Foreword to Psycho Killers: A Love Story

    I love slashers.

    A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Halloween are the ones most people know but I'm a fan of many more. I also love the parodies, deconstructions, and homages that they've created over the years. You haven't got a full appreciation for the genre until you've tried Scream, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, and Tim Seeley's Hack/Slash. At the end of the book, I'll have a whole list of recommendations for movies and works that I think my audience will like. I even have a soundtrack plotted out.

    What is a slasher? A slasher is, in simple terms, a movie or piece of media that is about a murderous killer that is stalking a group of individuals that must struggle to survive against their attacker's rampage. A slasher can be an escaped mental patient, an immortal zombie, a ghost, or any number of other things. One quality most possess is a nebulous invincibility. They can attack you, hunt you, and stalk you with seemingly no ability to be stopped until the final confrontation (because then there wouldn't be a story). You can shoot them, stab them, or throw them off a roof and they'll just keep coming back. Running away from them is useful but they always seem to find a way to get ahead of you, even if they're only walking after you. They might wear a mask or they might not but each slasher has a depersonalized element that makes them like a supervillain. Very few, except for Freddy Krueger, are chatty and the majority are mute horrors.

    Facing against the slasher is usually the Final Girl. Conceived of in the academic work Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film by Carol J. Clover, they're basically the young women that manage to turn the table against slashers in the majority of said movies. Whether a babysitter or a sorority sister, they manage to turn the tables on the slasher after they have survived the death of several friends. Joss Whedon, without specifically naming this trope, used it as the basis for creating Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He wanted to empower one of the victims in a horror movie so that when she went into an alley with a monster, she kicked said monster's ass.

    The original slasher story is And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie of all people. The Queen of Locked Door Mysteries conceived of a group of scummy people trapped on an island before they were knocked off one by one. Psycho isn't really a slasher in the fact that it really only has a tiny body count but it's focus on the killer rather than the victim opened the way to many more murderer-focused films and stories. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Black Christmas would both debut within a few months of each other in 1974. They set the template for the gorier, crazier, and more survival-orientated horror movie that dominated the 80s. Movies like the ones I mentioned in my opening would become box office icons and they eventually became satirized as a formula in the 90s. We even had a successful show in 2006 about a serial killing vigilante named Dexter.

    But why a love story?

    Fans of my other work like the Supervillainy Saga, Agent G, Lucifer's Star, and Wraith Knight know that I enjoy doing stories from the perspective of villains. There's something awesome about getting into the perspective of the bad guy that I really enjoy. Here, I had a lot of fun playing with the making of a slasher, William, who had sympathetic qualities while also living in a culture that wanted him to be worse than he was. Contrasting him was the character of Nancy that I wrote as a love letter to my favorite Final Girls and probably would have been first to be murdered in most movies as she was a "bad" girl. The two of them travel through a crazy send-up of the tropes and attitudes of slasher movies that I have assembled here.

    I hope you enjoy their story.