zero and One, the characters, are different species. Zero crash-lands on One’s planet, and the two have to figure out how to communicate. It’s a touching portrait of how first contact can go—that first contact does not always have to be bloodthirsty clashes of civilizations. Sometimes, it’s good to remember that cooperation is a necessary part of existence.
You can back the Kickstarter here. You can also check out more from Bijhan at the Jamsheed Studios Patreon.
And now, back to Subgenre Slam!
Setting
Wrote this paragraph second-to-last and the others kinda got long! Wait, is the slasher blog meta? Setting’s important. I have argued that horror can be done in cities, but it is hard to beat the woods for a slasher. In A Violent Nature, A Bay Of Blood, Friday The 13th. Also shoutout to college campuses—Scream 2, Happy Death Day. Shoutout to Stephen Graham Jones and what he does with Indigenous/Christian burial grounds in the Indian Lake Trilogy. Still, I think the greatest slasher setting is the suburbs. A place that is inherently evil, manufactured, unholy, filled with lawns choking out natural life, bloated cars burping exhaust all over six-lane roads flanked by chain restaurants and cookie cutter retail, the residents entitled pricks and their entitled kids, and now you’re adding a killer to the equation? Scream, Totally Killer, The Babysitter, Nightmare On Elm Street, Halloween,
Characters
There has to be an element of That’s How The Kids Are Now in slashers. The babysitters and camp counselors of Halloween and Friday The 13th, yes, but think how each generation changes. Think Stu Macher’s cartoonish face next to Billy Loomis’s gelled dirtbag next to Tatum Riley’s post-grunge alt-girl thing as a statement on the 90s in Scream. Pair that with Cruel Intentions-meets-Gilmore Girls-as-slasher in I Know What You Did Last Summer the following year. Think B and Cole’s millennial nerdiness in The Babysitter, then pair that with the Children Of Rihana Born In The Fires Of Chaos of Bodies Bodies Bodies. Slashers should have some sort of capture-the-moment-for-the-youth feel.
The other aspect of character in these movies is progression—however you feel about how many siblings Laurie Strode has, it’s great watching her through the years of the Halloween franchise. Ditto Sydney, Gale, and Dewey in Scream, with a nod to the Carpenter sisters and Meeks-Martin siblings in V and VI. The most interesting character study lately has been Mia Goth and Ti West’s X trilogy, which time-jumps between installments and shows a really compelling evolution of a character (Mia Goth’s Maxine) and character archetype (fame-hungry aspiring starlet). It might feel like all slasher are the same. Sure, they play by similar conventions. Putting the same characters in similar-but-slightly different situations, over and over again, reveals new things. Sydney Prescott’s journey shows that.
Set dressing
There’s a not-totally-untrue accusation you could level that slashers are almost entirely setups for elaborate sets and props. The Friday The 13th series is the original title holder for best set dressing, what with Jason hiding heads in the fridge for people to find when they have a bad dream and then decide their cat needs to be fed at three a.m.1The Final Destination series has added “the Grim Reaper as Rube Goldberg Device Enjoyer” to the mix, giving that franchise at least the Intercontinental Championship Belt for set dressing, if not the current world title. There hasn’t been a good Friday The 13th movie since—before I was born maybe? I haven’t seen anything beyond Takes Manhattan.
Anyway, slashers are about kills, and we want those kills to look cool! It’s funny, I wouldn’t really call myself a fan of gore—not squeamish, but I do genuinely I like all the other stuff about horror more. Yet I do find myself orienting the movie around kills. “Well, opening by offing Drew Barrymore, your biggest star, is an incredible move2, and then, it’s really when the garage door kill happens that the whole movie gets set off.” Kills are almost like video game checkpoints in slashers. Plus, if you’re watching in a theater—yeah, you want some spectacle.
The Meta Aspect
This is the last paragraph I’m writing, and I’m sorta stuck on what to do with it. It’s cool when Scream does it? I like the current trend of rebooting classic movies, like Totally Killer as Back To The Future But A Slasher and Happy Death Day as Groundhog Day But A Slasher. I really enjoyed what Stephen Graham Jones did with Jade Daniels, particularly in the first book, My Heart Is A Chainsaw. It’s hard to pull off what Scream can and what SGJ does with narrative voice, though. Even though I like this movie, I’m not so sure The Babysitter 2: Killer Queen succeeds with how overboard it goes on being self-aware. If I picked up another book that felt like it was trying to be SGJ in terms of conversational, shaggy dog-style writing, it would take a bit for me to get into it. The final verdict might be I like meta stuff when I see it, but I’d rather most people not even try.
Morality
There’s always some reason. Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees are famously incel prudes, upset that anyone anyone is having sex. Ghostface often has some Tipper Gore-esque “the movies made me do it” monologue, which is always funny. Jigsaw is a righteous crusader against the USian healthcare system at first, but blossoms to a warrior against capitalism’s broader hypocrisies. The Se7en guy, he was a pretty famous moralist.
I have to confess to loving this aspect of slashers.
There’s been this idea lately, that movies are often capitalist/imperialist propaganda, and that movies love making a socialist/communist/anarchist the villain, but they have to go to great lengths to make them extra gross, otherwise they wouldn’t be villainous. Killmonger in Black Panther is necessarily a bloodthirsty murderer, because a message of Black liberation—even if it’s armed—is kinda undeniably attractive. If Jigsaw’s not a, like, sick sadistic fuck, bro, then he’s just Luigi Mangione, and the people love them some Tony Spaghetti. And I don’t know. I just like that part of these movies. I like the bad guy monologuing. If I met Hugh Grant’s Heretic character from the movie Heretic3 in real life (and I feel like I have), I would tell him, “Heretic, my dude, you absolutely need to chill, and please do not talk to me.” But DAMN can I watch him, endlessly. Idk. I’m a man of peace, I’m the lakeshore monk, but. There’s something so compelling about watching evil people spout out compelling, outside-the-mainstream ideas, stuff you are ready to agree with, to cheer on—and then dude kills somebody, and you’re left with, “well, not like that.” I’m not sure what that says about me. To paraphrase Stu Macher, I hope my mom and dad don’t get mad.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
- surprisingly common trope, in that it happens in two movies that I can think of: Friday The 13th Part 2 and The Long Goodbye. What the hell is going on? This should not be that common. Set your cat’s feeding time and stick to it. Unless you want to be awoken at three a.m. every night ↩︎
- Barrymore’s idea to be the character who gets killed early, IIRC ↩︎
- not a slasher, but a lot of the same trappings, same with Se7en ↩︎