Slashers
by Guillaume le Sayz, Fred Pizzoferato, Marie Casabonne, Claude Gaillard
Release date : November 24, 2020
Publisher : West Winds
Language : French
Number of pages : 256 pages
A cinema that kills but does not want to die.
From the end of the 1970s, the success of Halloween by John Carpenter spawned a wave of masked killer films whose sole activity was to murder teenagers with knives. The slasher is all the rage and makes the killing a spectacle. Even better, it introduces the concept of the stylized bogeyman who, unstoppably, is bound to become a pop culture figure. Many times buried, the genre always ends up being reborn from its ashes, like its stainless psychopaths, adapting to the times and to new generations of spectators. The longevity of the slasher can be explained by its symbolic dimension. These modern fairy tales, with their apparent idiocy, are also and above all mirrors held up to society. Social satyr, the slasher tells us more than it lets on, its depth is found in the coarseness of its features and its progressiveness in its almost always victorious female characters... In the end, the slasher is not nearly to die, but he already has a heavy past to which it is time to come back.
Through files, articles, tops and interviews composed by authors and experts from all walks of life, Slashers playfully and eclecticly explores the special place of this discredited but adored genre within popular culture.