Slasher!

The jokes in Christmas crackers and on the back on penguin wrappers are usually rather bad or obvious, this is so that everyone round the table can get the joke and all agree on how bad it is. This brings people together. This is also similar to how, in most slasher films, the victims are always clumsy and make stupid mistakes. It makes us come together in our agreement that the character is being foolish and shouldn't have left the knife lying there! This often creates a level of interaction between the viewers and the movie itself, 'why don't you just run away?' or 'no don't go in there!' etc. Although sometimes frustrating it can make a film more fun to watch when with a group of friends.

Scream 1996

What I definitely do find frustrating in slasher films however, is the long drawn out endings in which the hero or heroine (who we know is going to survive) and the psychopath (who we also know is going to survive if part of a franchise) fight it out. The number of times someone can get stabbed and still be okay is often stretched to the limit, nothing will kill these mad men who just keep coming back again and again and again. They're like superheroes who never die but then I suppose that's why people love them, you can't get rid of them and so no matter what they're always out there.

Halloweem 1978

Slasher films are often considered to be predictable, unimaginative and pretty much the down fall of horror as a genre. They are certainly the most 'main stream' type of horror film but they haven't always been the dreadful films that people seem to think they are. The pioneering movies of the slasher genre such as Halloween and Friday the 13^th are still widely regarded as being good memorable films, the wave of low budget slasher films that came later just repeated what had already come before. Some of these films eg. Sleep Away Camp 2: Unhappy Campers and Sleep Away Camp 3: Teenage Wasteland offer nothing more that topless girls running around at night and being stabbed at summer camp. The idea of going away to camp was once scary but now it has simply been over used and lost it's edge (much in the same way that 'found footage' films are starting to do).

Slasher films will always be fun to watch on a night in with some friends, they're one of the few types of horror film that nearly always provide a good laugh from time to time as well as hopefully managing to stay scary and often alarming. Slasher films have given us the likes of Jason Vorheers, Michael Myers and Freddy Kruger, all of them much loved by many and all of them coming to get you while you sleep.