Review by Scott Nicholson

"Slasher Films: An International Filmography, 1960 through 2001"

Written by Kent Byron Armstrong
McFarland Books

here is a great deal to be said about those escapist guilty pleasures that can also be examined as sociological artifacts. By having those pleasures thrown under the cold glare of an academician's eye, we can be reassured that our particular brand of crudity is indeed palatable to the masses and not a refined taste reserved for the cultural elite.

So it is with "Slasher Films: An International Filmography, 1960 through 2001" (hc, $65, 376 pp), a recent release from specialty press McFarland Publishers. Yes, the masked or grinning lunatics who rip teen flesh and geriatric jerky with equanimity are ordinary people. Those happy, hard-eyed automatons for whom once is not enough could just as easily be us. Except we're safe in our theater seats and afterward can walk out into a world where such atrocities are just enough of a remote possibility to give us an extra delightful shiver.

"Slasher Films" brings the dripping blade under scrutiny both as a formulaic subgenre of horror and a stylized art form, examining the emotional effects of place (often ordinary but confined), visualization (often the murderer's point of view), and weaponry (not limited to knives, since the "slasher" often employs a creative assortment of found objects).

The book's author, Kent Byron Armstrong, also believes the slasher category requires a human, or human-like, killer. Thus the seemingly immortal Jason, Chucky, and Michael Myers fit the bill even though they have never met a sequel they couldn't fit into their busy schedules. Yet Freddy Krueger is disqualified because he clearly inhabits a land where every sin goes unpunished.

Armstrong also employs the psychology trade toward what most consumers and fans admit is disposable and prurient cheese. "People often wrongly assume that slasher film murders are sexually disturbed and wickedly demented deviants, much like Norman from 'Psycho,' or members of a completely twisted family, like the familial household of 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,'" he writes in the introduction. "But slasher films have offered an array of vicious, homicidal maniacs who feed on mayhem and flourish by spilling the blood of others."

Priests murder alongside yuppies, and matronly maulers compete at the box office with generic mental defectives. Armstrong maintains a conservatively defensive posture, assuring us that watching a brutal murder up close "distances the audience from the killer, rather than forcing people to associate themselves with a homicidal maniac." While my own exposure to slasher films has decreased in direct proportion to the expanding cast of cute, Dawson Creekish protagonists, I suspect that most viewers are secretly rooting for the murderer to rid the plot line of yet another of these insouciant slackers and save us the indignity of their further dialogue.

Of course, slasher films came full circle with "Scream" and "American Psycho" and can now be safely defended as high satire. Armstrong also takes the proper moral road by stating "In slasher films, sexuality is present because humans are sexual; it does not present itself through the murders." Still, most of the target audience for these films will feel slightly cheated if they don't get some taste of a hunk's washboard belly and underwear line or a swaying pair of endangered breasts.

Armstrong gets applause for the bravura of such an observation as "Characters are often killed just to be killed; there appears to be no specific reason for a particular character to be murdered (other than the person just happens to be alone)." Pauline Kael couldn't have been more insightful than that. The intellectual build-up is essential for dunning libraries into ordering this book as serious critical fare. As soon as we recognize that Armstrong is applying these pseudo-scientific principles to an industry that has no soul, much less a brain, then we can skip the analysis and get right to the real and joyful meat of the book.

"Slasher Films" lovingly catalogues over 250 slasher films, listing major cast and production credits, a plot synopsis, and a critique of each, with the occasional production notes. Filmographies are also provided for some of our favorite B-babes and balding detectives, hack screenwriters, and dedicated directors.

You don't need to explain or defend your reasons for wanting this book, just as you don't need a shrink's blessing in order to attend one of the described movies. If you've read this far, you know the slasher never apologizes. Another rule of our cinematic universe is just as unfailing: the killing never ends, it merely pauses for refreshment.

On the Web: http://www.mcfarlandpub.com

Scott Nicholson is author of the Appalachian Gothic thrillers "The Harvest" and "The Red Church." When he's not tracking down obscure videos, he's hanging out at his website, www.hauntedcomputer.com.