The Dead Teenager in the Attic - Richard Nowell’s introduction to Black Christmas

Psycho (1960) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) had little impact on teen slasher films. Halloween (1978) was neither the first nor a particularly influential teen slasher. Early teen slashers featured few instances of male-on-female violence. The makers of teen slashers laboured tirelessly to mimic Hollywood blockbusters. The Final Girl is a myth. And teen slasher films were made primarily for teenage girls. These are just some of the points film scholar and author of the groundbreaking new monograph Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle (New York: Continuum, 2011) Richard Nowell explores in a introduction to the 1974 teen slasher film Black Christmas – one of the most influential yet overlooked films in American cinema’s history. Nowell outlines the real principles that governed teen slasher film production in the pre-video-era and explains why they ensured that the makers of Black Christmas looked to make a killing from a film that combined elements of some of cinema’s biggest hits and kept blood and violence off-screen – all so Hollywood could sell the first teen slasher film to a generation of young feminists.

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