Ah, the slasher. A subgenre of horror that gets its name for the relentless, methodical murders that happen throughout the film. When you go to see a slasher, you must be ready for a lot of characters to be isolated and eventually die — and often in creative, gruesome ways.
My new suspense novel The Cold Read features, at its core, a slasher film called No One Can Hear You Scream. The movie follows
four young people who get lost in a snowstorm on their way to a rental home where they were going to spend New Year’s Eve. Instead, they end up at an abandoned ski resort with a killer dubbed The Lumberjack and, of course, mostly meet terrible fates.
In the book, the movie No One Can Hear You Scream has become a cult classic in the ten years since it’s been released. This is mostly due to the lore and gossip surrounding the filming of the movie, where one of the cast members disappeared in an apparent skiing accident, though her body was never recovered. Now the cast is reuniting at the same ski resort where they filmed the movie to announce the sequel. And you might imagine that, like in the slasher movie they starred in years before, things aren’t going to go so well for them.
When I was writing the book, it was fun to tap into the world of horror fans and fan fiction and that general excitement around a fictional story — especially a scary one. But if you think about it, it’s kind of weird that slasher movies are popular. Why would we spend money and time watching a film where people get killed in gross ways, one by one? Why do we like scaring and horrifying ourselves at all for that matter?
I myself have had a love/hate relationship with horror movies. (Though, admittedly, mostly love.) I definitely watched a few (Halloween, Children of the Corn) when I was too young for them, which turned me off and induced nightmares for weeks after.
But then when I was a freshman in high school, I went to the theater to see Candyman with some friends, and there was something about being in a packed theater with a bunch of other scared people, all laughing nervously and jumping and hiding our eyes, that got me hooked. Fear can be isolating at times, but there was something about that shared experience that made it fun for the first time. We were exploring the darkness together, and there’s always safety in numbers.
And isn’t that one of the big “rules” of a slasher movie? Always stick together as a group. The second you venture off alone to the basement or outside to investigate a noise, you’re toast.
For years, since my birthday is on Halloween, I’ve hosted a small party where friends come over to watch a campy horror movie from the 1970s or 1980s and poke fun at it ala Mystery Science Theater 3000. If I watched those same movies, even the campy ones, at home alone in the dark, I’d probably be looking behind my shoulder for days.
In my novel, I’ve tried to capture that communal feeling of watching a scary movie as a group, albeit with a twist. When the cast arrives at the ski resort for their weekend reunion, they naturally turn off the lights and watch the movie that made them famous. As they, too, laugh nervously at the kills and chills happening on screen — at their former selves getting murdered in some cases — you can’t help wondering as a reader what might be lurking behind the projection screen, what might be waiting for them once the credits roll.
And that’s where the fun begins.
