Good news, horror hounds: we're in the midst of a full-blown slasher renaissance. The subgenre dominated horror in the 1980s, buoyed by '70s classics like "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," "Halloween," and "Black Christmas." By 1996, when "Scream" was released, everyone knew all the tropes, and the idea of a killer coming back to hunt down a bunch of screaming teenagers no longer seemed as novel.

Nowadays, there's Art the Clown. There's no denying that the "Terrifier" killer is the most iconic new slasher villain of this decade, but those films often amount to little more than showcases for director Damien Leone's squelchy gore effects. Despite what Leone said in 2025, horror is indeed political. There was a conservative backlash to all that gory mayhem in the 1980s, even though slashers could be thought of as quite conservative, with the villains often punishing people who had sex. There were also...