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horror film, conference papers Stephanie A. Graves horror film, conference papers Stephanie A. Graves

“They always started with a kill scene”: Reboots, Requels, and The Slasher Cycle

One of the most popular and enduring subgenres of horror film, the slasher initially hacked its way onto the big screen and into the cultural imaginary in the 1970s. Like other monsters in the horror canon, the slasher villain—wielding a variety of weapons, from knives, machetes, and axes to sickles, chainsaws, and the occasional wood chipper or bread slicer—has long functioned as a manifestation of the “monster as metaphor,” a means through which horror engages in critique of cultural ideologies. What I want to consider in this paper is the idea that throughout the slasher cycles of the 70s and 80s, the mid- to late 90s and early 2000s, the Post-9/11 era, and continuing into our current neoslasher era, the slasher villain is and always has been directly shaped by the concomitant influences of our repressed cultural fears and the rise of sociopolitical conservativism.

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