The Postmodern Slasher Film
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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.
Steve Jones is Assistant Professor in Media and Film at Northumbria University, where he leads the Horror Studies Research Group. His research principally focuses on sex, violence, ethics and selfhood within horror and pornography. He is the author of The Metamodern Slasher Film (2024), Torture Porn: Popular Horror after Saw (2013), and his work has been published in Feminist Media Studies, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Sexualities, and Film-Philosophy. He is a founding member of the BAFTSS Special Interest Groups for Horror, Film-Philosophy and Screening Sex. He is also on the editorial board of Porn Studies journal, and the 21st Century Horror and Hidden Horror Histories book series. For more information, please visit www.drstevejones.co.uk.