Whither the Slasher?

I grew up in the bustling town of Fouke, Arkansas.  You, Dear Reader, may have heard of this town in conjunction with the Tony Alamo compound raid or the stories of the Boggy Creek Monster.  The population hovers just below one thousand, and the school and rice fields make up the primary economic forces.  If you travel down highway 71 South, you will pass through Fouke.  There are a handful of stores, a couple of restaurants, a post office, and a photo island in which YOU become the Boggy Creek Monster.  It’s pretty unremarkable, and pretty standard for the areas of lighter population in Southwest Arkansas. 

What sets it apart in my imagination is the fact that there are so many places a person can become lost in the town, both physically and mentally.  Much like a character from Winesburg, Ohio, I grew up in fear of becoming like everyone else in town, and that was the mental loss I feared.  I feared the ultimate resignation, and the acceptance of this life in this town as the only life I would know.  I outgrew that one.  The fear of being lost physically has never let me.  There are too many back roads and too many abandoned farmhouses that seem to offer have for Ed Gein-lites.  There are mysterious creeks, and hideaways that only a few know about.  So, I grew to fear them.  Unfortunately, I also stoked this fear with fuel from Hollywood’s nether regions.

            There was one Mom and Pop video store in Fouke, and I was their best customer.  It was called creatively enough THE VIDEO PLACE.  I loved the smell of it, and the look of it.  In fact, when someone says “Video” or “Video Store” Or “Rental” or “Avogadro’s Number”, the first image is of The Video Place.  It was a small metal building of the type that is often used as an office on construction sites.  It had a tiny counter and the walls were top to bottom vhs tapes.  They had a teeny closet that housed their “dirty” movies.  These movies turned out to be tamer than what anyone can see on Cinemax or, in some cases, what a viewer can catch on a random episode of Nip/Tuck.  I never paid that much attention though because I was there for one thing and one thing only.  Art Films!!!!  I kid.  I became a ravenous beast when it came to off-kilter films later in my adolescence, but from the age of eleven to fifteen I was a horror kid.  I was not a monster kid because most monster movies bored me; I was a hardcore horror kid.  I read Fangoria and Gorezone until the precious few issues I was blessed with fell apart.  Then, I would read the tatters.I rented every horror film good or bad that THE VIDEO PLACE had to offer.  I rented so many that they started holding the ones I hadn't rented for me becasue they knew I was an easy touch. Savini. Romero. Holland. Craven. Bava. Argento. This litany filled my mind with thoughts of zombies and things gone awry.  The center couldn’t hold for the average guy in their horror scenarios, but for the horror kid with his trust copy of John Stanley’s Creature Features Movie Guide there just might be a chance.

I loved all horror save for one sub-genre.  I grew up watching Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel rack “Slasher” films over the coals.  I had heard a million times that they were devoid of any merit, and that they were misogynistic and offered hopeless scenarios.  Therefore, I believed everything that I was told about them.  When one swears a vow of celibacy, the countdown clock begins.  It won’t be long until it is broken, busted, and shattered. 

I broke mine with Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which the director claims is actually inspired in part by the film made about my hometown.  This was quickly followed with Halloween, Prom Night, My Bloody Valentine, and Terror Train.  Eventually I watched all of  Friday the 13^th movies, and these turned out to be the shoddiest and most repellent.  Is it any wonder that they are remembered the most fondly of all of the Slasher films from this era.  The tales of Jason Voorhees ritualized the escapased of the retarded butcher so much that many otherwise intelligent people have come to view them as a fascinating and even innocent artifact of a bygone era. 

This sort of revisonism works for people who haven't recently re-watched the films.  They are tepid, sleazy , and an affront to the struggling filmmakers who have original visions that will never see the light of day.  However, I found that as shoddy as they were they instilled in me a terror built equal parts of naivete and the piney woods I grew up in.  Every time I would go to play or camp with friends in the woods that surrounded all of our homes, I took with me Jason.  The wind through the pine trees whispered "ki-ki-ki-ma-ma-ma." In short the keast of the slasher infiltrated me because I grew up in an enviorment where a monstrously strong mentally-challenged hillbilly did not seem that big of a stretch.  Hell, he could have been my neighbor.

The cartoon-y transgressions of Friday the 13th films gained power not through the skill of the filmmaker , but from my own feverish adolescent mind, and i would be lying if I didn't sometiems awaken with a start expecting a hockey-masked killer to burst through a wall or door and murder me dead.  I see that a re-make opens tomorrow, and I am very glad that I live in a neighborhood with very few trees and some very nice neighbors , a couple with an intense hatred of hockey on one side and avery nice young business man on the other. I thik his card read : PATRICK BATEMAN.  He seems to really like Huey Lewis.