The 2010s have been a great decade for horror; films like Midsommer, It Follows, and The Babadook will be remembered for decades to come. Canada’s contribution to the 2010’s horror boon has been Slasher, a great mystery series that is highly indebted to the horror movies of the past.
With Netflix picking up the rights after the first season, this creepy anthology series has been making its way onto the screens of more and more viewers craving a good scare. Here are 10 things only true horror fans would have noticed.
The Show’s Setting Is An Homage
Summer camp plays a big role in Slasher, which is fitting since so many slasher films are set in similar locations, including Friday the 13th and most of its sequels, Sleepaway Camp, The Burning, and critically acclaimed satires of the genre like The Final Girls and Nightmare Cinema.
Perhaps summer camps became such a popular setting for slasher films because they’re economical – if you shoot a film at a summer camp, you probably won’t have to build any sets. Despite Slasher‘s setting, the show’s creator, Aaron Martin, never actually attended a summer camp in his entire life, meaning that he’s drawing more from older movies than any of his actual experiences.
Its Villains Are A Bit Familiar
The show has had three main villains thus far: The Executioner, the Camp Motega Killer, and the Druid. What each villain has in common – besides being terrifying – is that they each obscure their faces with a mask of some sort. This is another tip of the hat to a slasher movie convention. While early slasher films like Psycho and Black Christmas hid the visages of their antagonists through camera angles, their cinematic progeny had masked killers, as it’s easier to hide a character’s face with a mask than with clever cinematography.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was a smash hit in 1974 and its villain, Leatherface, inspired later mask-wearing fictional psychopaths like Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees, and Ghostface, not to mention the baddies in Slasher.
Solstice Had Its Roots In A Weird 1970s Subgenre
Horror goes in cycles. One minute the craze is alien invaders, the next it’s sound footage, and the next it’s Jason Blum. One such cycle that has come and gone and come again is folk horror, which focuses on paganism.
While the genre has its roots in Arthur Machen’s classic Victorian novella The Great God Plan, it became especially prominent in the 1960s and 1970s with films like Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, and The Wicker Man. Slasher: Solstice and Midsommar could lead to a revival of the genre.
One Scene Was Inspired By The Most Notorious Horror Franchise of The 2000s
While moral panics over horror films were common in the 1980s, particularly in the United Kingdom, there weren’t too many of them in the 2000s. That said, one film that succeeded in outraging numerous people was 2009’s The Human Centipede.
Its grotesque premise proved controversial but the film still garnered a place in popular culture and inspired a disgusting moment from Slasher where two people are attached together.
The Evil Dead Connection
Ian Carpenter, director of Slasher: Solstice, was a horror fanatic from a young age and grew up loving horror films like Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and the work of Italian horror maestro Dario Argento, particularly 1987’s Opera.
Carpenter was especially fond of Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead films and wrote about them as part of his thesis on comedic violence. Carpenter cites the first two Evil Dead films as a major source of inspiration for the relentless pace of Slasher.
Crystal Lake Memories
The first horror movie that Ian Carpenter ever saw was the original Friday the 13th, a film which is most remembered for being the only entry where Jason Vorhees isn’t the antagonist. While few claim that Friday the 13th is a great movie, it had a major impact on Martin, whose mind was blown by the film’s opening sequence, where an amorous teenage couple are stalked and eliminated by an unseen knife-wielding maniac.
That scene inspired a similar one in Slasher that shows people being eliminated with an ax. Whether you love or loathe the original Friday the 13th, it’s amazing that this little horror film is still influencing filmmakers nearly forty years after its release.
Same Familiar Lighting
Slasher is a show which often features the eye-popping neon aesthetic common in American independent films of the 2010s. The inspiration for the show’s cinematography is Harmony Korine’s arthouse film, Spring Breakers.
While Spring Breakers isn’t a horror film by any stretch of the imagination, it is certainly disturbing in its own bizarre way, making it a perfect source of inspiration for Slasher. Other inspirations for the show’s book include the series Fargo and the Oscar flick Moonlight.
The Show Subverts Slasher Film Tropes
While paying homage to numerous slasher films and their tropes, Slasher also takes the time to subvert some of those same cliches. In an interview with Bloody Disgusting, Ian Carpenter discussed how the show’s third season subverts stack Slasher characters like “The Mean Girl” and “The Best Friend.”
Carpenter discussed how these roles were catered to the actors who joined the show’s cast for its third season, as well as the show’s writers, who he feels are able to accurately portray different groups of people and subcultures.
It Was Inspired By Korean Cinema
K-Horror (short for Korean Horror) has a bit of a following in the English speaking world, partially because it is so different from what English speaking audiences are used to seeing.
While Hollywood’s interest in K-Horror piqued during the 2000s through a few remakes of popular K-Horror films, the genre’s influence still exists in America thanks to Slasher as Ian Carpenter credits Korean films like The Chaser (which is not really horror) as an inspiration for his show.
The Show Is Medically Accurate
While numerous films try to pass off science fiction as actual science (looking at you, Human Centipede) Slasher goes the extra mile and tries to be medically accurate. The show’s creators look to their medical advisor, Dr. Zina, to make sure that the over the top and grotesque horror sequences in Slasher conform to the realities of the human body.
It’s a move that’s both totally unnecessary and kind of cool.
