In the spirit of the latest Halloween reboot, there’s a new straight-to-Netflix Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie out this week that, like the 2018 Michael Myers movie, ignores all of the intervening films and re-introduces the original’s lead (in Massacre’s case, that involves recasting Sally Hardesty—as Marilyn Burns sadly died in 2014).
The initial buzz seems to be...not great. But that’s not unheard of for a slasher franchise, and it’ll be up to fans rather than critics to decide whether or not it was worth a trip back to Texas.
Often seen as the lowest of low-rent sub-genres, there’s nothing inherently wrong with slasher movies. The original Massacre was an impressive bit of nasty cinéma vérité-style filmmaking. Black Christmas, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street were all conceived as actual movies, made by real filmmakers, and not merely the cheap cash-grabs that came to give the genre its low-rent reputation. Imitators dominated the ‘80s and ‘90s, but more recent waves of slasher movies have been about subverting expectations and deconstructing the genre in really smart ways.
Some slasher movies are easy to identify, but where it gets tricky I’ve stuck to two criteria: The killer ought to be human, or at least human-esque); and there needs to be a reasonably large body count. (It’s 2022, and a measly murder or two isn’t even going to make the papers.) Motive is all well and good, but the truest slashers enjoy their work, and they want you to enjoy it too.
