Halloween and Slasher genre – Essay

Halloween, directed by John Carpenter, was a strongly influenced film in terms of the slasher genre for film, and one of the first, which there after created a boom in slasher genre films. Therefore, we know that Halloween was one of the first ever slasher films to be made. However, this film typically, like any other follows conventions from that of Hitchcock’s movie “Psycho”.

Repetition of iconography, such as women screaming excessively, suggested the fear within the protagonist. The fact that a dagger – like knife was used in Halloween suggests that this was copied from the movie “Psycho” as Hitchcock originally uses a knife, in order for the killer to kill the protagonist. The fact that the knife was used, is represented as a phallic symbol as it is large, and long shows intimate contact and the killer would need to intimately stab the knife into the body of the victim. However, in both films, this is not shown clearly, yet the sounds that we hear, for example screams from those who are actually being killed, suggest that they are actually being killed. Halloween shows blood, however only to a certain extent, not that it looks gruesome, however, the fact that we are aware that the female character is bleeding, we sympathise with her, especially as she was the character we were made to identify with from the beginning. '

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