If there was a primary decade for slasher cinema, it was the 1980s. Peeping Tom and Psycho kicked things off back in 1960, but it wasn’t for another 18 years that the subgenre would get its real grandfather: John Carpenter’s Halloween. The massive critical and commercial success of that masterpiece led to the slasher boom. The first of these copycats, Friday the 13th, was similarly successful financially, but it was eviscerated by critics. In fact, just about every slasher released in the ’80s was eviscerated by critics. But some of them are actually quite good. And, oddly enough, most of the top-tier post-Halloween slashers didn’t just imitate their core stalk-and-slash concept, but the notion of tailoring it to a holiday, as well. Yet some of those are still better than others, and we’re going to go through those holiday slashers now.
Of note is the fact that, while they’re tailored to a specific day, Prom Night and Graduation Day are not tailored to specific dates. These are the ’80s slasher movies that have either a direct or an indirect relation to a particular date.
8) Silent Night, Deadly Night
Like Christmas Evil and Don’t Open Till Christmas, Silent Night, Deadly Night was an ’80s slasher that ruffled a lot of feathers. In fact, Silent Night, Deadly Night may stand as the most controversial slasher of all time. And for good reason, because its marketing material was practically forced to display its one selling point: a serial killer dressed up as Santa Claus. There’s no way kids wouldn’t be freaked out by that, not to mention the pushback from the Christian community.
Controversy aside, Silent Night, Deadly Night is the best of the ’80s Christmas slashers. But that’s a slight compliment because it’s a wildly unpleasant film. Christmas Evil and Don’t Open Till Christmas are bland, but Silent Night, Deadly Night is memorable for not-so-great reasons. Tonally, it’s grim as can be, and it’s also one of those slashers where you aren’t just occasionally seeing things from the killer’s perspective, e.g., in Friday the 13th and Halloween; you’re basically spending the whole movie with this guy.
Rent Silent Night, Deadly Night on Amazon Video.
7) Terror Train
Like New Year’s Evil (which is labeled as a slasher and sounds like a slasher but is really more of a punk rock-infused thriller), Terror Train focuses on the welcoming of a new calendar year. Before she broke out of the genre with 1983’s Trading Places, Jamie Lee Curtis starred in (not counting her vocal roles in Escape from New York and Halloween III: Season of the Witch) six horror films in a row. Those were Halloween, The Fog, Prom Night, Terror Train, Roadgames, and Halloween II. Terror Train is by far the weakest of those six, but it still has some merit.
For one, it has a ton of pre-fame stars. Alongside Curtis, there were Die Hard‘s Hart Bochner, Riverdale‘s Timothy Webber, pop star Vanity, and magician David Copperfield. It also benefits from the titular location. Putting all the characters on a speeding train is a great way to negate the potential for escape, and because of this and the Fade to Black-like concept of disguise changing, Terror Train can be pretty tense on occasion. Not as often as it should be, but sometimes.
Stream Terror Train on fuboTV.
6) Mother’s Day
Co-written and directed by Charles Kaufman, the brother of Troma Entertainment’s co-founder, Mother’s Day is similar to that company’s The Toxic Avenger in that there seemingly are no limits. But, even more than The Toxic Avenger and similarly outlandish fare, the best comparison to Mother’s Day is Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left.
Essentially, this movie is The Last House on the Left if the sexually assaulting, monstrous antagonists weren’t escaped convicts but rather a pair of brothers who carry out their crimes to impress their mother. It’s unsettling stuff, but Mother’s Day carries a lighter overall tone than that similarly disturbing Craven film. And like with that Craven film, there’s a third act that has the remaining protagonists turn the tables on the vicious antagonists and knock them off in increasingly elaborate ways, and there’s a level of satisfaction in that.
Stream Mother’s Day on AMC+.
5) Trick or Treat
Not to be confused with the anthology film from 2007, Trick or Treat (1986) is a supernatural slasher film that plays like a combination of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Carrie. It even has special effects by Kevin Yagher, who worked on this in between the second and third Freddy movies. And, while it’s hard to imagine the Halloween-themed Trick or Treat not being influenced by those two horror masterpieces, it’s also more of a love letter to hard rock bands like Black Sabbath and KISS.
If proof is required of that latter point, both Ozzy Osbourne and Gene Simmons have cameos in this tale of a vengeful resurrected rocker. Interestingly enough, Trick or Treat was helmed by actor/director Charles Martin Smith, who, thirteen years prior, had his breakthrough in American Graffiti, and one year later would have a memorable role in The Untouchables. Later in his career, he would switch to directing animal-focused movies such as Air Bud, Dolphin Tale, and A Dog’s Way Home.
Rent with a Screambox channel add-on on Prime Video.
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4) April Fool’s Day
One might hear the title April Fool’s Day and think “Great, another bland holiday slasher with buckets of blood and a high body count. Pass.” But to do so would be to really miss out. April Fool’s Day is as far from a traditional slasher as a slasher can be. No one even dies…all of the deaths are a ruse by one of the protagonists in her effort to craft what amounts to an early take on the now-popular escape room.
April Fool’s Day is also one of those slashers where you see a couple of familiar faces. For one, there’s Thomas F. Wilson, arguably the best part of the Back to the Future trilogy. Two, the lead is Amy Steel, who played Ginny Field in Friday the 13th Part 2 – the best final girl of the franchise, in the opinion of many fans (she is, without a doubt). Part of that comes down to the fact that Ginny was given a bit of backstory and a compelling final conflict with Jason (where she put her psychology degree to good use). Another part is Steel’s strength as a performer, both in that Jason sequel and April Fool’s Day. Hollywood should have given Steel more attention back in the ’80s, she very much deserved to be in higher-brow fare.
Rent April Fool’s Day on Amazon Video.
3) Halloween II
This entry serves as an amalgamation entry for all three ’80s Michael Myers movies: Halloween II, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, and Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers. If it weren’t for Halloween 5, it might even be bumped up a spot. That film showed a franchise that was more than ready to wrap things up, even if there was another movie in the mainline continuity to go.
While Halloween II introduced the controversial “Laurie Strode is Michael Myers’ sister” twist, it is overall an expertly crafted slasher. The scenes of Myers chasing Strode through the hospital are almost as iconic as anything in the first film. Not to mention, a hospital is in and of itself a novel location to set a slasher. Similarly excellent is Myers’ return after sitting out the underrated but bizarre Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which isn’t technically part of this entry, considering it is not a slasher. Halloween 4 is overall tied with the second film as the best a Halloween sequel can be (H20 has pacing problems, but is also solid). Even without Strode and even with a pretty awful Michael Myers mask, it’s a sublimely paced frightfest with two excellent performances by Danielle Harris and Ellie Cornell anchoring it. Sadly, Cornell’s Rachel would be killed off in the first act of Halloween 5, and Harris was saddled with an unenviable task for a young actor: pulling off a character driven mute by trauma. Not to mention, perhaps even factoring in the original film, Halloween 4 has the best ending of the franchise.
Rent Halloween II on Amazon Video.
2) My Bloody Valentine
It may not have spawned a franchise, but My Bloody Valentine is just about in the same league as A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Friday the 13th, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It’s also gorier than any of those, while still retaining a certain artfulness and ability to pace things out and up tension.
It’s spot on this list, however, is solely for the unrated cut. For the longest time, it was a version of the film that was practically unattainable, but now it’s the primary one available. That’s good because it’s the way the movie was meant to be seen, and, without the reinserted footage, it’s a film with very little impact. Like Friday the 13th Part 2 and other such slasher sequels, it was a movie torn apart by the MPAA once they began to worry about the effect of so-called “video nasties.”
Stream My Bloody Valentine on Paramount+ Apple TV Channel.
1) Friday the 13th
Friday the 13th is a well-known spooky day, but there’s no real set way to celebrate it like there is with Halloween. No trick or treating, no costumes. You basically just avoid having a black cat scurrying in front of you and, if at all possible, refrain from walking beneath any spread open ladders. In other words, Friday the 13th could be considered Halloween lite. The same could be said of Friday the 13th.
As far as critics went, Friday the 13th mimicked Halloween but didn’t quite get what made it so effective. On one hand, that’s true, but the original Friday the 13th has also always been underappreciated on the critical side of things. It’s an air-tight, nightmarish horror flick with a likable cast and an iconic villain. Plenty of detractors have slighted Sean S. Cunningham’s direction, with some even calling it amateurish. And, admittedly, outside this, he never really crafted a film that is a must-watch (though A Stranger Is Watching is an underrated thriller). But the fact that Friday the 13th doesn’t quite feel like a major studio motion picture is part of its charm. You feel like you’re there with the teens as they attempt to reopen Camp Crystal Lake. It may be a film that copies elements of Halloween, but it also brings enough of its own to the table to arguably be just as influential on the future of the slasher subgenre as its respected predecessor.
Stream Friday the 13th on Pluto TV.
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