News that David Gordon Green is to direct a remake of the classic slasher flick Halloween comes as a welcome surprise for those of us who have often felt a chill down the spine at the sight of this once proud subgenre’s descent into grey cliche. With regular collaborator Danny McBride co-writing the script, and full backing from the original film’s director, John Carpenter, might the slasher movie be ready for a renaissance just as it looked to be flat on the floor with a kitchen knife in its back?
It’s easy to forget the impact Carpenter’s 1978 movie had at the time. The film, with its hauntingly minimalist piano score and an understated performance from Jamie Lee Curtis, cemented so many of the tropes that have defined the genre over the past four decades: the scream queen, the masked killer who keeps coming back from the dead, the deaths following on from teenage sex. Back then, these themes were still relatively fresh, their power to freeze the blood in our veins arguably at its zenith.
In the intervening years the slasher flick has slowly - almost glacially - proceeded to drift out of fashion, to the point where a new reboot of rival saga Friday the 13th was cancelled this week, just a month and a half before the start of principal photography. A succession of execrable remakes of classic horror movies – mostly from Rob Zombie or the Michael Bay-owned production company Platinum Dunes – has diminished the genre to the point where it is sometimes a struggle to remember why it was ever popular in the first place. Zombie’s 2007 version of Halloween swapped out the original’s spine-tingling suspense for a purely sadistic remake filled with slasher stereotypes – and it is probably one of the least awful noughties revamps.
Instead of masked killers, horror cinema is now dominated by movies that combine psychological horror and fantasy elements, whether they be vengeful spirits (recent cult hit The Witch and surprise smash It Follows) or aliens (10 Cloverfield Lane). Part of the fun with these films is working out whether something out of the ordinary really is going on, or whether the central characters have simply gone mad. Jennifer Kent’s sublime The Badabook is perhaps the most powerful of the recent crop for its challenging dip into the deeply unsettling subject of maternal child abuse, as well as the movie’s final intimation that the titular bogeyman is all in its protagonist’s mind.
There is, in fact, little new here. As far back as the original 1942 version of horror classic Cat People (a film credited with inventing the jump scare), film-makers have been feeding elements of supernatural terror and psychological torment into the same stories. Three decades later, Roman Polanski invited audiences of Rosemary’s Baby to wonder whether Mia Farrow’s expectant mum was mentally disintegrating or really did just get impregnated by the antichrist. But genuinely fresh or not, this type of horror feels realer – and therefore more chilling – than stereotype-laden slasher material. M Night Shyamalan’s current box-office smash, Split, is arguably the most terrifying horror movie of the past year precisely because its story is wholly believable. No ghosts or goblins here, just a Russian dolls’ set of evil, with each new layer of psychosis more repellent than the one before. Perhaps the key when generating chills is to resist travelling too far into the realms of fantasy.
The 1970s horror boom occurred at a time when horribly grim real-life murders were hitting the news. Wes Craven’s proto slasher-flick The Last House on the Left was released just three years after Charles Manson’s supporters embarked on their murderous 1969 jaunt through the affluent suburbs of Los Angeles, leaving Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, and others dead in their wake. Not long afterwards, in 1974, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre riffed off the abominations of serial killer Ed Gein.
Halloween succeeded because it maintained the veneer of a story pulled straight from the headlines, while adding just a soupcon of supernatural terror. If Green is to succeed in breathing new life into the story of Michael Myers, as well as the slasher genre as a whole, he will have to find a way to bring back that sense of realism. Ignoring the aforementioned standard tropes would be a good start: they are better known to horror fans than Death Stars, lightsabers and droids are to acolytes of Star Wars, the difference being that George Lucas’s long-running space saga can get away with wallowing in nostalgia because its key dynamics are not reliant on the element of surprise. With horror, by contrast, it is almost impossible to be truly scared when you know what’s coming.
McBride has promised that he and Green won’t take the easy way out by playing the original material for laughs – the 21 Jump Street approach. And this probably makes sense, given that Craven’s Scream movies and Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods already brilliantly blunted the genre’s blade with an approach based on self-referential satire.
Maybe a completely new approach to the slasher flick is required – one that returns the genre to its roots in fear of the merciless mad killer, but remembers from childhood that the bogeyman was always scariest back when you thought he was real.
