A city couple relocating to a home in the forest discover a commune on the neighbouring land is home to a cult of sasquatch worshippers harbouring sinister secrets...
Written by feminist author Rita Mae Brown and directed by Amy Holden Jones, this fun, deceptively unconventional slasher follows a group of teenaged friends menaced by a power drill-wielding maniac during a sleepover party. On the surface, The Slumber Party Massacre is an exploitative, low-budget, trashy B-flick. However, throughout its duration, a slyly subversive edge becomes apparent. While directed completely straight by Jones, with a brisk pace and no-nonsense style, it was originally written as a parody of morally conservative slasher films. Released during the hey-day of the 1980s slasher, during which time the subgenre’s tropes and conventions had well and truly been established, Brown’s knowing screenplay adds a few wee rebellious elements to the mix by skewing the conventional use of the male gaze in slasher films, touching on social pressures experienced by young women, and generally highlighting everyday misogyny and violence against women. And it does so in a really fun, ...
With its themes of the past returning to haunt the present, emotional and psychological turmoil, the exhumation of dark secrets, and bloody revenge from beyond the grave, teen slasher I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) is deeply entrenched in the Gothic. Based on the YA novel by Lois Duncan, and adapted for the screen by Kevin Williamson, it tells of four teenaged friends – Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt), Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.) and Barry (Ryan Phillippe) - who, one year after dumping a body into the murky depths of the sea to cover up their involvement in an apparently fatal car accident, find themselves stalked by a mysterious fisherman wielding a large hook. From its opening images of surf crashing upon a rugged coastline to its tautly knotted climax aboard a fishing boat, I Know What You Did Last Summer is also awash with aesthetic and thematic notions of the ‘seaside gothic’, as it contemplates the shifting boundaries between past and present, l...