Scream is credited with transforming the slasher subgenre in 1996, generating a new subgeneric form: the postmodern slasher. While this subgeneric phase is widely regarded as distinctive and influential, 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 distinguished by two combined attributes. The first is a particular emphasis on gameplaying, which is anchored by a presumption that audiences are (over)familiar with the subgenre’s conventions. The second is a distinctive tone, characterised by self-consciousness, duplicity, cynicism and fatalism. This combination of attributes results in films that exhibit sardonic apathy about the subgenre’s conventions and its future.

The Postmodern Slasher Film examines major theatrical releases of the period, including Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer and Urban Legend films, alongside more than thirty direct-to-video films that followed in their footsteps. Furthermore, the book explains the postmodern slasher film’s development by tracing the ways the subgenre evolved between the late-1970s to the mid-1990s.

• Debunks the prevailing idea that the postmodern slasher film is distinguished by the employment of intertextuality, metafictional self-reflexivity, pastiche, and deconstruction.

• Revises dominant understandings of this popular subgenre by accounting for the characteristic tonal qualities of these films, which mark the postmodern slasher as a distinct subgeneric phase.

• Makes an intervention by connecting the postmodern slasher to preceding and succeeding phases of the subgenre’s development, rather than treating the postmodern slasher in isolation, thereby revising the field’s understanding of this popular subgenre.

• Accounts for more than 60 films, providing in-depth analysis of 30 key case study films, including numerous postmodern slashers (such as Bleed, Paranoid, Cry Wolf, Ripper, Lover’s Lane and Final Stab) that have been largely ignored in the field, thereby enhancing understanding of this subgeneric phase.