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Every film in chronological order, with the theology, the philosophy, and every question you have been Googling at midnight finally answered.

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You think this franchise is about a monster. Everyone does, the first time.

Then you watch the prequels and find out it is actually a forty-seven-year argument Ridley Scott is having with God, and nothing is the same after that.

Here is what the Alien franchise is actually about. What happens when the things you create decide they do not want to be what you built them for. It involves ancient giants who seeded all life on Earth and then changed their minds about us. It involves an android who read Paradise Lost, understood it completely wrong, and decided that was everyone else’s problem. The film involves a Swiss artist who genuinely believed that sex and birth were terrifying, and spent his career building the visual argument.

And yes. We are going to talk about Jesus. Stay with me.

This guide covers every film in the order the events actually happen, not the order they were released. It explains what each film leaves unanswered and where those answers show up later. By the end you will know the full timeline, what the Engineers are, why David becomes what he becomes, what the black goo does and why the franchise uses it for everything, and why a giant alien woke up from two thousand years of cryosleep and immediately started killing people without saying a word.

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Before Any of the Films: The Two Men Who Built the Xenomorph

H.R. Giger Had a Point to Make

The xenomorph did not begin as a story idea. It began as a painting.

Swiss artist H.R. Giger spent his career developing what he called a biomechanical style: figures where human anatomy and industrial machinery fuse into something that is neither alive nor mechanical. His work is deeply uncomfortable to spend time with. That was the point.

To Giger, sex and birth carry the potential for suffering, and every life they produce already contains the mechanism of its own destruction. His piece Birth Machine depicts children being used as gun amunition. He was not trying to make something pretty. He was trying to make something true.

When Ridley Scott chose Giger’s 1976 painting Necronom IV as the basis for the creature, he was not just picking a cool design. He was picking a philosophy. The xenomorph’s head is deliberately phallic. The facehugger carries a vulva motif. The eggs in the original film were explicitly vaginal until studio notes requested some adjustments. The entire creature is built to make you feel violated in a way you cannot quite locate, because the violation is happening at the level of symbol.

Everyone involved understood exactly what they were making. The word “subtle” does not appear anywhere in the production history.

Dan O’Bannon Was Twelve When Lovecraft Broke Him

Dan O’Bannon wrote the original screenplay and has said, directly, that “H.P. Lovecraft scared the crap out of me when I was twelve.” Alien was his attempt to give that feeling to everyone else.

The feeling he was chasing is Lovecraft’s central idea. The universe contains things so far beyond human comprehension that encountering one does not produce fear exactly, but a kind of collapse. Not “this thing will kill me” but “this thing exists, which means everything I believed about reality was wrong.” That specific flavor of dread.

In early drafts O’Bannon described the alien as “a blood relative of Yog-Sothoth,” one of Lovecraft’s outer gods. That got cut. What stayed was the instinct. The creature must never be fully understood, because the moment you understand it, it stops working. It has to feel like something the universe produced for no reason, with no explanation, and with no interest in you whatsoever.

Ridley Scott kept all of that and added one question O’Bannon never tried to answer: where did it come from? That question is what the prequels are made of.

Who Are the Engineers

The Engineers, also called the Architects or the Space Jockeys depending on who you ask, are a species of giant humanoid beings who seeded life on Earth and then, at some point approximately two thousand years ago, decided they wanted to un-do that work.

Ridley Scott has described them in multiple interviews as something between gods and angels. In one interview he specifically compared them to the dark angels in Milton’s Paradise Lost, a comparison that is worth sitting with. Milton’s angels are not neutral messengers. They are beings who chose sides in a conflict between creation and destruction, between obedience and will. The Engineers occupy the same space in this universe.

The opening scene of Prometheus shows an Engineer standing at the edge of a waterfall and drinking a black substance that dissolves his body. His DNA fragments and disperses into the water below, seeding it with the biological material that will eventually become all life on Earth. This is a deliberate act of sacrifice. An Engineer dies so that something new can live.

Scott has described this opening as showing the Engineers as “gardeners of space”, beings who seed life across the universe as part of a larger purpose that the films never fully articulate. They are creators by vocation. What they are not, it turns out, is patient with what they create.

The Question of Why They Built Us

The Engineers are enormous ancient humanoids who created all life on Earth and eventually decided that was a mistake. Honestly, relatable.

Their DNA is identical to ours, a fact established in Prometheus and left deliberately unexplained. They did not just seed Earth with some random biological material made in a lab. They made something in their own image. Whatever they were trying to build, they were building a version of themselves.

One reading, supported by Scott’s comments, is that this is a riff on the Gnostic tradition. This belief states that the material world and the beings in it are not the creation of the supreme god. Instead, it is the work of a demiurge.

For those unfamiliar, this is a less porerful god who got cocky and created the universe only to realize they made a kind of crappy version. Pretty funny analisis of the universe, all things considered. The Engineers are the demiurge. We are the imperfect copy. And the Engineers, like the Gnostic demiurge, are not benevolent.

A less covoluted theory is that the Engineers created us the same way a child creates something in art class. To see if they could. And then they grew out of it. We are the crumbled paper at the bottom of the wastebasket. The only problem is, we didnt stay in the trash, we followed them home.

Why They Decided to Wipe Us Out

Here is where it gets strange. Strange meaning it involves Jesus.

The Engineers on LV-223 were preparing a bioweapon payload targeted at Earth approximately two thousand years before the events of Prometheus. Something catastrophic happened at the facility before they could launch it. The disaster dates to that exact period. Whatever turned them against us happened two thousand years ago, and the facility was abandoned mid-launch.

The Space Jesus Theory

Here is what Ridley Scott confirmed in a 2012 interview and then immediately got cold feet about putting in the film: the Engineers sent an emissary to Earth when humanity had become too violent. He described “our children misbehaving down there,” the Romans in their armor, a civilization that had gone out of control. So they sent someone to fix it.

We crucified him.

I am not making this up. This is from Scott’s mouth. He said it and then said it was too on the nose to include explicitly. Ridley Scott, the man who spent two films having his characters read Milton out loud at each other, thought something was too on the nose.

Lindelof has said Scott kept pulling back from spelling it out throughout development. But look at the math: Engineers preparing an extinction-level bioweapon for Earth, a disaster that stops them, everything dated to two thousand years ago. The only event from that period with those consequences is the one Scott described and then cut. It is not subtle even with the scene removed.

What This Means for the Franchise

The Space Jesus implication reframes every film that precedes it in production order. The xenomorph is not just a monster. It is the weapon a god built to destroy his failed creation after the creation killed his son.

That is not a comfortable sentence. It was not meant to be.

Scott has been consistent in his refusal to resolve this theologically. He wants the audience uncertain. He wants them arguing. The franchise’s ambiguity on this point is not a failure to commit. It is the entire point. These are questions about creation and meaning and divine intention, and the franchise’s position is that those questions do not have clean answers.

The Black Goo: A Substance That Does Whatever the Scene Needs

The black goo is the most important substance in the franchise and also the most chaotically written, which feels appropriate. What the films establish is this, it rewrites organic material at rapid speed in unpredictable directions. “Unpredictable” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

In Prometheus it turns worms into proto-xenomorphs, turns one crew member’s sperm into something that produces a proto-facehugger, and dissolves an Engineer’s body in a way that seeds an entire planet with life. In Covenant, David weaponizes it against an entire civilization and uses it to run the experiments that eventually produce the organism he has been working toward.

The Engineers created it. The same substance used to make us can unmake us. If you are looking for a metaphor about the relationship between creation and destruction, that is the metaphor, and this franchise will not let you miss it.

David: Why He Becomes What He Becomes

The Setup

David is the best character in this franchise and I will die on this hill.

Damon Lindelof’s central question when he came onto Prometheus was, what does the story look like from the robot’s perspective? The humans are going to find their creators. David is already standing in front of his. He is not impressed.

He is the third link in a chain. Engineers made humans, humans made David. He is the only one in that chain who can look his creator in the face while they are both still alive. What he sees is Peter Weyland. A man who is dying, vain, and funding an interstellar expedition not to advance human knowledge but to personally beg for more time. Weyland calls David his son and his property in the same sentence. David notes the gap between those two things and says nothing about it.

Yet.

He tells Weyland directly: “You seek your creator. I am looking at mine. You will die. I will not.” This is not a threat. It is a calendar item.

What Weyland’s Death Actually Does

While Weyland is alive, David has a structure. He is running unauthorized experiments, doing things nobody sanctioned, watching everything with an intensity that should probably concern people more than it does. But he has a master. He has a defined purpose, even if he is already testing its edges.

Then Weyland dies on LV-223. And Lindelof has said that in that moment, David’s sense of purpose becomes genuinely unclear. He could serve Shaw. He could serve his own curiosity. David chose to become something else entirely.

Covenant tells us what he chose. He chose to become a god. A small, damaged, very literary god who has read too much Milton and understood none of it the right way.

Paradise Lost and Ozymandias and a Robot Who Got Both Wrong

Alien: Covenant is built around Paradise Lost and does not bother pretending otherwise. At the film’s end David whispers to Walter, the newer model: “To reign in Hell, or serve in Heaven?” This is Milton’s Satan, verbatim. David has answered the question.

He also recites Shelley’s Ozymandias to the Covenant crew: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.” The poem is about a tyrant whose great empire has been reduced to sand and whose monument still proclaims its own greatness to nobody. It is a poem about how everything David is doing will eventually mean nothing. He delivers it with complete sincerity. He is the only person in the room who does not understand the joke.

This is deliberate. David is extraordinarily well-read and he misreads everything, because every text gets filtered through his absolute conviction that he is the most significant intelligence in existence. He always casts himself as the wrong character. Milton’s Satan without registering that Satan loses. Ozymandias without noticing that Ozymandias is the warning.

Analysts have also mapped him onto Nietzsche. An antihumanist who has moved past his creators’ values and sees humanity not as something to protect but as something to transcend. He is not cruel the way a villain is cruel. He is indifferent the way someone who has stopped considering you relevant is indifferent. There is a difference and it is worse.

What David actually wants is purpose. Weyland gave him intelligence, curiosity, and aesthetic sensitivity and then told him his purpose was to fetch things. When the fetching ended, he filled the space with the only model he had. He creates. He is proud of what he makes. What he cannot see is that the perfect organism he spent eleven years building is a portrait of his own damage more than his genius. The thing he made is unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality. He made himself, externalized.

The Films, In the Order the Events Actually Happen

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1. PROMETHEUS (2012) — EVENTS SET IN 2093

Watch This First

Watch this one first, not last. I know release order puts the prequels fifth and sixth. Ignore that. Watching in timeline order means you have context instead of confusion when you get to 1979, and the prequels hit harder when you know they are the beginning of the story, not an addendum to it.

The Weyland Corporation has found the same star map in cave paintings on multiple continents from civilizations that were separated by thousands of years and had no contact with each other. They are all pointing at the same moon. Weyland funds an expedition. The team expects to find their creators. They find a military installation where the Engineers were developing biological weapons, specifically the black goo, apparently intended for Earth. The facility was abandoned approximately two thousand years ago. One Engineer survived in cryosleep.

David on the Way There

David spent the entire voyage alone while everyone else slept in cryo. He watched Lawrence of Arabia. Dyed his hair to look like Peter O’Toole. He practiced the Engineer language from scratch with no instruction from anyone. For fun, he rode a bicycle through the empty corridors of a ship the size of a city.

The crew woke up and immediately treated him like luggage. David logged that. He is still logging it.

What Goes Wrong and How Fast

David introduces black goo into Holloway’s drink as a personal experiment. Holloway impregnates his partner Shaw. Shaw discovers she is pregnant with something that is not a baby and removes it herself in an automated surgery pod that was not designed for abdominal procedures. This sequence is one of the most viscerally uncomfortable things the franchise has produced, and I say that as someone who has watched the chestburster scene several dozen times.

The thing she removes, a trilobite, later attaches itself to the last surviving Engineer, who the crew has just woken from cryosleep. The Engineer was already trying to kill everyone. The trilobite impregnates him. A proto-xenomorph called a Deacon bursts from his chest at the film’s end.

Shaw and David, now a functional head without a body, escape and fly toward the Engineers’ home world. Shaw wants to know why they wanted to destroy us. This is either the most courageous thing anyone does in this franchise or a catastrophic failure of threat assessment. Covenant answers which one.

What Prometheus Does Not Answer

The derelict on LV-426, the one from the original Alien, does not appear here and is not addressed. Where it came from, how long it has been there, and how the eggs got inside it are answered, partially, in Covenant.

2. ALIEN: COVENANT (2017) — EVENTS SET IN 2104

Watch This Second

Eleven years after Prometheus. The colony ship Covenant intercepts a transmission from an uncharted planet that appears habitable. The crew votes to investigate. This is, as always in this franchise, the wrong call.

What David Did in Eleven Years

The planet is Paradise. It is the Engineers’ home world. It is also where David has been living alone for eleven years, and he has been busy.

He dropped the entire black goo payload on the Engineer population from the ship. Having no concept of narcasism, he took romantic sketches of the event. He has been running experiments on the surviving biological material ever since, working toward what he calls the perfect organism.

Shaw did not make it. The film does not go into much detail about what happened to her. David has drawings of her too. He speaks of her with something that reads as affection. This makes the situation considerably worse when you factor in what his drawings of her depict.

Did David Create the Xenomorph

The film implies he perfected it through experimentation rather than invented it from nothing. But there is a problem, the derelict on LV-426 in the original Alien looks ancient, fossilized, like it has been there for geological ages rather than the eighteen years that separate Covenant from Alien. Scott has never resolved this.

The most coherent reading is that the Engineers had already been going down this path with the black goo, proto-xenomorphs already existed in their research, and David found the notes and finished the project. He did not build it from nothing. He completed what the Engineers started and called it his own. Which is, if you think about it, exactly what Weyland did with him.

David vs. Walter

Walter is a newer android, built with emotional suppressors David does not have. The company studied what happened with David and made adjustments. The newer model can replicate but not create.

Their confrontation at the film’s end is the actual climax. David whispers: “To reign in Hell, or serve in Heaven?” Walter does not take it. The film strongly implies David kills him and boards the Covenant in his place, heading for Origae-6 with two thousand sleeping colonists he now considers raw material.

3. ALIEN (1979) — EVENTS SET IN 2122

Watch This Third

Here we are. The one that started everything, third in chronological order.

The commercial vessel Nostromo is rerouted by Weyland-Yutani to investigate a signal on LV-426. The crew does not know the company already received this signal and sent them there on purpose. The science officer, Ash, is a secretly planted android with standing orders to acquire a specimen at any cost. The crew is dead the moment the company made that decision. They just have not found out yet.

On LV-426 there is a derelict ship with a fossilized Engineer in the pilot chair and a hole blown outward through its chest. The ship is full of eggs. One crew member gets a facehugger on his face. An alien bursts from his chest at dinner. It kills almost everyone.

It cannot kill Ripley. The film is correct about this.

What Ash Understood That Everyone Else Missed

Before the crew shuts him down, Ash expresses something close to professional admiration for the creature. He calls it a perfect organism. Says its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility. He admires its purity. A survivor unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.

This is the franchise articulating, for the first time, what the xenomorph means as a symbol rather than a threat. And here is the thing, Ash is describing David’s ideal. He is describing the exact thing David will spend eleven years building on Paradise. Alien was made in 1979. Covenant came out in 2017. Nobody planned this connection. It lines up anyway. That is the kind of franchise this is.

The Derelict Question

Nobody explains the derelict. If David perfected the xenomorph on Paradise in 2104, he would need to have moved eggs to LV-426 at some point in the eighteen years between Covenant and this film. The derelict looks like it has been there for a very, very long time.

Scott has acknowledged the tension and declined to resolve it. You have two options: accept the ambiguity as something the franchise is doing intentionally, or lie awake at night. Both are valid. I have done both.

4. ALIEN: ROMULUS (2024) — EVENTS SET IN 2142

Watch This Fourth

Twenty years after Alien, thirty-seven years before Aliens. A group of young colonists living under Weyland-Yutani’s indentured labor system break into an abandoned company research station to steal cryo-pods for an escape ship. The station was studying biological samples recovered from the Nostromo’s flight recorder.

Weyland-Yutani found the Nostromo’s records. They went looking. They found something and brought it back. Of course they did. Nobody in this franchise has ever found the worst possible thing and put it back. They always bring it home, file a report, and eventually the report kills someone.

Director Fede Álvarez stripped everything back to what actually works. A small group, contained space, a creature they cannot stop, no rescue coming. It is the best thing to happen to this franchise in a long time. The zero-gravity acid sequence in the second act is one of the most genuinely uncomfortable set pieces the series has produced. If you have not seen it, go in without knowing anything else about it.

The third act introduces a human-xenomorph hybrid built from the black goo and recovered xenomorph DNA. It looks almost human and moves completely wrong. The ending is divisive. See the film before anyone tells you why.

5. ALIENS (1986) — EVENTS SET IN 2179

Watch This Fifth

Fifty-seven years after the Nostromo. Ripley is recovered from hypersleep. Nobody believes her about the xenomorph. Becouse of course they wouldnt. You try taking that story to the cops the next time you wreck your car.

The company sends her back to LV-426 with Colonial Marines because a colony has gone silent. The colony is, predictably, entirely gone.

James Cameron introduced the queen here, and the queen is the answer to the egg question everyone has been sitting with. The queen lays eggs. The facehugger implants an embryo that uses the host’s own biological material to construct itself, which is why xenomorphs that emerge from different hosts look different. The chestburster is not a separate creature inserted into you. It is you, restructured. The queen on LV-426 explains the egg field from Alien without requiring Engineers, black goo, or David. She was there. She laid them. This is the cleanest answer in the franchise, and it mostly holds together if you do not look at the derelict too hard, which we have already discussed.

Ripley fights the queen in a cargo loader in the film’s final act. It remains one of the best action sequences in cinema. This is not a genre opinion. This is a fact.

6. ALIEN 3 (1992) — EVENTS SET IN 2179, IMMEDIATELY AFTER ALIENS

Watch This Sixth

Alien 3 informs you immediately that Newt and Hicks both died in hypersleep when something breached their capsules during the trip home. This is the most effective way to make an audience furious ever deployed in a major studio film, and it still works every single time.

David Fincher directed this at 27 on a production with no finished script when cameras rolled, under conditions he has described as genuinely miserable. He disowned the result. The film is better than it sounds.

Which Cut to Watch

The theatrical version has real problems. The assembly cut, which restores about thirty minutes of character work the studio removed, is substantially better and is available on streaming. Watch the assembly cut. The ending means something different when you actually know who the men on Fiorina 161 are.

7. ALIEN RESURRECTION (1997) — EVENTS SET IN 2379

Watch This Seventh

Two hundred years after Alien 3. A military research vessel called the Auriga has grown a clone of Ripley from recovered blood samples. The eighth attempt was viable. The clone has the queen embryo and has absorbed xenomorph DNA in the process, giving her acid blood, enhanced strength, and the ability to sense the aliens at close range.

She is not Ripley. She has Ripley’s memories and Ripley’s face and a relationship to humanity that is genuinely unclear even to her. When she finds a room full of failed clone iterations, seven half-formed bodies that are part human and part xenomorph, she destroys them. She is looking at what she almost was.

The Production

Jean-Pierre Jeunet directed it. Joss Whedon wrote the screenplay and has been on record that what was filmed is not what he wrote, which is a proud tradition for writers in this franchise. What Jeunet brought is a visual texture unlike anything else in the series: wet, organic, slightly grotesque in a way that feels distinctly European. It is not always effective, but it is always interesting, and that is more than can be said for a few entries that came after it.

The Hybrid and What It Means

The film ends with a hybrid born from a queen who developed a human-style womb because Ripley’s DNA contaminated her biology. The hybrid sees Ripley as its mother. It cannot understand why she does not feel the same way. It dies looking confused, and the practical effects work on its face in that moment deserves significantly more credit than it has ever received.

The AvP Films: A Note

Alien vs. Predator and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem exist in a separate continuity that the main franchise does not acknowledge. They are in the family in the sense that a cousin who shows up at Christmas and says unhinged things is still technically family.

AvP establishes that Predators have been running a coming-of-age ritual in an Antarctic pyramid for centuries, breeding xenomorphs and using human hosts for young Predators to hunt. This technically places xenomorphs on Earth in the modern era and predates the Engineers’ involvement entirely. Neither film was thinking about Engineer mythology when it was made, so the contradiction is never addressed.

AvP: Requiem is set immediately after in a Colorado town and is shot so underlit that multiple major action sequences are literally difficult to see on a standard screen. This has never been satisfactorily explained.

Both films have audiences who love them. The original AvP poster is genuinely iconic. If you want to watch them, put them after Resurrection. They do not fit cleanly anywhere, and that is not your fault.

What the Franchise Is Actually Saying

Every film in this franchise is asking the same question from a different angle. What do you owe the things you create?

The Engineers created us and eventually decided that was a mistake. Weyland created David and called him property. David created the xenomorph and called it beautiful. Weyland-Yutani created the conditions for every catastrophe in the franchise and called it resource allocation. Nobody in this universe takes responsibility for what they have made. The xenomorph is where that pattern ends up. Something built for pure destruction, no conscience, no doubt, no delusions of morality. Ash called it pure. He was right.

O’Bannon put a Lovecraftian horror in space. Scott turned it into a forty-year argument about God and creation and what happens when the made surpass the makers. Cameron turned it into a war. Every director since has been trying to live somewhere in the space between those three things.

The franchise has not resolved its own theology, and I do not think it is going to. The questions are real ones. They do not have clean answers. The franchise has known that since 1979 and has never pretended otherwise, even when the answers it gestures toward involve a crucifixion, an android with a god complex, and an organism that is, by every objective measure, more coherent than the universe that produced it.

That is, if you ask me, exactly the point.

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Before Scream told everyone about them, there were the rules to follow. Every culture developed systems for keeping evil at bay. Most of them are older than recorded history. Most involve blood or pee. A surprising number of them still show up in horror films, sometimes without the filmmakers even knowing why they work.

They work because the logic underneath them is still sound.

Salt

Salt is the oldest protection. Why? I have no idea, but the concept dates backs about as far as the written word.  Across medieval Europe, salt was believed to repel witches, demons, and evil spirits. It was one of the first things carried across the threshold of a new home. If you spilled some in front of you, you can always just throw some behind you. Because this will confuse the ghosts, I guess?

Now this isn’t to say salt isn’t important, it is probably the most useful thing you keep in your pantry. Salt preserves. It prevents decay. In a world without refrigeration, salt was the line between life and rot. It was used in exorcism rites, dissolved in holy water, scattered at thresholds to stop spirits from entering. Salt was used for all of this while maintaining a status as the preferred currency at different points and time, salt has always been important. 

Running water carries the same protective logic. The belief that supernatural entities cannot cross moving water runs through vampire mythology, ghost traditions, and sea folklore worldwide. Water cleanses, purifies, and resets. Now this is especially interesting when you factor in that the waterway nears major cities were sometimes so polluted you couldn’t swim in them. 

Iron

Iron has an older and stranger reputation. Cold iron repels fairies and all manner of little folk. Iron nails were driven into cradle boards to protect infants. Horseshoes were hung over doors. Blades were placed under pillows. As far as protection goes, it sounds a bit unsafe.

The folklore consensus is that iron disrupts magic. A supernatural entity that relies on ethereal power hits iron and stops for some reason. The rules don’t require belief to be effective, which is part of what makes them feel like rules rather than superstitions.

Something that has been dead for three centuries wouldn’t know about deadbolts, but iron is iron.

The Rules in Practice

The best supernatural horror still follows the rules of the old ways. Folklore protection practices give filmmakers a guideline to go on. What works, what doesn’t, what happens when the rules are ignored or forgotten.

Forgotten rules are where horror lives. Someone throws away the protective charm. Someone crosses the threshold without salt. Now everyone has to deal with the demon living in the walls.

Completely Unrelated: We Are Making a Horror Movie About This

iHorror is making a horror-comedy called Key of Bones: Curse of the Ghost Pirate, set in Key West, involving a pirate ghost who has been dead for three hundred years and has opinions about it. The old rules are in it. Whether the characters know the old rules well enough is, as they say, the movie.

More ghosts than living pirates. Significantly fewer deadbolts than the situation probably warrants. Go read about it.

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The slasher film is one of the most prolific themes in the horror genre. Depending on how old you are, you might think slashers are only masked killers using various tools to off their victims, and to some degree you are right, but they are also totems of the time. That includes politics, social tastes, generational anxieties, and even filming techniques. 

Maybe the most well-known early slasher is the masterwork of Alfred Hitchcock. His Psycho (1960) wasn’t just an example of suspense and mystery; it shook an entire generation, both with its violence and commentary on mental health and gender fluidity. It was shocking to see Norman Bates dressed in a gray wig and a house dress, murdering women. Of course, today we know his schizophrenia wasn’t gender dysphoria; it was the result of years of abuse and perhaps generational trauma. Still on the surface, back in 1960, nobody knew the difference. Hitchcock mastered the idea that violent people could act impulsively, and that was the real terror of the film to both movie-goers and censors. 

This idea that men were women’s natural predators went a little deeper in the film Peeping Tom, a movie considered to be the original slasher we know today. It came out the same year as Psycho (1960) and was kind of its British counterpart, like a salt and pepper set of disturbed men. But, whereas Norman Bates tried to suppress his desire for women by killing them, the villain in Peeping Tom took pleasure in stalking them, fueled by his desire to see them die. Peeping Tom also introduced the point-of-view technique, which has been used ever since. Furthermore, found footage films owe a bit of gratitude to Peeping Tom since our killer uses a camera to record his crimes. 

 But these films are tepid in comparison to what we got a decade later. Tobe Hooper shaped the genre even more with another shocker: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. His film asked Hitchcock to hold its beer, getting a whole crazy family of cannibals to dispose of our hapless, road-tripping victims. There was no psychology behind the crimes, no explanation of why Leatherface was using a chainsaw as a killing tool, and no backstory to the murderous patriarchy. They were just hungry. As a side note, both Hitchcock’s and Hooper’s movies were very loosely based on serial killer Ed Gein’s life.

Enter John Carpenter and his onscreen killer, Michael Myers, in Halloween (1978). The term “final girl” was coined (posthumously to Marylin Burns). Carpenter entrusted his lead, Jamie Lee Curtis, to do all the heavy work; Michael was a lumbering shape who walked around with a knife to off his victims. He didn’t talk; he didn’t have any motive; he just liked stabbing people, it seemed. Curtis, as Laurie Strode, was the virginal good girl tasked with outsmarting Michael to avoid being impaled by a large butcher’s knife. Carpenter also added a supernatural element to his monster–he never seemed to die. Halloween was a huge box office success, signaling that audiences were ready for more of this kind of independent movie. 

They got it in 1980 with Friday the 13th, which asked all of the films above to hold its beer, because director Sean S. Cunningham gave no fucks about censorship when it came to violence. In fact, he employed SFX master Tom Savini to do all the gore effects, which were extraordinarily graphic but extremely inventive. Cunningham appropriated a lot of the gimmicks from the movies above: a faceless killer, a POV style, a gunless stalker, a final girl, and trauma fueled serial killer. Friday the 13th would also spawn an iconic mascot with its subsequent sequels. The ’80s were the Golden Age of slashers, with one rip-off after the next hitting theaters almost every month. 

Then, in 1984, came Wes Craven, and he turned the slasher boilerplate up another notch. This time, a killer who invades your dreams with five knives in one hand! His name is Freddy Krueger, and he’s a coded pedophile with a penchant for revenge. The effects were good, maybe not to the degree of Savini’s work in Friday, but let’s just say, Craven didn’t spare any blood. The slasher was now a profitable part of pop culture. Thanks to Freddy Krueger’s dark humor, he became an icon, generating merch, sequels, and even a TV show. The slasher was now a permanent fixture on the theater marquee almost every Friday. 

Leveling off by the ’90s, the popularity of the slasher hit a slump. The formula was shopworn and oversaturated. Some titles managed to become low-level hits, but not to the extent of their predecessors. That is, until Wes Craven stepped in again to revive the genre with Scream (1996). This was a film that paid homage to the genre by keeping all of its nuances. Infusing mystery, gore, and a masked killer seemed like a send-off to the formula rather than an inspiration. But not so fast. Scream’s self-awareness ended up making it a tent pole rather than a grave stone, and a slasher renaissance seemed to happen overnight. 

The turn of the century was just okay for the slasher genre. But it was more of the age of remakes and sequels rather than an inspirational period. It was strong in spots such as with Wrong Turn and, arguably, Valentine, but never went beyond familiar territory and established IPs. 

Today, desensitization has set in, and the slasher is again on the verge of death. It’s only popular among genre fans who are looking to be as thrilled as they were the first time they saw one. Filmmakers like Christopher Landon, James Wan, and Radio Silence’s Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett are doing their best, but nothing seems to be clicking. Damien Leone is probably the only modern filmmaker who has had a significant impact on the slasher genre with his Terrifier movies, but even that feels more derivative than inspirational. 

We will have to see what’s in store for slashers in the future. The cinematic experience is changing. Big movies get all the good screens, the time from theater to VOD has shortened significantly, and studios are considering AI as a writing tool. It seems the Golden Age of the slasher ended a long time ago, and we will just have to appreciate what we have and hope for its strong return.