The It's a dark October night in a quiet suburban town. A teenage girl and her boyfriend

have just finished having sex and are enjoying a calming post-coatal cigarette.

The girl says to her boyfriend, go and get me a beer.

Go get me a beer.

The boyfriend reluctantly agrees and mutters,

I'll be right back as he leaves the room.

As he heads downstairs towards the kitchen, he is unaware that he's about to be brutally

stabbed to death by a masked escaped lunatic, and that his girlfriend upstairs would be next.

We all know the story, we've all seen the movies and we could probably all list the

tropes and formulas of the slasher sub-genre. The teenagers behaving badly, the hokey acting, the masked lunatic,

the gore, the knife, the bodies piling up one by one, the showdown with the final girl and that last jump scare before the closing

credits not to mention the sequels and endless franchises that came after there can't

be many people out there who didn't enjoy a good slasher movie with their mate at a sleepover during

their teenage years. But are there more to slashes than meet the eye? Is there substance

behind the mask or is there just a black empty void? The blackest dies. The death size.

It's the opinion of many critics and cinnophiles that slashes are the bottom of the barrel when it comes to horror, the lowest of the low, devoid

of any cinematic worth whatsoever.

But if that's the case, then what attracted filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, John Carpenter,

Dario Argento, Wes Craven, even Brian DiParma

to dabble with these slasher tropes.

Why was there such an abundance of commercially successful slasher movies being churned out in the early 80s

when they all basically followed the exact same formula and how did all these

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