What Make “Slasher” Films So Thrilling

Movies like Scream, Halloween, Valentine, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Urban Legend are all horror movies and in a more specific term, they are all “slasher” films. A “slasher” film is basically a movie where a serial killer is on the loose which is the plot in all of these five movies that I watched.

The movie Halloween is different from the other four movies because it was made more than twenty years ago. This movie is about a six year old child who killed his sister and fifteen years later escapes from a mental asylum. While on the loose, the psychopathic killer stalks teenage girls on Halloween night who remind him of his sister. The killer, “Michael Myers”, uses a kitchen knife to kill all of his victims and wears a mask to disguise himself. The star of the movie, Jamie Lee Curtis as “Laurie”, is one of the only survivors of the attacks. Since Halloween was made so long ago, there isn’t even close to as much gore and violence as there are in the other movies, but it is still scary because of the suspense

and mystery that every “slasher” film contains. At the end of the movie, “Michael” is shot and falls out of the window only to reveal that when the person who shot him looks out, he sees that “Michael” has disappeared. This made room for the three Halloween sequels to follow.

Urban Legend was my favorite movie and the scariest of the five. It took place on a small college campus where urban legends were often told. The killer wore a black trench coat with a hood that hid their face. In the movie, the killer takes all of the urban legends and turns them into reality. For example, an urban legend says that a girl and her boyfriend are parked along the road and hear on the radio that a serial killer is on the loose. The girl, being afraid, asks her boyfriend to check underneath the car for the killer. He goes outside and a few minutes later the girl hears scratching on the roof of the car. Scared, she drives away to leave her boyfriend dead, hanging from a tree. The killer in Urban Legend did the same thing in the movie. There is a great deal of mystery in this movie too because the killer isn’t revealed until the end and ends up being someone that no one would suspect. At the end, the two stars of the movie survive and the killer is shot off of a bridge and is assumed dead.

The movie then ends but not until the killer is seen a year later telling an urban legend to some freshman of how a killer once killed people by taking urban legends and turning them into the truth. This definitely left room for a sequel which is why Urban Legend: Final Cut was made.

Scream is one of the ultimate “slasher” films. It stars Neve Campbell as Sydney Prescott, Courteney Cox Arquette as Gail Weathers and David Arquette as Dewey. The killer in the three Scream movies were always different in each movie but all wanted Sydney dead for one reason: her mother who was an actress that died and wanted only a relationship with Sydney but not with her son whom she abandoned when he was young. The killer in Scream was dressed in all black with a very freaky looking mask on. The killer always used a knife to kill his victims with and always called them up on a cell phone right before they died. The killer used a voice-change device that made him have a disturbed sounding voice. Scream was a very bloody and gory movie and by the end of it, everyone was covered

in blood. The three scream movies are part of a trilogy which is why a Scream 4 should not be coming in the future, but who knows, anything can happen with “slasher” films.

I Know What You Did Last Summer is a movie very closely related to Scream. It stars actresses Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Geller and actors Freddie Prinze Jr. and Ryan Phillipe. The Movie is about four teens who just graduated from high school and wanted to enjoy the nice summer night of July 4^th when all of a sudden they had hit a guy with their car. Panicked, they dumped the body into the ocean and swore to each other that they would take the secret to the grave with them. The next summer rolls around and one of the girls who was in the car that night received a note reading “I Know What You Did Last Summer!”. Frightened, she shows her three friends that were there with her that night. Then a killer is after them for the rest of the movie, he wore a black rain slicker and a fisherman hat and killed his victims with a hook. This movie has a sequel called I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.

The fifth movie I watched was Valentine. It is about a guy who was a nerd in junior high school and twenty years

later kills the women who rejected him at a school dance. The killer wears a mask that covers his whole face and he wears a black cape. Throughout the movie, whenever the killer murdered someone, his nose would bleed. The movie is so scary because of the thought and feeling that a murderer is after you. Valentine does not have a sequel yet but there is a great chance that it could happen in the near future because the end has a very spooky twist to it.

In conclusion, in slasher movies all the killers are after young people. The stars of the movies always survive. The killers always have on a mask and disguise of some type and never use guns to kill. In these five movies there is always a motive and reason the killer has for killing who he/she kills. The endings of the movies are usually twisted which leaves a chance for sequels and the beginnings of the movies are always significant. The setting of the movies are always in small towns and the victims are always alone when killed. Although Halloween is much older than the other four movies, it shows how “slasher” films have not changed much other than that the ones nowadays are more graphic. I Know What You Did Last Summer, Scream, Valentine, Halloween and Urban Legends are

all good examples of “slasher” films. They contain every qualification a “slasher” needs to have.

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