I received word today from Vince Liaguno of Dark Scribe Press that my contributor copy of Butcher Knives & Body Counts: Essays in the Formula, Frights, and Fun of the Slasher Film (Dark Scribe Press, 2011) is in the mail. My contribution is a brief essay that argues for the slasher film myth to be understood as a contemporary form of the chaos monster myth in ancient civilizations, particularly those form the ancient Near East.

Vince was interviewed about this book which he edited at Fangoria.com which was posted in various installments. In Part One Vince talks about the origins of Butcher Knives and Body Counts:

FANGORIA: What was the genesis of BUTCHER KNIVES & BODY COUNTS?

VINCE LIAGUNO: The book was actually with another publisher in the UK called Hades’ Gate, and it was originally conceived to be encapsulated reviews of slasher films. But what the publisher was looking for was more like, “What I remember about this film,” “Why it was special to me,” “What was going on in my life when I saw this film”—that kind of thing. So I answered the call; one of my essays was for CURTAINS. She accepted those, which I thought was great and came back and asked me if I could do another one, specifically based on a blog I had written on Rob Zombie’s HALLOWEEN.

A year and a half went by, and there was no news about the book. So I said to her, “I’ve put together anthologies, is there any way I could find the right publisher? I could buy it for a finder’s fee and take it over.” We agreed on a price, she gave me the essays that were part of the project, I read through them, and saw exactly what the intention was, but in looking at them, I said, “There could be so much more to this. This could be so much more than just anecdotal.” There were some writers that were really touching on film theory and film commentary and broader, pop culture commentary.

So I revamped the new submissions guideline. We completely changed the title. On Hades’ Gate it was going to be called THE ESSENTIAL SLASHER GUIDE or THE ULTIMATE SLASHER GUIDE. It mirrored something very close that’s on Amazon right now, one of those little guides. The response was overwhelming; we could not believe how many submissions were coming in. One of the first e-mails I got was from Jack Ketchum; it was actually a reprint piece he did on a Japanese slasher, which I took. It’s Jack Ketchum. He could write about fried green tomatoes in a slasher film and I would put it in the book.

In 2009, I [spoke to] Jane Kozak, one of the actresses in HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW. We got into a conversation at the bar and I asked her “What was making the film like?” And [after] I said Harley, this would make such a great essay, would you contribute?” “Sure,” boom, got her involved. So it just kind of kept growing. When I finally cut off submissions, we were already at like 400 pages to the book, but there were so many films we still hadn’t covered. So I think even after that point, I accepted 15 or 20 stories from people like, “Oh, did you cover JUST BEFORE DAWN? I have this great story about JUST BEFORE DAWN.” “OK, why not?”

The whole title of the book is really a celebration. Slashers are the one part of genre in horror that are really open season. You can always take a pot-shot at a slasher. It’s there, just make fun of it, degrade it, whatever, yet it’s lasted longer than any of the other subgenres. It’s always there. It never seems to die, people always come back. So the whole thing came together in a way to celebrate it, but also pay homage to it in a way that says, “This is really about more than just killing teenagers.”

The rest of Part One of this interview can be read here, followed by Part Two, and Part Three.

Butcher Knives & Body Counts can be purchased through the TheoFantastique Store, or Dark Scribe Press.

I must admit that with the exception of Psycho and Halloween, I am not a fan of the slasher film subgenre (and it is debatable whether the former should be included in this category), but I thought this volume was significant and wanted to make a contribution. My brief essay is titled “Slasher Films As Modern Chaos Monster Myths.” The piece touches on the ancient chaos monster which was conceived of as a threat to the established order in Near Eastern cultures, and suggests that the unstoppable slasher may represent the chaos monster myth in the late modern cultural context.

Related post:

“Long History and Many Forms: Chaos Monsters Then and Today”

The publisher is hopeful that the multi-contributor volume will ready for publication this October, and this post includes a copy of the finalized cover by Deena Warner Designs. My contribution is a brief essay titled “Slasher Films as Modern Chaos Monster Myths.” My thesis is that just as ancient near eastern cultures feared the breakdown in the social order with resulting chaos as personified by various monstrous deities, so the killer in slasher films might be understood to fulfill this function for audiences in modern cultures who still fear chaos as our continued fascination with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic indicates.

For as long as human beings have been trying to explain their place in the cosmos they have been creating monsters. We are familiar with many of the contemporary versions of these creatures, but what we might not readily recognize is that one monster in particular seems to be dominant throughout history and across cultures. It surfaces in various guises as contemporary monsters. What is this monster, you might ask? I suggest it is the chaos monster.

In his interesting book Religion and Its Monsters (Routledge, 2002), Timothy Beal looks at some of the earliest monsters of humanity as they were expressed in the cradle of civilization in the ancient Near East. One of these was intimately tied to cosmologies In this context Beal states:

“Less familiar but nonetheless fascinating to those of us attuned to the sciences of chaos is the idea that primordial chaos might take the form of divinity, or rather divine monstrosity. In many ancient Near Eastern stories, the chaos of and against which the world is created is personified as a ‘chaos god’ or ‘chaos monster’ who must be defeated by another god in order to create or maintain cosmic order.”

It is against this backdrop that the ancient Hebrews penned their creation stories, perhaps functioning in some senses as an apologetic against the gods of the surrounding nations wherein Yahweh was conceived of as imposing order on a chaotic creation.

While this scenario might seem far removed from our late modern context and its sensibilities I suggest that we still fear the chaos monster even though it may take different appearances in our cultural context. In fact, our contemporary chaos monster has maintained a significant cinematic expression since the 1960s in one popular form, that of the maniacal and seemingly unstoppable slasher. Heather Duda picks up on the development of the slasher film in her book The Monster Hunter in Modern Popular Culture (McFarland & Company, 2008). She mentions Hitchcock’s Psycho as the film which ushered in the slasher in horror films and then connects them to our fears of chaos. She writes:

“..[T]hese monsters are seemingly immortal in that no matter how many times they are shot, stabbed, or fall several stories, they just keep coming. With their single-mindedness and refusal to play by traditional horror rules, the slash monsters represent chaos. Chaos is the ultimate fear of the humanizing apparatus. When there is chaos all rules and order are thrown by the wayside and the feeling is one of ‘every man for himself.’ When the humanizing apparatuses are thrown into disarray, those people who championed them have nothing left to cling to.” (Emphasis mine.)

It is important to note the dramatic changes going on in America during the time in which the slasher films picked up momentum and the interest of viewing audiences. While Psycho may have helped introduce the slasher in 1960, it took the advance of cultural upheaval that came with the late 1960s which would continue to play out in the 1970s, 1980s and beyond for the slasher film to become a recurring facet of our culture’s expression of angst over chaos. To be sure the slasher is not the only expression of chaos in horror. Any number of apocalyptic scenarios could be pointed to, such as our continued fascination with an end of the world via zombies, as additional examples of our fears of our sense of order being swallowed up in chaos.

Given the long history of humanity’s fears over chaos, and our modern expressions of this fear, what then might we expect in terms of the continued expression and longevity of the chaos monster in cinema? Given the protracted global economic crises (not to mention several other international challenges to global peace and security) it seems likely that the chaos monster will continue to be expressed in slasher films and other forms as Hollywood and independent cinema continues to externalize our inner fears. Perhaps one day humanity will slay this monster, but I wouldn’t count on it any time soon.