Why Slashers Can't Scare Me: Horror Grows Up

You know the drill.  Car/van/bus full of nubile kids gets stranded/goes somewhere they shouldn't and ends up being stalked and killed by guy in a mask/chainsaw aficionado/hillbilly cannibals.  Usually, one of them survives, the virgin more than likely.  The rest of the pot-smoking, sex-having, danger-ignoring teens get killed off, paying for the sins of sex, drugs and irreverence.  It's a formula that's been with us since at least the 1950s, when greasers at Lookout Point would find some monster that hunted them like the nubile prey they were, honed to knife-edge precision in the late 1970s as Jason, Leatherface and Michael took to the screen.  But what is so compelling about a bunch of kids getting hacked up?  Why not senior citizens, or even middle-aged adults more concerned with mortgages and raising kids than with smoking weed and fornicating?

It's been discussed by the like of John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper before, as well as the literary master of horror, Stephen King.  This fixation on youth cut short speaks to the essence of horror - death.  Every slasher film can be boiled down to a central denial of the invulnerability of youth.  If the killer is speed-walking after grandma, it's just not as affecting.  Grandma's lived a full life.  She's expected to die soon, even if it's a natural death.  As for Mom and Dad, well, they're sort of in the same boat, aren't they?  They have outlived their youth, and may be struck down by cancer, aneurisms, heart attacks... their deaths don't mean as much because death is such a real possibility.  It's a function of life at a certain point, the recognition of the reality of mortality.

But these teens, with their fresh bodies, unwithered by age, unmolested by the ravages of the decades to come - they are beautiful, perfect representations of how we like to see ourselves.  They are the youthful ideal, and in today's American culture, what is more worshipped than youth?  We inject ourselves with Botox, get implants, exercise, eat healthy, all because we know we are going to die, that youth has fled us and we long desparately to cling to that youth.  But these teens, that's some distant future, some reality that doesn't exist yet.  Death is no more a reality than life on Mars.  It may happen, but it's not happening now, and the now is the only thing the teenager can process. 

But it's not only teens watching these movies.  We see our own youth in these characters.  We are given the opportunity to lie to ourselves and say that we are still young, not much different from the teenage men and women on the screen, and share, for a time, their denial of the grave.  Then, when they are mercilessly hacked up/eaten/chainsawed, we can say from the safety of our seats, these kids had it coming, because we ALL have it coming.  As an adult, these movies speak less to the sense of a life cut short and more to our newfound sensibilities.  Death comes to us all, so why should these people be any different.  I would argue that there is a morbid sense of justice in the adult perspective on the slasher.  While a teenager may subconsciously register these films as a way to see death presented to them, and then be allowed to safely walk away, having flirted with oblivion, but easily dismissible, the adult sees them as confirmation of the dark knowledge that we all die, it's only a matter of when, where and how. 

Adult horror tends to be more associated with the Cronenberg school of horror, of desecration of the flesh, or losing a child, or helplessness, or paranoia.  Slashers aren't made for adults, because their central notion of the loss of youth has already happened.  Mortality is.   The youthful fear of the unexpected death when the bloom is still on the rose has no relevance anymore.  We know we will die and, therefore, our fears must be different.  Death may still scare us, but it's inevitability takes away some of the terror, like being terrified of that other inevitability, taxes.  And that's okay.  It's okay to release the slasher as an irrelevant horror experience.  There are plenty of fears out there, plenty of things far worse than death.  Let the kids have their masked monstrosities wielding axes and chainsaws.  Those can't scare me anymore.  Show me the handful of dust, and, like Eliot, I will show you real fear.