Review by Jason Colavito
The Teenage Slasher Movie Book (2nd revised and expanded ed.)
J. A. Kerswell | 224 pages | Companion | October 2018 | ISBN: 978-1620083079 | $24.99
Horror fans have sliced and diced the genre into innumerable subgenres—if you will forgive the terrible pun. It is now possible to be a fan exclusively of Korean zombie movies, or films about people trapped in overly complex torture devices, or even movies about creepy strangers posing menacingly outside of young adults’ windows. It is both an astonishing time to be alive, and also kind of uncomfortable to have Hollywood feeding so much of the same that the most obscure horrors are no longer isolated gems cherished for their own sake but are instead copied and pasted until the original no longer stands out. There is a certain degree of homogenization in horror, and the homages, copycats, and riders of coattails end up retroactively detracting from the true originals.
This has always been the case, of course. Universal Pictures drove its own monsters into an untimely grave through too many inferior sequels in the 1940s, from which they have never entirely recovered. The inferior slasher films of the 1980s and 1990s make it hard to remember just how powerful the original
Halloween was upon its release forty years ago. Unless you are the author of the book under consideration today, for whom those copycat cutups are the very apex of the horror genre.
In 2010, British author J. A. Kerswell of
The Hysteria Continues podcast published
Teenage Wasteland: The Slasher Movie Uncut, also released in the U.S. in 2012 as
The Slasher Movie Book, which outlined the history of teen slasher movies. Now, just in time for Halloween 2018, Kerswell has a revised and expanded second edition of the text, covering recent developments down to about the end of 2016. I have not read the first edition, but the
New York Times reported in 2012 that it was a book of movie posters, so the new edition must lean more heavily toward text. ...
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