If you could create your own slasher...

[Roderick Usher]

Originally Posted by ChronoGrl

Rod - I think I heart you.

Yeah, I'm pretty lovable;)

[Despare]

Originally Posted by knife_fight

I always liked Michael Myers more when he didn't have a motivation for killing. it's much scarier, to me, that anyone, at any time, could just flip out and go on a rampage. when they started delving too much into his backstory (motive, what drove him to it, etc.) the franchise lost me big time. it just lets the audience breathe a big sigh of relief like, "OHhhhh, he was abused! that'swhat drove him over the edge! whew! for a second I thought anyone could be a killer at any moment!"

so my killer would be like that. no backstory. just one day flips his shit and starts murdering people in brutal ways (a la Hatchet). except he'd be skinny and not ugly or malformed in any way. just to, yet again, get back to the "regular joe" ideal.

I don't think that helped make Michael seem "normal" at all. I think all the backstory did was show that he had a poor childhood before he snapped. It's not like multiple killings is a normal reaction to abuse. Michael went over the edge, far far beyond where any normal person would go. All the abuse did was kind of chip away at the shell that contained the evil inside the boy. If he wasn't abused then something else in his life would have let it out of him.

[knife_fight]

Originally Posted by Despare

I don't think that helped make Michael seem "normal" at all. I think all the backstory did was show that he had a poor childhood before he snapped. It's not like multiple killings is a normal reaction to abuse. Michael went over the edge, far far beyond where any normal person would go. All the abuse did was kind of chip away at the shell that contained the evil inside the boy. If he wasn't abused then something else in his life would have let it out of him.

that's not really what I was trying to say. my point was, mainly, that the backstory makes him seem less scary, to me. "normal" is a relative term (and one that, incidentally, in my original post, I didn't refer to MM as. I was referring to my hypothetical slasher movie villain).

"normal" serial killers are routinely the products of abuse. it allows us to view the killer as something that we have seen before here in the real world.

to me, what was great about MM was that he had no reason to do it. he just did. and that makes it scary b/c it means that anyone, including us, could, at any time, become a monster. it's the old Werewolf tale, yet again.

[Despare]

Originally Posted by knife_fight

it's the old Werewolf tale, yet again.

Except to turn into a werewolf one must encounter one, with evil it's already inside us.
I would like to see a slasher that simply roamed the US and Canada killing people without trying to hide it. He stops at a small town, slashes up a few people, and leaves. No trying to hide the bodies and no dwelling on what he did just killing and moving.

[ferretchucker]

Here's one I wrote about a year ago. Patent pending.

Dinga linga Dinga Linga die!


OH what a beautiful day,
the ice cream van is coming out,
children come and play,

The ice cream van parks and makes,
that dinga linga dinga linga noise,
with excitement the children shake!

One buys a vanilla cone,
with the last bit of strawberry sauce on top,
other children moan,

but just behind the van's back,
little Tim Tom screams,
before the final HACK HACK HACK!

Ice cream man brings him in,
puts him in a machine,
and puts the clothes in the bin,

and so to the front of the line, children force,
there's a hole new batch
of strawberry sauce.

[_____V_____]

Originally Posted by Despare

I would like to see a slasher that simply roamed the US and Canada killing people without trying to hide it. He stops at a small town, slashes up a few people, and leaves. No trying to hide the bodies and no dwelling on what he did just killing and moving.

Someone called?

[knife_fight]

Originally Posted by Despare

Except to turn into a werewolf one must encounter one, with evil it's already inside us.

that is true. the aspect of the werewolf that I was comparing it to was that, as in my hypothetical movie, any average person could suddenly find themselves in a situation where they are the monster, without even doing anything wrong to begin with.
to push it even further, maybe the first half of the movie would be this regular guy going through his days and then something goes awry and he starts killing indiscriminately. and this thing that goes wrong isn't some kind of outside impetus, like abuse or anything like that, it's just one day his mind turns a corner where killing is just something he does now, and doesn't even consider that it may be wrong anymore, like going to the grocery store or driving a car. you could probly even cheese it up a bit by making him not even realize that he's the killer till the end (which, possibly, could make it more of a Frankenstein tale. the monster-who-isn't-a-monster). that would make it more marketable to the same type of producers who crank out Shyamalan's crap every few years.

but to get back to my original point, the bottom line is a killer who, with no motivations or reason or evil behind it, just does it because, like our friends Kriss Kross, "that's what he was born to do."

[VampiricClown]

I am currently working on one at the moment. But for what it is, you will have to wait.

[boxcutter]

Originally Posted by knife_fight

I always liked Michael Myers more when he didn't have a motivation for killing. it's much scarier, to me, that anyone, at any time, could just flip out and go on a rampage. when they started delving too much into his backstory (motive, what drove him to it, etc.) the franchise lost me big time. it just lets the audience breathe a big sigh of relief like, "OHhhhh, he was abused! that'swhat drove him over the edge! whew! for a second I thought anyone could be a killer at any moment!"

so my killer would be like that. no backstory. just one day flips his shit and starts murdering people in brutal ways (a la Hatchet). except he'd be skinny and not ugly or malformed in any way. just to, yet again, get back to the "regular joe" ideal.

I believe that a slasher character doesn't necessarily have to have a backstory in order to be frightening. Consider some famous real life serial killers who had so-called normal middle-class upbringings, (Bundy, Gacy, Dahmer). Their backgrounds probably wouldn't make a very interesting or believable backstory for any crime or slasher movie. But they're still pretty damn scary.

On the other hand, I think that fleshing out a character with background information can only add to their fascination without in anyway detracting from the horror of their deeds. Take, for example, someone like Diane Downs, that woman who shot her children sometime back in the eighties because her boyfriend didn't want a family. She's been analyzed to death, histrionic, narcissistic, personality disorder, etc. Yet no reasonable person could feel more than a superficial feeling of reassurance from any explanation of her actions. The fact remains that she's just an evil bitch.

Anyway, here's my slasher. He's a Viet Nam veteran, close to sixty years old. Still relatively strong and healthy but old enough to be non-threatening. He's a jeans and t-shirt kind of guy, wears old combat boots and sometimes a camouflaged field jacket. Yet he's actually well-groomed and avoids the appearance of an aging hippie.

When he was stationed overseas, he became interested in eastern religion and meditation techniques. One day, he witnessed a soldier's death while in a meditative state and the event had a profound effect on him. He became convinced that he could achieve spiritual growth by witnessing physical death.

When he returned to the States, he began haunting bus stations, labor pools, cheap diners, and other places where he might meet homeless men. He chose them as victims because they would be hard to trace and noone would miss them.

[Psycom5k]

Ok so here is mine...

Ai (Female Japanese name meaning "Love") - a 16 year old Japanese prostitute who had recently caught HIV from one of her clients. This drove her mad, not knowing who it had come from, but realizing that her life was over, and that she would die from the virus. She revisits each client that she had been with since she started, which had only been a month, and kills them each in a unique way, and because shes Japanese you know its fucked up. Like something involving a strap-on, only deadly, like from the movie Se7en. Each different client would involve some different form of death, each sick and perverted as only the Japanese can do. Possibly even something along the lines of making "People Sushi." Then after she had killed every client she has had, she kills herself, ending the movie, no sequels.