What is slasher summer?
Picture this: You’re sitting in front of a screen in a friend’s house or backyard. Your hair is wet from swimming, and you are wearing a collection of dry clothes that no one knows who owns anymore (your friends spend too much time together to keep track). You’re watching the most predictable, cheesiest, and most ridiculous slasher movie you could ever imagine, and you’re having the time of your life.
Slasher summer is the teenage American dream, defined by 70s-90s nostalgia, felt by young people who never even lived through those decades. In my opinion, it rose to popularity because young people crave the freedom our parents had in their youth. Most of Gen-Z never experienced the childhood rite of passage that is spending the summer outside with our friends, a bike, and instructions to not return until the street lamps came on. The cell phone generation grew up in a totally different world from the generation before us. Towards the end of our childhoods, our parents could reach us at a moment’s notice, and many of them even had our locations. Gone are the days of “It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?” PSAs, and while Gen-Z may be safer, we crave freedom.
Strangely enough, as a way of rebelling from our safe and sheltered upbringings, young people are craving the very opposite. In the words of my mom, spoken while discussing this very article: “You guys weren’t left alone for long enough to get slashed”. Helicopter parenting has led to teenagers all over the internet with freedom fantasies that include getting axe-murdered in the woods. While (hopefully) no one actually wants to encounter a masked killer, young people do crave the freedom that their favorite final girls enjoyed.
How to participate?
You don’t have to get brained with a chainsaw or thrown from a cliff to enjoy slasher summer. In fact, doing so will result in a summer that is decidedly unpleasant. Slasher summer just means enjoying summer in a way that’s reminiscent of simpler times. The most important detail of a good slasher summer is ditching the phone. Obviously, keep it on you if you feel the need (we don’t need anyone getting slashed for real), but a major part of reclaiming the freedom our parents had in their youth is resisting the urge to be constantly connected. You’re forced to live in the moment when you have no other option. Raid your basement, odds are that your parents are still holding on to some old treasures (and by treasures, I mean ancient T-shirts and perhaps a cassette player).
All you really need to enjoy slasher summer is your friends and a scary movie; so put the phone down, put on a movie, and NEVER say “I’ll be right back”. That being said, I’ve put together a starter kit:
Music:
Blasting music at the beach or in the car with the windows down is a summer essential, and this playlist is just the mix to get you in the mood to outrun a monster (let’s hope you like new wave):
Movies:
You can’t have slasher summer without a slasher movie, so here are some of the most iconic ones to get you started, including the descriptions from their respective filmmakers:
Sleepaway Camp (1983)– “Years after a terrible boating accident, Angela is sent to Camp Arawak where a series of bizarre and violent ‘accidents’ begin to claim the lives of various campers.”
Scream (1996)– “A year after the murder of her mother, a teenage girl is terrorized by a masked killer who targets her and her friends by using scary movies as part of a deadly game.”
Prom Night (1980)– “At a high school senior prom, a masked killer stalks four teenagers who were responsible for the accidental death of a classmate six years prior.”
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)– “After an accident on a winding road, four teens make the fatal mistake of dumping their victim’s body into the sea. Exactly one year later, the deadly secret resurfaces as they’re stalked by a hook-handed figure.”
Friday the 13th (1980)– “Camp counselors are stalked and murdered by an unknown assailant while trying to reopen a summer camp that was the site of a child’s drowning”.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)– “Teenagers in a small town are dropping like flies, apparently in the grip of mass hysteria causing their suicides. A cop’s daughter, Nancy Thompson, traces the cause to a child molester, Fred Krueger, who was burned alive by angry parents many years before. Krueger has now come back in the dreams of his killers’ children, claiming their lives as revenge. Nancy and her boyfriend, Glen, must devise a plan to lure the monster out of the realm of nightmares and into the real world…”
Halloween (1978)– “Fifteen years after murdering his sister on Halloween Night 1963, Michael Myers escapes from a mental hospital and returns to the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois to kill again.”
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)– “Five friends head out to rural Texas to visit the grave of a grandfather. On the way, they stumble across what appears to be a deserted house, only to discover something sinister within… Something armed with a chainsaw.”