The Postmodern Slasher Film

By Steve Jones

Scream reputedly transformed the slasher subgenre in 1996, heralding a new subgeneric form: the postmodern slasher. Despite being a distinctive, influential phase in the subgenre's development, it has been widely assumed that postmodern slasher films are distinguished from their predecessors because they employ intertextuality, metafictional self-reflexivity, pastiche and deconstruction.

The Postmodern Slasher Film challenges those assumptions by demonstrating that those same traits have been present in the slasher subgenre since its 1980s boom-period. This book instead argues that postmodern slasher films are more pertinently distinguished by their tone, which is characterised by self-consciousness, duplicity, cynicism and fatalism.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1399537091
• ISBN13: 9781399537094
• Release Date: June 2025
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Length: 270 Pages