“That’s not all! Because if one of those things gets down here, then that will be all!” – Ripley, ‘Aliens’
Right away, you should be warned that there won’t be a conclusion. This is a vague question for a subcategory of a subgenre, which makes it extra meaningless. After writing last week’s column, I started to wonder what separates a slasher from, say, Dracula. Or a Xenomorph (specifically, the first Alien, which I think of as a slasher). How is a slasher meaningfully different from a monster that is stalking and killing people?
“Answered your own question,” you say to your monitor, forgetting that I can’t hear you (unless you comment). “Monsters are supernatural, slashers are human killers.” Well, yes and no. Michael Myers is a human killer, but with a supernatural ability to 1) be quiet 2) survive getting killed 3) learn to drive despite being institutionalized from the age of six. Jason Vorhees is supernatural from the start—he is resurrected at the end of the first movie, and in at least one other movie after that. Freddie Krueger is inherently supernatural, but those movies are slashers. The guy in In A Violent Nature is a supernatural resurrected killing machine. Does Candyman count as a slasher?
Of course, plenty of slashers do not have a supernatural element: Ghostface is always normal person, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre family were, well, not normal people, but you get it. Same for Norman Bates. I’m not sure if The Clovehitch Killer counts as a slasher, but it is about a killer, and there’s nothing supernatural there. So thinking of slashers as more grounded has some basis.
So many of these monsters, though, just want to kill some people. Dracula’s biggest desire is Mina, yes, but his defining trait is that he’s a murderer who comes in the night. Werewolf movies are structured differently from slashers. We don’t have a big group of characters to slowly murder, it’s usually more of a focus on one person turning monstrous. Still, though, there’s a viewing of An American Werewolf In London as a slasher, from the perspective of the killer. It Follows sure plays out like a slasher, but that is a supernatural monster passed on through sexual contact. Something like Jaws necessarily cannot be a slasher, yet is structured like one. Is Alien actually a slasher? When Brendan and I were talking about this, he said that Alien is absolutely a creature feature. That’s the thing, too, with The Only Good Indians. It’s a creature feature paced and plotted like a slasher. The Thing in The Thing is slowly picking people off, but that’s differently from a slasher.
This is not the Subgenre Slam for creature features, though. When I brought this up with Chloe, she referred The Thing and It Follows as parasite movies, which. Yes, that’s absolutely what they are. Parasites are a good way of thinking about monsters that retain some human quality, which is another thing I like about this subgenre. I think the Victorian English audience for which Dracula was written would’ve viewed the Transylvanian who cowers before Catholic crosses and wants to steal all the women and children a parasite, though I don’t particularly want to engage in that kind of anti-immigrant rhetoric. It’s there, though. That reading’s more explicit in both the original and Herzog versions of Nosferatu, where a plague comes to town before the vampire even gets there.
This week’s Subgenre, I don’t really know what to call it. Monster doesn’t feel quite right, because there’s a lot of monstrosity this category leaves out (Godzilla, Jurassic Park, Tremors, feel like I shouldn’t have even brought up Jaws). And vampires, even though they are monsters, feel distinct from monster movies to me. These are creatures who kill, creatures who, as Brendan pointed out, feel inevitable and inescapable. That’s super scary! This might be my favorite subgenre of horror. At least, I know creature features are, and my favorite creature features involve the threat of death, I guess? Or maybe I sympathize with hideous, chalk-skinned gargoyles. The creature as outsider is compelling. Did Anne Rice’s vampire books condition me to thinking of killing as some sort of tragic curse? That’s certainly how Louis views it, whereas David in American Werewolf In London is in denial. Candyman, of course, is just having fun out there.
So! Like I said, no conclusion. But I like this genre. Go read The Only Good Indians and watch Herzog’s Nosferatu.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris