I pointed out in my 10.16.18 review of David Gordon Green's "Halloween" that I feared the success of the film would re-energize and wake up the 'slasher' genre, which has been dead since the early aughts. I wrote, "Let's hope the success of "Halloween" at the box-office doesn't have Hollywood re-energizing a dead genre."
A write-up by The Ringer's Miles Surrey has the same suspicions that I had. Producers in Hollywood are no doubt going to fast-track slasher movies for the masses. It was all but inevitable -- after all, this is an industry that has always rehashed whichever formula was most successful at the box-office. The 'slasher' genre is in again.
The slasher genre was woken from its dead sleep this past weekend, and in a big way: the 2018 sequel to "Halloween" opened with close to $77.5 million to its name. Surrey admits that "after this weekend, slashers are more alive than they’ve been since the late ’90s. Whether more slasher films can break through in the same way will depend on how well they’re able to recapture the subgenre’s occasional highmarks and avoid the lows of the late ’90s and early-to-mid-2000s."
You know the usual tropes that come with the 'slasher' genre; A killer in a mask, a group of horny, not-so-bright high school kids, a secluded setting, gallons upon gallons of blood. The exploitative shock factor eventually numbed us to its effects, but the landmarks are still an essential part of movie history: "Peeping Tom," "Psycho," "Halloween," "A Nightmare on Elm Street," "Black Christmas" and "Texas Chainsaw Massacre." The cream of the crop. Forget about and the fact that Wes Craven all but mocked the slasher genre into oblivion in 1996 with "Scream." Green and his screenwriter, Danny McBride (yes the comedic actor), have decided to go back to the good old nostalgic days, to when movies like "Candyman," "I Know What You Did Last Summer" "Sleepaway Camp," and "Prom Night" were castigated by critics but audiences couldn't get enough of them, until that same audience realized just how godawful those retreads were.
As I was writing this article, news broke [via Bloody Disgusting] that NBA Star LeBron James was in negotiations to produce a ‘Friday The 13th’ reboot. More to come...