Retro Slashers

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The success of Blanche Knott’s Truly Tasteless Jokes spawned numerous rip-offs in the early 80s.  Julius Alvin cashed in on the raunchy joke book craze with the Gross Jokes series.   Gross Gifts, the entry from 1983, skips the usual dead baby material and focuses on “everything from gross cosmetics to gross movies to gross vacations.”  The “gross [...]

Teenage Wasteland is a welcome addition to the list of essential books about horror movies that includes Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, John McCarty’s Official Splatter Movie Guide and Stephen Thrower’s Nightmare U.S.A.

Horror fiction writers were slow to take up the slasher mantle back in the early 80′s even though celluloid stalkers were carving up hefty profits at the box-office. Anyone scanning paperback racks at the corner market were more likely to find novels about demon possessed houses, Stephen King rip-offs featuring evil little kids with psychic [...]

Talk about finding a diamond among a bunch of worthless rocks. I first saw Seth Grahame-Smith’s excellent book on a new release table sandwiched between mountains of Oprah’s latest Book of the Month and literary dreck that folks buy but never read. The cover, featuring a bloody gash through the title, is definitely an eye-catcher. [...]

The bible for all horror movie lovers.

Jim Harper has written a book about the slasher genre entitled LEGACY OF BLOOD: A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO SLASHER MOVIES, released in the UK in 2004. The blurb reads: The “slasher” movie is the bloodiest incarnation of the modern horror film, tainted by criticisms of misogyny, yet remaining-on and off-a box-office draw for 30 years. [...]

A notch above most Young Adult thrillers thanks to its author’s dryly humorous tone, Deadly Detention is a playful riff on school-set slasher movies that whistles along swiftly and keeps up the suspense to the end. Think back to the 1985 John Hughes movie The Breakfast Club and, if you’re anything like me, you’ll remember [...]

Charles Winecoff’s biography on the late, great slasher icon Anthony Perkins reveals the actor was much more complex, more troubled, and sometimes more crazed than any of the characters he portrayed. Now, out of respect to Perkins, I’m not going into all of the lurid details of his private life, but I will mention his [...]

There comes a point in every slasher fan’s life when they arrive at the horrible realisation that they’ve seen every decent slasher movie from the genre’s eighties heyday. Sure, newer slashers may promise a retro style but they, like Hatchet and Monster Man, usually turn out to be a mixed bag at best, with far [...]