Advance ticket sales have ended but door tickets remain available.
Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “A Night with Horror’s Slashers,” a thoughtful encounter with the film villains who’ve cut deeply into America’s psyche, with Stephanie A. Graves, lecturer at Vanderbilt University and scholar of film, television, horror, and the Gothic.
Slasher villains initially hacked their way onto the big screen and into the popular imagination in the 1970s. They’ve been hard to escape ever since, coming at us with knives, axes, sickles, chainsaws, and just about anything that slices, dices, and chops.
What are we to make of the enduring popularity of this frightening figure? Is the message conveyed by slasher films more than skin deep?
Treat yourself in the run-up to Halloween by coming to Nashville’s Fait La Force taproom to hear the slasher genre dissected by horror-film scholar Stephanie Graves of Vanderbilt University.
Graves will trace the origins and evolution of the slasher film, looking at how such characters first sprung at us in the 1970s and 1980s and took a turn toward postmodern self-awareness in the 1990s. She’ll describe how we’re now in a neo-slasher period in which nostalgia for the genre’s history manifests as reboots, remakes, and “requels.” She’ll consider the slasher as part of the cyclical nature of horror, and she’ll look at the social anxieties with which these distinct periods contend.
You’ll learn how the slasher villain has long functioned as a manifestation of the “monster as metaphor,” a means through which horror engages in critique of cultural ideologies. The slasher villain is directly shaped by our repressed social fears, and the slasher film almost always features a kind of moralizing tension between conservative and progressive cultural standards. After all, it’s in this subgenre that first emerged the figure of the “Final Girl”—a character trope marked by her comparatively conservative social values.
You’ll emerge from the talk with a firm sense of why the slasher film has been such an enduring mode, and why its rich legacy is still shaping horror narratives. Then you might just run the heck home and crawl under your covers with the lights on. (Advance tickets: $12. Doors: $15, or $13 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later. Please allow yourself time to place any orders and get seated and settled in.)
Image: Photo of a meat cleaver by Coyau / Wikimedia Commons.