Postmodern Slasher Film
1st Edition
Published on 31. July 2025
269 pages
978-1-3995-3712-4 (ISBN)
Description
Scream reputedly transformed the slasher subgenre in 1996, heralding a new subgeneric form: the postmodern slasher. Despite being a distinctive, influential phase in the subgenre's development, it has been widely assumed that postmodern slasher films are distinguished from their predecessors because they employ intertextuality, metafictional self-reflexivity, pastiche and deconstruction.The Postmodern Slasher Film challenges those assumptions by demonstrating that those same traits have been present in the slasher subgenre since its 1980s boom-period. This book instead argues that postmodern slasher films are more pertinently distinguished by their tone, which is characterised by self-consciousness, duplicity, cynicism and fatalism.
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Content
- Intro
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- The Structure of This Book
- Caveats
- 1. The 'Postmodern' Slasher Film
- From 'Proto' to 'Pomo': The Slasher Subgenre's Development
- Scream, Kevin Williamson and Beyond
- The 'Postmodern' Slasher Film?
- 2. Intertextuality and Metafiction in the Postmodern Slasher Film
- Intertextual References/In-Jokes
- Intertextuality as Narrative Driver in Urban Legend
- Metafiction: Films about Films
- Metafictionality in Urban Legends: Final Cut
- From Self-Awareness to Self-Consciousness: Internalised Judgement
- 3. Tracing Intertextuality and Metafiction Back to the Boom-Period
- Metafictionality, a Prequel: The Last Horror Film
- Metafictionality, a 'Sequel': Return to Horror High
- Intertextuality and Frame Breaks
- Self-Consciousness II: The Beginning
- 4. Parody and the Slasher Subgenre
- Subgeneric Parody in the Postmodern Slasher Era
- Slasher Parody in the Boom-Period
- The Slasher Parody Unmasked
- Scream: Parodying Conventions?
- 5. Deconstruction, Ontological Doubt and Authorial Control
- Deconstructing De[con]struction
- Deconstructing Conventions? The Example of 'Sex Equals Death'
- Ontological Doubt: Reality, Realism, Fiction
- Authorial Control as Construction
- A Cut Above: Convolution and 'Cleverness'
- 6. Irony, Duplicity and Superiority
- Irony upon Irony
- In-Jokes, Revisited
- Who's Laughing Now?
- Authorial Control II: This Time, It's Personal
- Irony as a Form of Duplicity
- 7. Epistemic Doubt in the Postmodern Slasher Whodunit
- Multiple Epistemic Vantage Points
- Perspectives, Epistemic Limitations and theGuessing Game
- Misleading Information and Misdirection
- False Information
- Weaponising Prior Subgeneric Knowledge
- Authorial Control III: Participation versus Cynicism
- 8. Callousness, Insularity, Presentism and Fatalism
- Cynical Detachment and Callousness
- Insularity and Presentism
- From Presentism to Fatalism
- From Traits to Tone: Two Final Cases
- Conclusion: Legacies of the Postmodern Slasher Film
- Self-Consciousness, Duplicity, Cynicism, Fatalism
- Continuations and Contemporary Iterations
- References
- Filmography
- Index
