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Originally Posted by Roiffalo
With how bad the characters, story, and puppets were, it felt more like it was poking fun rather than paying tribute. Although that may just be me.
And how do you define 'slasher'? I'm not trying to sound smart, I'm fairly new to these terms. I always thought a madman with a weapon going after horny teens was pretty much a slasher flick.
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Zombeavers is a creature flick, so not really a slasher, but follows a slasher formula. Different definitions of the formula have been written about, some very strict and some more flexible, but the slasher subgenre is the only one that intentionally seems to adhere to a repeatable structure -- so repeatable that the movie Scream satired the subgenre by calling out the formula in its script. (As a side note, the film also adhered to the formula it was satirizing, thus also being an actual slasher film, kicking off the "meta horror" trend.)
The most detailed description of the formula that I know of was described by Vera Dika, and is included in this wiki in the "Definition" section:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slasher_film#Definition
I'm not nearly as strict about it, and would call anything that follows a handful of those items a slasher. That most typically might include:
- The bad guy has a back story
- The bad guy is stylized or iconic, not just a regular person
- The goods guys are a group of people
- The goods guys ignore a warning
- The goods guys do some other immoral stuff, have sex, or maybe just act like jerks
- The goods guys get picked off one by one by the bad guy (and maybe some ancillary characters also get killed along the way)
- Usually there's a final girl
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I always thought a madman with a weapon going after horny teens was pretty much a slasher flick.
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That definition is pretty solid -- I agree with it. Regarding the "formula", however, there are a number of films that aren't technically slashers because there's no madman with a weapon, but they follow the formula to a large degree. Examples include Alien, Jaws and Final Destination.