Film: The return of the Slasher movie

WITH THE ACADEMY AWARDS approaching once again, we're already several pirouettes into one of pop culture's most tedious dances. My fellow critics, eager not to seem like joyless curmudgeons, are busy heaping unwarranted praise on Oscar-baiting tedium engines like Slumdog Millionaire. A-listers are rehearsing their tearful acceptance speeches.

And honest movie-goers, desperate to escape the woes of recession, are having to eke out whatever entertainment value they can from dreary prest

Mercifully, a fresh cinematic development is offering us respite from Hollywood's annual orgy of self-congratulation. After several years of dormancy the slasher movie, that ignoble horror sub-genre in which annoying teen archetypes are menaced by implacable maniacs, has risen from its grave.

In the nation's multiplexes, audiences are screaming and reflexively ducking their way through the stereoscopic carnage of My Bloody Valentine 3D. Next month, industrious killing machine Jason Voorhees will be taking his machete to a new crop of photogenic teens in a Michael Bay-produced remake of Friday the 13th. And with a reboot of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise in the offing and Knocked Up writer/producer Judd Apatow planning his own slasher opus, the genre is undergoing a renaissance.

As an unashamed fan of horror cinema and all its mutant strains, this revival gladdens my twisted heart. Alas, my fondness for slasher fare like the Friday the 13th series and Leprechaun (easily cinema's greatest meditation on homicidal fairy folk) is not generally shared by my critical brethren. And so it's now necessary to mount an impassioned defence of a genre which normally prefers to breathe softly and carry a big axe.

First, let's tackle the thorny subject of the form's gender politics. During the slasher boom of the early 1980s, when video-store shelves were collapsing under the weight of Halloween rip-offs, feminists griped about the genre's unwholesome reliance on women in peril. But, as noted by Berkeley Film Professor Carol J Clover in her seminal feminist tome Men, Women and Chainsaws, the genre has always offered us strong heroines. Long after the jocks, cheerleaders and disbelieving authority figures have gone the way of all flesh, there's always a resilient "Final Girl" left to battle the killer alone.

And, while the postmodern slasher romp Scream reaffirmed the myth that only virgins survive such trials, the genre is full of heroines who experience the pleasures of le petit mort without suffering the indignity of violent death. Particularly swoon-worthy is the heroine of Friday the 13th Part 7, a telekinetic teen who defends her right to sexual self-expression by opening a can of extra-sensory whoop-ass on her hockey-masked aggressor. Frankly, there are few films which wouldn't benefit from the addition of a sexually liberated psychic avenger.

Another complaint hurled at stalk and slash cinema is that it's overly reliant on rigid formula. It's a charge which, though entirely accurate, could easily be applied to any genre. Romcoms and action movies are similarly bound by convention. But though the slasher formula is staggeringly simple, it's hardy enough to support any variation, no matter how unhinged.

Venture into the more off-beat end of the spectrum and you'll encounter gems like Uncle Sam, an uproarious oddity in which an undead Gulf War veteran dons stilts and a star-spangled stovepipe hat in order to punish the unpatriotic, or Stagefright, a demented Italian splatter film in which a chainsaw-wielding maniac dressed as an owl colourfully disrupts the rehearsals of a low-rent play.

It's also easy to scoff at slasher cinema's fecund capacity for sequels, but there's something genuinely admirable about the genre's gift for renewal. Consider some of mainstream cinema's more disappointing sequels. Alien Resurrection and The Godfather Part 3, despite lavish budgets and talented directors, failed to engage because their originating narratives couldn't sustain any further expansion. But with the standard teen massacre movie generally eschewing bourgeois notions of plot and characterisation, all a slasher sequel really needs is a tiny smidgen of narrative invention and a few new methods of execution.

So, although Jason X is the tenth Friday the 13th film, its space age setting and cartoony hyper-violence (one victim's head is dipped in liquid nitrogen, then shattered like a cheap vase) are more than enough to ameliorate any sense of overfamiliarity. The genre, like its indestructible villains, has an infinite capacity for regeneration. So, whilst I normally bristle grumpily at the prospect of horror remakes, with Bay's Friday the 13th I'll simply pretend it's another sequel and mentally affix Roman numerals to the title.

There's also something genuinely life-affirming about watching slasher icons such as Halloween's Michael Myers at work. But, despite the concerns of our moral guardians, this is less a matter of identification and more one of appreciation. The principal joy of the Bourne films is seeing the hero perform his dangerous job with extraordinary precision. Slasher movies offer a similar appeal. Watching Leatherface's impromptu drive-by carve-up in Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 or Freddy Krueger's death by TV set-piece in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3, it's hard not to admire their improvisational nous and ghoulish joie de vivre.

Noel Coward warned us not to underestimate "the potency of cheap music". It seems wise to extend a similar caution to horror's lowest rung. Traditionally, critics and cineastes only praise horror movies if there's some kind of redeeming social subtext. Subsequently some directors, most notably zombie auteur George A Romero, are now obliged to lumber their work with leaden sociological commentary. But the slasher film retains a primal schlocky honesty.

The best of these films are scary campfire stories with a built-in sense of their own ridiculousness. And, thanks to the participatory engagement the genre encourages, even tepid offerings like last year's Prom Night, an under-achieving slasher remake, can work as movie-going experiences. In an age when adults are allowed to read children's books in public without being pilloried, we can surely acknowledge the joys of yelling at dumb on-screen teenagers who will insist on wandering into dark basements alone.

Of course, for all the guilty pleasures these movies offer, the main driving force behind this year's slasher revival is economic. In a time of financial uncertainty these films are an easy sell with an identifiable marketing hook, cleaver, machete or what not.

It's a point best illustrated by some of Hollywood's more ludicrously ill-conceived recent horror films. Did you per chance see 2007's The Reaping, a $40 million anti-hit in which Oscar-winner Hilary Swank battled a localised Biblical apocalypse in Legstump Louisiana? No? Well what about last year's Mirrors, a similarly budgeted horror vehicle in which an anguished Kiefer Sutherland faced the disquieting terror of, um, reflective surfaces.

Unsurprisingly, both films, fatally weighted with pretentious hard-to-market central conceits, under-performed at the box office. But the slasher flick, aside from being an inexpensive proposition generally, is also an easier concept for studio marketing departments to communicate. As such, the ad-campaign for My Bloody Valentine 3D only needed to stress the presence of a masked killer and the hucksterish promise of buckets of gore to guarantee lucrative box-office. And, as long as audiences retain their appetite for such fare, the visceral culling of the teen herd will continue.

• My Bloody Valentine 3D is out now. Friday the 13th is released on 13 February.