Retro Slashers

You are browsing the archives of 1984.

The film played for one week then vanished. It has never been mentioned since… until now.

In 1983, Hikmet Avedis & wife Marlene Schmidt wrote & produced Mortuary, which Hikmet directed. A year later they were back in the same capacity with They’re Playing With Fire. Taking the plot of their 1974 movie The Teacher, and Eric Brown – the star of the popular Private Lessons (1981), it starts off simple [...]

After three successful, if somewhat critically mauled, feature films, Paramount finally decided to lay their lucrative Friday the 13th franchise to rest with what promised to be The Final Chapter.

As the slasher boom came to an end, with most major studios bowing out of the genre and leaving just the independent filmmakers to milk the concept dry, a struggling director by the name of Wes Craven had penned a script full of original ideas and inventive deaths,

Of all the slasher movies to meet controversy in the 1980′s, perhaps the most loathed of these was the festive tale Silent Night, Deadly Night, which was picketed by angry parents and pulled by the studio. Still unreleased in several countries, this tale of a homicidal Santa Claus was not the first festive slasher

Silent Night, Deadly Night was a mean spirited little entry in the slasher canon that carried more notoriety on its shoulders than it was worth. Not to say it’s a bad slasher – it does manage some moments that get under your skin – like the suddenly non-comatose grandfather and the nighttime family assault that [...]

It’s almost impossible to look past such a salacious tagline as “It’s not human and it’s got an axe”, therefore, I didn’t. While I was slightly disappointed that it was human, he still carried that axe with enough murderous glee to make up for that shortcoming. The Prey is an oddity for sure. Approximately half [...]

A psycho escapes from a mental institution. Three years later, the female students and teachers of St. Trinians College fall victim to the knife wielding slasher. The new teacher on campus (Francine Forbes) thinks she knows the killer’s identity. After the deaths of her friends, the young teacher confronts the killer in the hallways of [...]

Christie (Rachael Kelly) is sure her new step-father, Paul Fox (David Brooks), is trying to kill her mother but none of her friends or family take her warnings seriously. The suspicious teen stalks her step-father and his lover, Brenda (Lolita Lorre), in an attempt to gather evidence proving Fox’s evil intentions. Eventually, Christie convinces her [...]

Heavy metal rocker Billy “Eye” Harper (Tray Loren) goes on a killing spree and snuffs 25 people before being captured and executed. The only survivor of Billy’s rampage is Lynn Starling (Donna Scoggins), back up singer and part-time groupie. Two years after the murders, Lynn is preparing her new band, Headmistress, for the Rocktober Blood [...]