Review: Sotiris Petridis, Anatomy of the Slasher Film: A Theoretical Analysis (2019)

Systematic genre criticism has gone out of fashion and Sotiris Petridis’s Anatomy of the Slasher Film: A Theoretical Analysis (2019) is an attempt to respond to this pressing need in genre studies. Anatomy of the Slasher Film (Fig. 1) consists of an introduction, four chapters, a conclusion, two appendices (“Films Referenced” and “Semantic Elements”), endnotes, a filmography, a bibliography, and an index. The author’s aim is to fill the research gap in the field of slasher films through the systematic analysis of the subgenre from its birth to the present (3).   Through such comprehensive study of the narratives Petridis strives to highlight the evolution of the structures and conventions of slasher films (3). Petridis notes that past scholars of slasher films, such as Carol J. Clover in Men, Women, and Chain Saws (1992) and Vera Dika in “The Stalker Film, 1978 – 81” (American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film, 1987), have typically analysed gender and sexual representations, and that the field has overlooked an analysis of the genre as a whole. This oversight needs addressing, particularly as the genre has changed since the early 1990s. Petridis argues that what past scholars saw as a collection of films guided more or less by the same formula, with little variation and ascribing to a conservative cultural logic of the sex equals death variety, actually clusters into three readily identifiable cycles in the evolution of the genre. This vital distinction leads his narrative analysis grounded in the semantic/syntactic approach in the vein of Rick Altman through the development of three generic phases (2).

Fig. 1 - Anatomy of the Slasher Film: A Theoretical Analysis (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2019).

Petridis arranges the history of the slasher film into three cycles: the classical 1974 - 1993, the self-referential 1994 - 2000, and the neoslasher cycle 2000 - 2013 (2). The categories are differentiated by their clustering of semantic and syntactic properties such as the semantic elements: Normality, the Other, the Final Survivor, and the Victims and the syntactic elements: backstory of the Other, the connection of the Other with the Final survivors, and the relationship of Normality (2). The defining feature Petridis identifies as constituting the breaks between the cycles is a change in the expression of the elements or a change in the three syntactical elements he identifies.

Petridis’s method relies on isolating a series of narrative elements that are present in some form across time but which change in expression as the genre evolves, thus providing a means of systematic comparison.

Petridis’s argues that the slasher subgenre changes over time and that the classic cycle generally has weak narrative links between the Other, the Victims and Final Survivors, but these links strengthen significantly in subsequent cycles. The classic cycle killings are more or less opportunistic but are (at least initially) guided by the moral logic of the film’s Normality, but the morality policing aspect of Victim selection falls away as the genre progresses (even in the classic cycle), such that it is no longer a factor in the neoslasher cycle. In the self-referential cycle, the overall structure comes to resemble a whodunnit narrative, in which the “identity, motives, and thus the backstory of the Other … are revealed towards the end of the film” (38). The final cycle turns to the causes and narrative justification for the Other’s violence; the Other tends to become an outright protagonist, represented as a three-dimensional character with whom the audience retains identification and empathy (41). Petridis also notes that a great majority of films in this third cycle are remakes, sequels, or prequels to earlier films, which presents an opportunity for comparisons that reveal changing expressions of the semantic elements.

Anatomy of the Slasher Film has a number of strengths. First, Petridis correctly notes that “there is no unified theory that covers the subgenre’s lifetime and … applies to all filmic texts [in the subgenre] and not just to a group of them” (18). Taking a semantic/syntactic approach à la Rick Altman is a straightforward and reasonable way to produce something the slasher subgenre lacks; the approach can cope with the major corpus of films we already have; and it is flexible enough to remain useful as more films are produced. Second, Petridis provides much methodological transparency in the establishment of his corpus, which includes 74 films released between 1974 and 2016, all of which broke into the top 100 American Box Office (7 – 10; Appendix B lists the corpus by cycle). Such rigor is a great service to future scholars who might take up the call Anatomy of the Slasher Film represents.

The book, however, has also a few weaknesses. Most importantly, Petridis structures his book around the semantic elements instead of the syntactic elements. Put simply, the syntactic elements are not analysed systematically in this book. Petridis states in the introduction that the changes in the narrative syntax are what fundamentally differentiates each cycle form each other, thus his choice to not focus on them clearly is disappointing.

Other weaknesses in the analysis limit what could potentially have been a definitive reference work on the slasher subgenre. For instance, while it makes sense to take a touchstone approach to a case study analysis, the charts in the back of the book do not provide enough data to constitute a systematic study of the semantic and (particularly) the syntactic elements. Petridis also frequently repeats the flaws in past scholarship he seeks to redress, particularly with the social analysis in the description of the semantic elements of each cycle (particularly Normality).

In light of Petridis’s emphasis on how his analytical corpus was established, there are a few suspect inclusions in the neoslasher cycle: he states quite clearly that he excluded films from his initial corpus if “they possessed some elements of the slasher film subgenre [but] some other filmic genres/subgenres prevailed in their narrative” (8), and so including Final Destination (2000) and Cabin in the Woods (2012) seems strange.

Fig. 2 - Alexandra West’s The 1990s Teen Horror Cycle: Final Girls and a New Hollywood Formula (2018).

The absence of references to Alexandra West’s The 1990s Teen Horror Cycle: Final Girls and a New Hollywood Formula (2018) is also notable (Fig. 2). Its corpus significantly overlaps with Petridis’s self-referential cycle and, therefore, deserves a mention, especially given the sweeping claims about the systematic analysis of the genre. I suspect that although Petridis book was published a year later than West’s, West’s book simply had not come out yet when Petridis did the bulk of his work. However, as both authors share a publisher, this oversight in referencing is slightly jarring.

Finally, Anatomy of the Slasher Film would have benefited from some more developmental editing and careful revising in its final stages of publication. This lack creates one of the biggest obstacles to pure enjoyment of Petridis’s account of the genre, and detracts from the book’s vital academic arguments. A more systematic approach to analysing the syntactical elements of slasher films would have been a valuable contribution to the field. As it is, Anatomy of the Slasher Film might be too confounding a read for students and fans of animated horror and the gothic, though scholars of the field might find some of its approaches a useful springboard for future projects. Insofar as all recognizable genres deserve a descriptive criticism that is accurate and generalizable, the author sets out to perform a worthy task.  Hopefully someone interested in pursuing systematic study of the slasher film will continue the important work begun by Petridis.

**Article published: November 4, 2022**

Biography

Joshua is a PhD candidate in English at the Pennsylvania State University. He is interested in what he terms spooky literature. This includes Gothic literature and its emergence out of the early modern period, ghost stories, weird fiction, horror literature, and folklore.

His dissertation explores the participatory process by which our understanding(s) of the Gothic have been negotiated from the beginning of the long eighteenth century to the present, and his theoretical articulation of the “Spooky” was recently published in the Journal for the Fantastic in the Arts as “Dancing in the Ruins: Toward an Affect-Narratology of the Spooky”.

He also runs an informal reading group called The Spooky Society. (www.spookyscarysociety.com).