Slumber Party Massacre II (1987)
If A Nightmare on Elm Street advanced the slasher by creating new killers and scenarios, the Slumber Party Massacre franchise found new ground by deconstructing the tropes, specifically in terms of gender. Each of the three films in the trilogy explore the dynamics between the killer and the final girl, drawing attention to the way that the movies punish women for embracing any of their desires. Moreover, each of the entries does this unpacking without forgetting to be a solid horror movie, especially Slumber Party Massacre II, written and directed by Deborah Brock.
Slumber Party Massacre II sticks to the basic slasher sequel plot. After surviving the events of the first movie, Courtney Bates (Crystal Bernard) tries to celebrate her senior year of high school by hosting a party for her closest friends and their boyfriends. But the revelry gets interrupted by the appearance of a supernatural rockabilly guitarist called the Driller Killer (Atanas Ilitch, brother of a true horror for Detroit sports fans, Chris Ilitch). As expected, the Driller Killer starts murdering the party-goers, usually by stabbing them with his drill-tipped guitar. But Brock lets the kill scenes go on a little too long, lets the Driller Killer vamp for the camera with a little too much glee, forcing the audience to feel the discomfort of the events on screen.
Scream (1996)
A Nightmare on Elm Street may have reinvigorated slashers in 1984. But by the mid-’90s, even that franchise had devolved into obvious self-parody. So leave it Wes Craven to come in and save the subgenre again with the groundbreaking Scream. Directed by Craven and written by Kevin Williamson, Scream knows that slasher tropes have become obvious, and uses the audience’s knowledge against them for a movie that’s always scary, no matter how much it winks at the camera.
Neve Campbell stars as Sidney Prescott, a teen trying to move on with her life in Woodsboro, California, after the murder of her actress mother, Maureen. But when a killer known as Ghostface starts murdering her friends, and doing so while referencing slashers of the past, Sydney must try to break the script to stay alive. For as much as Scream is renowned for its self-referential qualities, particularly when Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy) proclaims the rules of slashers for his friends and the audience, Craven never forgets to make an actually scary movie, proving that slashers can be smart and fun at the same time.
The Strangers (2008)
As this list shows, the best slashers work by being fast, cheap, and mean. The quicker they can deliver their tasteless shocks, the better. Yet, with 2008’s The Strangers, writer and director Bryan Bertino finds that slowing things down can be even scarier. Of course, The Strangers has to move slowly because it really only has two characters to terrorize, lovers James (Scott Speedman) and Kristen (Liv Tyler). Returning to his secluded childhood home after some friends’ wedding, James had hoped that he and Kristen would spend a romantic evening together, assuming that she would accept his proposal of marriage.
But as their awkward energy makes immediately clear, Kristen has turned down the proposal, forcing the two to ask some tough questions that they’d rather avoid. And avoid them they will, because their attempt to get through the night gets interrupted by frequent knocks on the door, strangers asking for “Tamara.” Eventually, these strangers don masks and make their way into the house, quietly playing mental games on the pair until they start the physical torture. The Strangers has easily the lowest body count of the movies on this list, but it proves that slashers can be terrifying, even without a lot of slashing involved.
