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You could look back at the stalk and slash sub-genre of horror cinema (predominately known as slasher' film, or teen slasher') and cite the book written about serial-psychotic Ed Gein as the root of the genre. Alfred Hitchcock bought the rights to the book and made the pivotal film, Psycho in 1960. Along with Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), Psycho was the major influencing factor that allowed Tobe Hooper and then later John Carpenter to define the sub-genre with their films: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Halloween (1978). It was the monster' as a human rather than an otherworldly, fictional entity, that gave the horror' a more solid basis in reality, in turn breeding a closer ideological connection with its audience the next rampaging maniac to run around wielding a knife could be a friend, a relative, a co-worker. Psycho also introduced the audience to the knife as a weapon, a symbolic object of danger, death and madness, which would become an icon of the film and later within the genre itself. The knife represented another human aspect to the evil', a culturally defined object used by everyone that could quite easily become a weapon in the wrong hands.

Generally, slasher films are American-made, there are a few exceptions in Europe that loosely fit the sub-genre mould (Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977) for example), but such European films draw on a very European gothic horror the remnants of old feudal systems and the wicked aristocrats that live in their rundown castles (Frankenstein and Dracula are prime examples, while Suspiria is entirely based in the decaying, rundown castle' whose inhabitants happen to be wicked' witches, living out their power of old.) Slasher films of American cinema drew upon a very Americanized heritage, that of their pioneering past and the new frontier, linked to home and family, the American Dream. These slasher films had at their central core, characters who would break this mould, they would revolt against their parents better' judgment (family) in doing drugs, alcohol, having sex; they would venture out from their sanctuary (home) and in their socially transgressed behavior, they would in turn take the gloss off the clean shine of this heritage. The ever-partying' teens (teenagers were predominantly the main characters in American slasher films, started by Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but arguably pre-dated by Bob Clark's Black Christmas which was released in 1973, and continued through John Carpenter's

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