Components of the Slasher Film
Location: Terrible Places
The settings of the slasher films are diverse—rural towns, suburbia, summer camps, train cars, a school, and even, as the case in A Nightmare on Elm Street, dreams (or perhaps more accurately, nightmares). Rockoff reasoned that these locations share an association with adolescence, relatable to the target audience of the slasher film especially after they prove extremely popular and profitable for studios around 1980.5Adam Rockoff, Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978-1986 (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2001), 10-11. Clover denotes the setting of the slasher's climax as a "terrible place," usually a location thought of as a place a refuge that becomes severely compromised. Clover discussed the decaying manor home of Texas Chainsaw Massacre where unsuspecting kids approached for help in securing gas for their car. The hospital in Halloween II, mostly abandoned because of Halloween festivities (and the prior murders of the staff), becomes anything but a helpful infirmary.6Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 30-31.
Scholar Vera Dika noted the need for the setting to be relatable to the target audience in an effort to maximize believability and terror. None of the locations are real places but rather "positioned in a middle-class American setting, one that fosters the greatest degree of 'likeness' to the members of the film-viewing audience, or at least, to their mythical ideal."7Vera Dika, Games of Terror: Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the Films of the Stalker Cycle Rutherford: Associated University Presses, 1990), 58-59. Therefore, the killings take place not in Lake of the Ozarks or the Levittown suburbs, but at fictional Camp Crystal Lake and Haddonfield, IL.
Video Examples
In the first scene below, Nurse Jill is murdered in a hospital hallway by Michael Myers in Halloween II (1981). . The second scene is a movie trailer from Sleepaway Camp (1983). Note the familiarity of settings, places both of safety and with recognizable connections to youth.