What was the first slasher movie? Ask this question among horror fanatics and you get about thirty-seven different answers and a whole bunch of rules that I still don’t understand, to be honest with you.
“So, Blood Feast, that’s the first slasher movie, right?”, I might ask.
“No, you dumb Texan, Blood Feast is a gore film, not a slasher film. Big difference,” says some guy on the internet.
“Okay, well, how about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre?”
“Nope, that doesn’t count as a slasher movie, either, you cow-shit shoveler. That’s its own thing.”
“What? Okay, this one seems a little late to be the first, but where do you stand on Halloween?”
“Strike three, Willie Nelson. Halloween is also not a slasher movie, it’s a psychological thriller.”
(I paraphrase for effect, but all of those replies are based on real things that I’ve read about those movies.)
Me, I always thought a slasher movie was anything in which we see somebody with a knife, ax or saw going around turning people into Beef Wellington, but I guess it’s some complicated stuff.
Anyway, Tower of Evil from 1972 feels like an early slasher movie to me. It’s got a group of people who go to a remote British island to look for hidden artifacts only to get knifed, speared and decapitated by a maniac in the shadows, but I guess there’s someone somewhere who says it’s actually a political drama. A few other tropes that it trots out: gratuitous teen skinny-dipper nudity, killer’s POV shots and the deaths of everyone who’s sexually promiscuous. It’s also fast-moving and fun and is as about interested in logic as I am in debating horror genre distinctions.
The most memorable part is the scene where a doctor questions the teenage girl survivor from an earlier incident of island slayings by hypnotizing her with flashy light boxes that belong on stage with early Pink Floyd. Her resulting flashback begins with epilepsy-inducing color flashes and quick cuts back to that fateful day when her friends all got slash—uh, I mean killed.