‘You’re Next’ and a Sensational Slasher Legacy
Chad Collins
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While it seems cut and dry, the slasher subgenre is difficult to define. Roger Ebert famously described them as “dead teenager films.” Carol Clover describes the subgenre as “the immensely generative story of a psycho killer who slashes to death a string of mostly female victims, one by one, until he is himself subdued or killed, usually by the one girl who has survived.” Adam Wingard’s You’re Next fits both molds. Sure, it’s not teenagers, but it is a body-count movie. Per Clover’s definition, Sharni Vinson’s Erin certainly survives and takes down the killer (my boyfriend, for his part, describes these proto-slashers as “Good For Her” movies).
Collectively, even casual fans not versed in horror literature and media criticism, likely recognize the likes of The Slayer, Blood Rage, or Nightmare as bottom barrel offerings. They’re the kind of movies that have given the genre a bad reputation. Not even the likes of Laura Dern and George Clooney could save Grizzly II: Revenge.
What Could Have Been
You’re Next, for its part, should have been dispositive of the slasher movie’s worth. The movie was released in 2013, two years after its Toronto International Film Festival premiere. It arrived in theaters with (accurate) hyperbolic hype and a killer marketing campaign. The rights to Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” which plays in the theatrical trailer, likely cost more than the entire production itself. You’re Next, a labor of love and gore, cost a meager $1,000,000, though it likely cost even less than that.
Wingard’s direction and Barrett’s script are a match made in heaven (the same could be said of their Blair Witch sequel, though I might be alone in that regard). It was the pinnacle of slasher homage, a movie that pays tribute without the burden of cheap, conspicuous ploys. In recent years, Ready or Not and Vicious Fun have probably come the closest to achieving what You’re Next did almost a decade ago.
It’s a movie that should have been the 2010 Halloween. The Friday the 13th of the decade. A movie so aggressively good at what it does, it inspires legions of copycats and lesser sequels. You’re Next Again. We’re Next. You’re Next: The Final Cut. Yet, You’re Next failed. $26 million against a $1 million budget isn’t bad. But it certainly isn’t the kind of low-budget success that the Paranormal Activity or Insidious franchise achieved. It simply performed fine. Not poorly, but not incredibly, either. As a result, You’re Next is an artifact, a movie well-loved by fans, but only marginally of note to anyone else.
Modern slasher movies adhere to a template. Before the boon of legacy sequels, slasher movies were principally of the indie variety, movies that postured as love letters to the genre. They had synth scores, nubile young casts, and buckets of practical blood to spill. Yet, these conspicuous homages never developed into their own thing. These movies were abounding in eighties iconography. It begged the question: if 2010s Movie A reminds me so much of 1980s Movie B, why not simply watch Movie B?
You’re Next did not regress. There are shades of The Strangers. There are even beats harkening back to the 1982 Donald Pleasance shocker Alone in the Dark. But it still coalesces into its own thing. Simon Barrett’s script is whip-smart, arguably one of the smartest horror scripts of the century. It’s funny, scary, self-aware, and deadly serious all at once. In the wrong hands, those tonal eccentricities could prove fatal. Wingard directs You’re Next with exceptional homage and contemporary verve. It’s a slasher movie that radically revamped an entire subgenre.
A Fresh Final Girl
Most famously, You’re Next updated the final girl template. A longstanding point of contention in the horror community, the “Final Girl” moniker remains debated even today. Whether the term is accurate, regressive, empowering, and so forth. No matter the moniker, and no matter the implications therein, the final girl does exist in some kind of objective independence. They are the final survivor, often a young woman who must stand alone against the maniacal killer.
Clover described the final girl as “abject terror personified”. She continues to say, “Her scene occupies the last ten to twenty minutes… and constitutes the film’s emphatic climax.” In You’re Next, Erin is nothing if not emphatic. Having grown up on a survivalist compound, a factoid she kept hidden from boyfriend (and killer) Crispin (A.J. Bowen), Erin is better prepared than most to confront and incapacitate the leagues of animal-masked intruders at Crispin’s parents’ vacation home. Erin is spirited, fierce, and aggressively tactile in her behaviors. She smashes killers with meat tenderizers, splays their brains with blenders, and outfits the house in Nancy Thompson-style traps.
Clover says the final girl “encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril.” Erin perceives the horror writ large from the beginning. She immediately takes charge, leading the family away from a barrage of crossbow arrows, guiding them toward safety and better decisions. She’s tactical, measured, calm, and unpredictable, the lone wrench in the prospective killers’ plans to annihilate everyone and secure a hefty inheritance. Horror films have borrowed the template considerably since. There is a clear, linear line between Sam (Melissa Barrera) in this year’s Scream sequel and Erin in You’re Next.
Erin isn’t the first final girl to break the mold. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) held her own. Ginny Field (Amy Steel) played Jason Voorhees like a fiddle. Audiences had never seen anyone like Erin, at least within the contemporary slasher canon. Credit is shared equally among Barrett’s lived-in script and Vinson’s career-best performance. It’s a slasher tour-de-force, the kind of exhibition of perfectly-calibrated elements that makes a cult classic.
Let The Blood Flow
Blood spills from the seams in You’re Next. Killers slash throats, cave in heads, and pursue their targets through the deep, dark woods. Almost a decade later, its legacy endures. While it never quite had the mainstream, breakout success it deserved, it remains a tentpole of modern horror. A slasher movie, decades after the subgenre’s heyday, that demands respect. Smart, scary, and frighteningly funny, You’re Next is no less a slasher touchstone than Halloween, Friday the 13th, Scream, or Black Christmas. Seminal scholar Robin Woods noted how the horror film is “currently the most important of all American genres and perhaps the most progressive, even in its overt nihilism.” The slasher film, and by extension You’re Next, is a core component of that conversation. A fiercely funny, nihilistic classic.
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