The slasher genre is a relatively new subgenre of the horror movie. The term "slasher" comes from the fact that almost all slasher films involve a psychotic killer who uses any number of sharp metal-bladed objects to take the lives of his or victims. There's no clearly defined line between horror and slasher movies, but there are a few basic standards that set slasher films apart from other horror.

Slasher movies almost always revolve around teenagers--horny teenagers, angry teenagers, smart teenagers, or stupid teenagers. Slasher flicks require a brutal killer, often disfigured and/or disguised by a mask, who generally exhibits some amount of strange charisma. Slasher movies are bloody--very bloody. They often favor style over substance, focusing more attention on creative death sequences than on a creative script. They are more concerned with startling the audience with a sudden surprise than with subtly scaring the viewer with drawn-out suspense. Slasher movies have jolting music, sometimes accompanied by heavy rock soundtracks.

Now, these elements are not exclusive to slasher movies. There's a lot of films that have plenty of teenagers, lots of blood, and a modern rock soundtrack, but are definitely not slasher movies. But generally speaking, if you've got a film that meets all of the criteria listed in the previous paragraph, chances are you've got a slasher movie on your hands.

But that definition doesn't really do slasher movies justice. In fact, slasher movies are seldom given the credit they deserve by the movie-going public. Often treated as the black sheep of Hollywood, social elitests and film scholars often ignore the genre entirely, dismissing it as occular fodder.

But they miss the point. Slasher movies aren't meant to be award-winners; they never were. Slasher movies are escapist's fare; they're meant for the teenager living in all of us, giving us a place to hang our adolescent dreams and our young adulthood fears...

...and they're fun. Above all else, slasher movies are meant to be enjoyable. They exist to give a group of friends or two kids on a date something cool to do on a Saturday night. And, since the full-fledged birth of the slasher genre, roughly twenty years ago, the teenagers of the world have embraced the movies with open arms, turning a couple of guys named Fred, Jason, and Mike into household names that rank right up there with horror legends Frankenstein and Dracula.

Over the course of the past twenty years, the slasher genre has seen its ups and its downs, and is currently going through a resurgence. Hence, the creation of The Internet Slasher Movie Archives; a place where slasher fans and friends can go to learn more about their favorite movies and trade opinions with other fans.

So, without further delay, please enjoy the site, and feel free to respond with any comments/questions you might have by contacting me, your host, at creaturekid@hotmail.com.


And now, on with the show....