The Postmodern Slasher Film

Scream reputedly transformed the slasher subgenre in 1996, heralding a new subgeneric form: the postmodern slasher. It has been widely assumed that postmodern slasher films are distinguished from preceding phases because they employ intertextuality, metafictional self-reflexivity, pastiche, and deconstruction.


The Postmodern Slasher Film challenges those assumptions. I evince that these traits were present in the slasher subgenre’s 1980s boom-period. I then demonstrate that these films are more pertinently distinguished by their tone, which is characterised by self-consciousness, duplicity, cynicism, fatalism.


Thus, this book argues that the postmodern slasher is a distinctive phase in the subgenre’s development, but for reasons that have been overlooked to-date. I will conclude by making a case for the continued pertinence of this phase by considering the legacies of the postmodern slasher’s distinctive tonal intervention in the subgenre.