Nicole Explains It All

The Birth of the Slasher movie

The American slasher film of the late 1970s and 1980s is a direct descendant of the giallo.¹ While John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) is often credited with igniting the slasher boom, its key elements were pioneered years earlier in Italy. The slasher subgenre adopted several core giallo conventions: the killer’s subjective POV shots, a focus on a series of creative and violent deaths, the use of a signature weapon, and the trope of a masked or mysterious killer.¹³

The most direct link between the two genres is Mario Bava’s 1971 film A Bay of Blood (Reazione a catena), also known as Twitch of the Death Nerve. This film is widely considered the first true “proto-slasher”.³¹ Its focus on a high body count and graphically inventive murder set-pieces provided a clear template for the American films that followed. The connection is so direct that the 1981 film Friday the 13th Part 2 famously copied two of Bava’s murder sequences almost shot-for-shot.³¹ While the slasher film largely discarded the giallo‘s complex whodunit plots, psychosexual ambiguity, and art-house aesthetics in favor of a more streamlined and formulaic approach, its fundamental grammar of suspense and violence was written in Italian.