Guest Author - Florence Cardinal

When I think of "Slasher" or "slice and dice" movies, several come to mind. The first is Psycho, the original one. In a future article I'll do a comparison of the original and the remake, but for this article, I'm referring to the first one, filmed in 1960, starring Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh.

Filmed in black and white (but when you're watching, the blood runs just as red,) with superb directing by the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho has become a classic of the genre. It won numerous awards, including Janet Leigh (best actress) and Alfred Hitchcock (best director.) Like so many movies it spawned several mediocre children.

From there, let's skip almost twenty years. It's 1978, and Halloween has just splattered across the big screen. Directed by the King of Splatter, Halloween tells the tale of a psychotic killer who escapes from a hospital for the criminally insane to return to his hometown. There he steals a white mask and begins stalking the town teens with murder on his mind. Directed by John Carpenter and starring Jamie Lee Curtis. Again there have been several sequels, none as strong as the original.

Two years later, in 1980, yet another blood bath hit the screens in the shape of Friday the 13th. Not, in my humble opinion, as good as Halloween, yet it does have it's frightening and bloody moments. Jason drowned when he was just a young boy. Eleven years later, he returns, and he wants revenge - and gets it. And Jason keeps coming back - to the tune of about a dozen movies now in the series.

Mustn't forget Freddy Krueger. He might not like it, and it's not good to make Freddy angry. Directed by Wes Craven, Nightmare gives everybody, well - nightmares. Burn scarred, dressed in weird clothing and with knives on his fingers, he's haunting the dreams of the teenagers living in Nightmare On Elmstreet, and he means business.

And the slashing goes on. Hannibal first stalked onto the stage in Manhunter, but he wasn't finished with us there. Based on a novel by Thomas Harris, Manhunter takes us into the mind of psychotic serial killer Hannibal Lecter. And he came back (Don't they all?) in a terrifying movie called The Silence Of the Lambs. Starring Jody Foster and Anthony Hopkins (as the diabolical Dr. Hannibal Lecter,) Silence Of the Lambs terrifies without the usual slasher bloodbath, but that blood is always in the back of the viewer's mind. And he insists on returning once more, in Hannibal, not a bad movie, but far outclassed by Silence of the Lambs. I'll be mentioning the Hannibal Lecter series again when I write about Psychological thrillers.

I know. There are lots more, and I'll no doubt be covering them in articles to come. But, for now, I have presented the classics of the genre.