Word: slashers
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...Take Slasher, for example, Allison Moore's comedy about an Austin, Texas, waitress who gets picked to play the last girl killed in a low-budget slasher film. Moore shows a real feel for the milieu: the Austin independent filmmaking scene, where cowboy film geeks meet up with cheeseball Hollywood wannabes. The encounter in which the film's hack director (a brilliantly smarmy Mark Setlock) discovers his star, Sheena, in a Hooters-style hangout, enlists her for his film and promptly gets rolled by her in contract negotiations, is as sharp and modulated a satire of Hollywood hucksterism as anything...
What is it about violence that we find so alluring? The cult of the slasher film, once considered a perverse, transgressive genre, has morphed into the unapologetic torture-porn fad. The genre of television detective drama has collapsed into gore-fests like those featured on “CSI.” Violence has become the stuff of the banal, and yet retains its mystic and exotic appeal. Valentin Groebner, one of Germany’s up-and-coming historians, takes a look at this phenomenon, grounding it centuries ago in the visual culture of the Middle Ages. Groebner?...
Then came Jason. In 1980, Paramount Pictures released Friday the 13th (tagline: "Fridays will never be the same again"), a slasher flick about a series of murders at a summer camp. Apparently Jason, born on Friday the 13th, chooses that date to take revenge on oversexed campers much like the ones who allowed him to drown in Crystal Lake. So much for trust falls and lanyard-making. Friday the 13th grossed almost $40 million at the box office and inspired a long-running franchise: Friday the 13th Part II; Friday the 13th Part III; Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter...
...with President Obama's election is not to say that he has made it change. That may be a taller order for a President than rescuing an auto industry. Cultural trends have a life span, and some of the Bush era's--reality TV, say, or terrorism dramas or slasher movies--may just be tired out. Bush didn't create them, but they helped set and capture a tone in the country after 9/11: wary, on edge, in your face...
...posits an incredibly simpleminded causal relationship between music that has violent narrative in it and actual violent action. Hip-hop takes the bigger weight for this problem than anyone else. And the reason it takes such a big weight is not because it's any more violent than slasher movies or than horror movies or action movies in general but because there is a denial about the violent world that we created in post-1960s black America. These are communities whose stability has been profoundly disrupted. And when you destabilize communities, violence always goes...