[abaddon]

Call me sad, but the other day I decided to catalogue my DVD collection - not a proper database just an excel spreadsheet. Once of the fields I've included is genre. Vampire Movies, Zombie Movies, Cannibal Movies, etc are all fairly easy to classify. But Slasher movies are little more difficult.

we also know that movies like Black Christmas, Friday The 13th, The Burning, even those awful Scream movies are all Slashers. But what makes them slashers? Is it just some mad serial killer running around killing people? But that would make other Serial Killer Movies like Schramm, Silence Of The Lambs or August Underground slashers which is clearly ridiculous. The best I can come up with are that Slasher Movies concentrate on the killings with little regard to characterization and (sensible) motivation, generally glorifying in their gratuitousness. Whereas Serial Killer movies focus on the killer and the killings become secondary. But there's a number of movies that tread the middle ground such as Murder Set Pieces, Eaten Alive (the Tobe Hooper one), House Of 1000 Corpses, even Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so where do you put these?

Then there's the Giallo movies. Again most are obvious, but there's a few such as New York Ripper, Stagefright or Bay Of Blood that could be classified either way.

I'd be interested to here anyone else's view on this.

Cheers,
Abaddon.