The Slasher Audience and the Narrative Structure

The Audience:
Different genres attract different audiences, different films will attract different ages, races and cultures, and each genre's audience will hold expectations for their genre.
Slasher movies are a sub-genre of horror. The audiences will expect generally high levels of violence involoving a lot of blood, and most genres have the binary opposites with the protagonists being a group of teenagers and the atagonists the killer. Friday the 13th (Danny Steinmann, 1985) is a good example of this and in showing the narrative structure of the contemporary slasher film, with the killer with a mysterious identity who attacks the group of young teenagers.
The first box office success was John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). The film cost only three-hundred-thousand dollars to create and made roughly fifty-million dollars, and films like this persuaded Hollywood to continue creating them which is where the slasher genre was made.

Narrative Structure:
Slasher films rarely stray from Tordov’s structure of narrative, and a classic film that demonstrates this is John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). For example this structure starts with a state of equilibrium, where the couple of teenagers are being as a normal teenaged couple. There is then a disruption to the equilibrium, where a killer begins to stalk them. The disruption is then noticed when the girl is murdered. The attempt to get things back to normal is when the killer is sent to a mental asylum, but then breaks out. Equilibrium is then reinstated when either the ‘killer’ is killed or the final teenager is killed.