They move in the dark. They wear masks. They wield blades and leave trails of blood and broken bodies behind them. But perhaps the most terrifying aspect about slasher icons is their persistence. Not just in the stories they inhabit but in the cultural consciousness itself. Since the 1960s, the slasher killer stalked the screen, evolving from quiet madness to mythic brutality. They became a cinematic figure as recognizable as the cowboy or the superhero.
From the pioneering psychological horror of Psycho (1960) to the existential dread of In A NatureViolent (2024), the slasher genre has carved its place in cinema history. Sometimes reviled. Sometimes revered. But always resurrected. This is the story of how they came to be.
The First Cut: Norman Bates and The Seeds Of Madness
His legacy begins with a shower. In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock shocked audiences with Psycho, a film that would forever alter the language of horror cinema. The murder of Marion Crane, in the shower, stabbing, screaming, violins shrieking wasn’t just a narrative turning point, it was a cultural one. Norman Bates, the boy next door with a fractured psyche and an overbearing mother, introduced the world to a new kind of killer. One hiding in plain sight.
Although the term “slasher” had not yet entered the lexicon, Psycho laid the groundwork. Hitchcock’s meticulous direction, combined with Anthony Perkins’ unsettling performance, created a madman that was disturbingly human. There was no monster lurking in the dark, only a man, warped by trauma, capable of sudden and savage violence.
Films like Peeping Tom (1960) and later, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) would follow each other pushing boundaries even farther. Leatherface with his grotesque mask and roaring chainsaw, was a creature born of isolation and madness. A bridge from Norman’s neurosis and the supernatural killers to come.
The Masks We Wear: Michael, Jason and The Birth Of The Slasher Icon
It wasn’t until the late 1970s that the slasher we all know truly emerged. John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) introduced Michael Myers, The Shape. Fearless, silent and unstoppable, Michael was the embodiment of pure evil. He didn’t chase his victims, he stalked them, as if driven by some primeval instinct. He wasn’t mad, he was blank.
Halloween helped to cement the rules of the slasher film: a masked killer, a series of creatively executed kills, a group of young victims and a sole survivor – the final girl. The slow build, the voyeuristic camera work and Carpenter’s eerie synth score created a sense of creeping inevitability.
Two years later, Friday The 13th (1980) upped the ante. While Jason Vorhees wouldn’t don his signature hockey mask until the end of the second film, the franchise embraced gore and turned the summercamp into a slaughterhouse. The term “slasher movie” was now being widely used to describe these low budget, high body count thrillers. The subgenre exploded throughout the 1980s, spawning dozens of imitators. Prom Night (1980), Sleepaway Camp (1983), The Burning (1981), Berserker (1987) and My Bloody Valentine (1981), to name a few.
Michael and Jason weren’t just killers, they were icons. Larger than life. Unstoppable. They became harbingers of death itself. Striking down anyone who transgressed the invisible moral lines of horror cinema: have sex, drink alcohol and do drugs, go off alone – you die.
Killers With Personality: Freddy Krueger and The Rise Of The Supernatural Slasher
While Michael and Jason relied on silence and brute force, Freddy Krueger introduced a new kind of terror in A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984). An accused pedophile that was burned alive by angry parents and reborn as a dream stalking demon, Freddy was the slasher as a trickster. A sadistic showman with a razor gloved hand and a flair for wordplay.
Wes Craven’s film blurred the line between reality and nightmare, bringing surrealism and creativity to the genre. Victims didn’t just get stabbed, they were slashed open, sucked into beds and devoured by their own fears. Freddy was terrifying and funny, a combination that elevated him to cult status.
The slasher villain was no longer in the shadows. He was the shadow. With a voice. A past. And a legion of fans.
Slashers Get Meta: Satire, Self-Awareness and Scream
By the early 1990s, the genre had grown stagnant. Sequels had diluted the impact of the icon and audiences had grown numb to repetition. Enter Scream (1996), Wes Craven’s masterpiece and brilliant reinvention of the form.
Ghostface was a killer with a rotating identity. High school students donning the mask to act out horror tropes in real life. But Scream wasn’t your garden variety slasher film, it was about slashers. Characters reference the rules of horror, poke fun at cliches and still manage to deliver effective scares.
This meta approach revitalized the genre. It paved the way for other self-aware horror gems like Urban Legend (1998),Cherry Falls (2000) and Behind The Mask: The Rise Of Leslie Vernon (2006), where the killers themselves were fans of the genre they inhabited.
Rebirth and Reckoning: Modern Slashers and The Weight Of Trauma
The 2000s and the 2010s saw a more grounded and emotionally charged approach to slasher storytelling. Films like The Strangers (2008) and You’re Next (2011) returned to the home invasion format, presenting killers with no backstory or supernatural elements. These murderers didn’t wear masks because they had to, they did it because they could.
In 2018, Halloween was rebooted once again, with Jamie Lee Curits reprising her role as Laurie Strode. Now a trauma survivor turned vigilante. This version didn’t treat the slasher as mere entertainment. It was an example of the long term psychological scars from violence.
We saw final girls turn from victims to warriors, reclaiming their narratives. The slasher, once formulaic and predictable, was now used to explore grief, guilt and generational trauma.
A New Perspective: In A Violent Nature and The Art-House Slasher
Then came In A Violent Nature (2024), a haunting reinvention of the slasher formula that dared to ask: what if the camera followed the killer and not the victims?
Told almost entirely from the perspective of the lumbering undead killer Johnny, the film strips away all the traditional pacing. There are no frantic edits, no chase scenes, no panicked dialogue. Just quiet, brutal inevitability. We watch Johnny trudge through the forest, observe nature and silently execute anybody that stumbles into his path. There is minimal backstory, just the unrelenting search for his stolen locket. He brings only death.
It’s a poetic inversion of the genre. The audience is forced to not just confront the violence but why we watch it. There are no jump scares. There are no screeching violins. No auditory blades slicing through the silence, just Johnny. In A Violent Nature is unsettling, because it shows us a slow perspective on death and silence.
The Shape Of Fear To Come
The slasher has survived reinvention, parody, decline and rebirth. What began with Norman Bates and a knife in the shower, has become a multi-faceted subgenre. They are capable of terror, humor, critique and catharsis.
These killers, Michael, Jason, Freddy, Ghostface, Leatherface and now Johnny, aren’t just monsters. They’re mirrors. They reflect our anxieties about safety, sexuality, grief, randomness and mortality. They change with us, adapting to new fears, new forums and new aesthetics.
The term “slasher” may have been coined in the late seventies to describe a wave of low-budget horror flicks but its meaning has since evolved into something far more complex. Slashers are now folklore. Archetypes. Myths. And like all myths, they’ll be retold again and again. Because we are afraid of what lurks in the darkness.
And we always will be.