In honor of Friday the 13th landing on October, this week’s Terrible Writing Advice is about Slasher Films! Terrible Writing Advice is a video series by Joseph Beaubien (Who has multiple social media accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and his very own website!).

Without any further ado, here’s the video. Enjoy!

Again, super fun! I’m not one much for writing horror stories, and I don’t watch many myself (except for the Saw series… I got into those for a while), but I can see that there’s a bit of a formula to them.

The problem with a slasher film is that they necessarily follow that formula, because, let’s face it, a slasher film where nobody gets slashed isn’t much of a slasher film. An antagonist that can’t stalk and murder a bunch of (stereotypically) attractive but otherwise unskilled and inexperienced teenagers is a really, really ineffective antagonist.

So yeah, you have the ultra-intelligent, technically skilled Jigsaw. You have the dream-murdering Freddy Kreuger. Jason, Mike Myers, Leatherface, so on and so forth.

While, like I said, I don’t watch a lot of horror movies, but I think I would be interested in seeing a slasher film where the characters are nuanced and deep, and the antagonist is a little more realistic, but then… would that still be a slasher film?

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below, and as always, thanks for reading!