Retro Slashers

You are browsing the archives of 1981.

The students of Lanier College have more than exams to worry about. A slasher armed with a butcher knife is stalking the corridors of academia. Only the survivors get to exempt this test. Final Exam could have been just another generic campus slasher but is saved by bizarre camera angles, an oddball but loveable cast, [...]

A year after Anthropophagus became an international hit, director Joe D’Amato (Aristide Massaccesi) re-teamed with star George Eastman (Luigi Montefiore) for this underrated sequel.  Rosso Sangue was banned by the British government during the Video Nasty Era and suffered from multiple name changes when it was released.  In America, Wizard Video released the film as Monster Hunter [...]

Once upon a time there was this bodybuilding guru named Jake. Jake Steinfeld actually, but he went by Body by Jake and built an empire as trainer to the stars. He was rumored to be the only man to make Steven Spielberg throw up. There’s just a touch of irony that he caused such mayhem [...]

Whilst throughout the seventies special makeup effects artists such as Stan Winston and Rick Baker had become renowned for their work, their achievements were still often eclipsed by the recognition that the directors and actors would receive.

Romano Scavolini’s Nightmare was one of the most notorious of all the slasher films to emerge in the eighties. Distributed in the United Kingdom under the more infamous moniker Nightmare in a Damaged Brain

Outside the obvious franchises (Halloween, Friday the 13th, etc.), perhaps the most beloved slasher of the early eighties was the Canadian thriller My Bloody Valentine

Of all the lost-in-the-wilderness slashers to appear in the early eighties (which would include The Final Terror and The Forest), Jeff Lieberman’s backwards thriller Just Before Dawn was arguable the most beautifully shot and well crafted, perfectly capturing the deadly beauty of the Oregon mountains

With so many slashers being released between 1980 and 1982, there were countless films that fail to receive the recognition they deserved

Despite winning major acclaim for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, director Tobe Hooper had followed the success with a string of inferior and disappointing flops, most notably 1976′s Eaten Alive which starred future Freddy Krueger Robert Englund

The success of Friday the 13th in 1980 and the subsequent slasher boom was responsible for every producer and studio in town attempting to create their own variation, some were successful (such as Prom Night, Happy Birthday to Me and Hell Night), others were mediocre at best.