As we brace for another Friday the 13th, here are some classic slasher movie recommendations.
Curl up with your favorite black cat, look out for ladders, and enjoy choosing from among these films.
Here are 13 classic slasher movies.
Psycho (1960)
Slasher movies are generally defined as a subgenre of horror where a killer (or sometimes killers) stalks a number of victims and takes them out one by one, generally using something sharp.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is often cited as the first slasher film, even though it doesn’t start as one — its a taut relationship drama about a girl gone bad (Janet Leigh) who steals $40,000 from her boss to start a new life with her boyfriend. Then she stops at the wrong hotel, takes a shower — and the movie makes a dramatic shift in genre.
Film would never be the same.
Fun fact: Psycho also inspired a pretty cool song.
Black Christmas (1974)
How timely: A perfect slasher movie for Friday the 13th and the holidays.
People sometimes say the Canadian slasher Black Christmas was the first North American slasher, but we say no: Both Psycho and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre got there first. (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre came out just in time for Halloween, and Black Christmas came out just in time for, of course, Christmas.)
Still, this movie by Bob Clark — whose varied list of films would eventually include Porky’s, A Christmas Story and Baby Geniuses — established for North American audiences the very familiar setup of a group of young women, who often attend college, play on a sports team, or cheerlead together — getting attacked by a mysterious creepy stranger.
Black Christmas stands out from other slasher movies with a stellar cast that includes Margot Kidder (future Lois Lane in the Superman films), Keir Dullea (who just six years earlier had starred in 2001) and Olivia Hussey (who starred in Romeo and Juliet in 1968, the same year Dullea appeared in 2001.)
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
We kind of hesitate to call the Texas Chainsaw Massacre a slasher, because slasher implies a knife, but we’re going with it because chainsaws have blades. Very fast blades.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with director Tobe Hooper’s interesting parallels between human victims and farm animals, was one of the first slasher movies to offer social commentary. You can read it as a plea against eating meat, if you’re so inclined, but we see it as a commentary on the Vietnam War.
The fact that many different people read the film in so many different ways is a testament to its power.
Halloween (1978)
This John Carpenter film, starring Janet Leigh’s daughter Jamie Lee Curtis, kicked off both Curtis’ illustrious career and the slasher movies craze of the 1980s. Carpenter and co-writer/producer had the chilling notion to open Halloween with a sequence from the perspective of the killer, making the audience unwittingly complicit in Michael Myers’ killing spree.
As artful as Halloween was, many of its imitators cared less about provocative filmmaking techniques than they did about accruing the highest body count possible. What makes Halloween so appealing (and hard to beat) is how it takes its time establishing the reality of Haddonfield, Illinois (named for the lovely New Jersey town where Hill grew up) and its relentlessly chilly atmospherics.
Friday the 13th (1980)
Inspired by the success of Halloween, Friday the 13th created a dark, murky, dreamy scenes of horrendous campground violence inflicted on unsuspecting campers who didn’t always have the best judgement.
Of course we all remember the film series for Jason, the hockey-masked killer, but Jason isn’t the killer in the original Friday the 13th, as Drew Barrymore’s character was brutally reminded in the opening scene of another movie on this list.
For better or worse, this is one of the first movie people think of when they think of slasher movies. And it brought us Kevin Bacon, who is zero degrees of separation from Jeannine Taylor in the image above.
Slumber Party Massacre (1980)
We know: The title of this movie doesn’t really scream “Criterion Collection.” But the film turned up on the Criterion Channel recently because of what Criterion describes as a “smart, subversive, and lightly satirical spin on the 1980s slasher formula.”
Slasher movies are frequently accused of misogyny — Carol J. Clover’s perfectly titled book Men, Women and Chainsaws has a lot to say on the subject — but Criterion notes that Slumber Party Massacre, by director Amy Holden Jones, was a written by lesbian feminist author Rita Mae Brown.
It’s an interesting slasher in that it includes many gratuitous elements, but also seems acutely aware of how it utilizes them. And it’s a delightfully suspenseful, beautifully controlled movie — right up to all the massacring.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street changed up the slasher genre in several ways, including the introduction of a killer who preys on his victims in their dreams.
Endlessly imaginative, and flawlessly executed by writer-director Wes Craven, it also gave us a blade-gloved, burn survivor killer in Freddie Krueger (Robert Englund), billed in the original credits as “Fred Krueger,” a smart and courageous heroine in Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) and a promising start for a new young actor named Johnny Depp.
It opened to extremely good reviews — especially for its genre, which wasn’t very well-respected at the time — and of course spawned many spinoffs and sequels, as well as a 2010 remake.
Slumber Party Massacre II (1987)
Maybe the most fun slasher movie ever made, Slumber Party Massacre II picks up five years after the original with a weekend getaway that includes Courtney Bates (Crystal Bernard), the younger sister of Valerie Bates (Robin Stille) in the original Slumber Party Massacre.
What makes Slumber Party Massacre 2 stand out as a camp classic and fabulous ’80s time capsule is the killer — played by Atanas Ilitch— a kind of rockabilly psycho who dances like Michael Jackson and takes out his victims with a guitar drill.
Unlike many serious-acting slasher movies, this one is the epitome of dumb fun, and you have to be really smart to pull off something this perfectly ridiculous. It holds an honored place on our list of ’80s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember.
Scream (1996)
Written by Kevin Williamson and directed by Nightmare on Elm Street mastermind Wes Craven, Scream took to heart all the years of academic deconstruction of slasher movies to make a poppy, thrilling meta horror movie that is as Gen X as Gen X gets. It’s aware of all the tropes it enlists, but also punctures them in smart and surprising ways — and it’s edge-of-your-dorm-futon entertaining from the very first scene, the aforementioned Drew Barrymore scene.
Scream’s decision to horribly kill off its most famous face within the first 12 minutes of the film rewrote the rules of slasher movies, and established that audiences would need to sharpen up — the days of dumb slasher movies ended with Scream.
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
Another Kevin Williamson-scripted slasher, I Know What You Did Last Summer, has also popped up recently on Criterion.
It stands out as a remarkably grounded, well-constructed thriller that is almost impossible to predict, with Hitchcockian twists that put its leads — especially the phenomenally engaging Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) through an emotional wringer as they try to avoid getting the hook.
The top-notch cast also includes an excellent Anne Heche, Ryan Phillippe, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Freddie Prinze Jr.
And who says slasher movies aren’t romantic? Prinze and Gellar, married more than 20 years, met on the set.
X (2022)
Our favorite slasher movie in years, this Ti West film, set during the filming of a 1970s adult movie, is heavily inspired by the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and serves as a very modern meditation on sexual guilt. While in many past slashers, young people were killed for giving in to their sexual impulses, in X, sexual repression and shame are the source of the violence.
The magnificent cast of rising stars includes Jenna Ortega and Mia Goth, who is especially good in a double role.
Goth reprised the part of one of her characters in the excellent X sequel Pearl, and plays her other character in MaXXXine, which came out in 2024.
Terrifier 2 (2022)
By far the most disturbing movie on this list, Terrifier 2 was a runaway hit in large part because of many reports of people getting sick or passing out during screenings. The film capitalized on the hype, and audiences signed up for the endurance test of getting through the movie.
We like to feel stuff, and Terrifier 2 definitely delivers in that regard — there’s a whole meta narrative going on in the background as you wonder if the film’s writer-director, Damien Leone, is a genuinely bad guy for wanting to inflict all this stuff on audiences. Watch our interview with him and decide for yourself.
You may also enjoy the cool narrative about Art the Clown finally meeting his match in the form of Lauren LaVera avenging angel, Sienna Shaw (above).
If you liked this list, you might also like this list of Oscar Winners Who Got Started in Horror Movies.
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Main image: Friday the 13th. Paramount.
Editor’s Note: Corrects links and main image.
