Canuxploitation: Canadian Slashers!

The slasher boom of the 80s had a huge impact, including a huge influence on our neighbors to the north Here are 7 classic slashers that came out of the Canuxploitation boom.

My Bloody Valentine (1981): A lot of Canuxploitation movies try to hide how Canadian they are, but this movie lets it's Canadian-ness shine. It's shot in Nova Scotia, set in a rural coal mining town and all the actors sport pretty thick accents; it's very Canadian. But it's also a really fun slasher flick featuring a killer equipped with a gas mask and pick axe! When it was originally released, the MPAA cut approximately 5-9 min out of the film to get it to an R rating cutting all of the kills out. Thankfully the gore bits were reassembled for a release in 2009, with only one kill still missing due to the deterioration of that section of film. (My Bloody Valentine also features a closing song that will defiantly stick with you for while...)

Prom Night (1980): This is a cheap cash in on the success of Halloween, so much so that they got Jamie Lee Curtis to star in it! This one always felt pretty forgettable and boring to us, but honestly we've only seen it a couple times on a really bad VHS copy so maybe there's more to it that we're missing. Though, it does feature a ridiculous disco soundtrack that prompted a number of critics to dub this a cross between Halloween and Saturday Night Fever!

Terror Train: Another Jamie Lee Curtis movie! This one gets a lot less love than Prom Night, but we feel this one's superior in many ways (you can check out our previous gushings about it here). This one's shot by John Alcott (long time Kubrick Cinematographer) so the movie looks amazing and is surprisingly flush with creative lighting and camera work. It's all shot on a train, which could get dull pretty quick, but the filmmakers incorporate stuff like unique masks used by the killer, Vanity in a leading role, and an on-train magic act preformed by none other than a young David Copperfield, so there's hardly a dull moment! Scream Factory put Terror Train out on Blu-ray, it's well worth picking up to see this flick in all it's glory.

Curtains: This unique slasher revolves around a movie director (played by John Vernon) who convinces his long-time leading lady that, in order to properly research her next role, she must be briefly (and covertly) committed to an asylum. However, his actual intentions are to just leaver her there forever. While she's desperately trying to escape the asylum, he holds additions for new lead actresses at his secluded estate, where masked killer picks them off one by one. This is a really interesting movie, but it's also a disjointed mess, and it's likely because of all the production problems. The crew shot 45 min of film before production stopped for a rewrite, and they didn't resume filming for over a year. The director, Richard Ciupka, wanted to make an art-house horror film, but producer Peter Simpson (who produced all 4 original Prom Night movies) wanted a more "marketable" film. Ciupka left the project when production shutdown, had his name removed from the film, and insisted the director credit go to the fictional director in the film, Jonathan Stryker.

Happy Birthday to Me: A pretty straightforward mystery-slasher, but also a really fun one! That's likely due to the fact that it was made by the veteran director J. Lee Thompson. Though, Thompson had never directed a straightforward horror movie before, he had directed multiple Planet of the Apes films as well as the original Cape Fear. After filming this horror gem he directed a bunch of Charles Bronson movies for Cannon films, but we're glad he took a stab a the horror genre when he did!

Black Christmas: Made four years before the original Halloween, this horror classic spawned countless holiday slasher films. This film also came almost a decade before director Bob Clark made his other holiday staple: A Christmas Story. This classic also features a star (and going to be star) studded cast: Margot Kidder, Olivia Hussey, Andrea Martin, Keir Dullea, and John Saxon just to name a few! This is also the first feature film to use the "calls are coming from inside the house" trope, and one of the first to use POV shots from the perspective of the killer to obscure their identity from the audience. We could go on and on about this one, it's one of our faves inside and out!

Horror in the Woods: The Burning

Another round of Tape Freaks guest writing by Izzi Xiques:

This 80s slasher takes place at a summer camp where a former camp groundskeeper (Cropsy) was the victim of a prank gone seriously awry many years before. What was the said prank? The campers thought it would be HILARIOUS to wake Cropsy up by tossing a flaming skull into his cabin. For some reason they weren't expecting Cropsy (or anything else) to catch on fire, but that's exactly what happened! Five years later, horribly disfigured and garden shears in hand, Cropsy's begins his quest for revenge against a backdrop of POVs shots, continuity errors, and adults portraying teenagers.


One of the fantastically gory highlights of this film is a massacre scene that takes place in broad daylight, in a canoe, with a bunch of teenagers. We're treated to fingers getting chopped off (fully in frame), someone getting garden shears through the neck, and blood basically exploding out of campers. It's glorious. And, that particular scene was what got the film on the UK's “video nasties” banned list!

But as much as the special effects bring to this film (thanks to a young Tom Savini's reluctance to do the Friday the 13th sequel) the score brings that much more. Personally, I consider the main theme of this film to be nothing other than classic. The score was composed by Rick Wakeman, who's name you might recognize for a number of reasons, but the most notable reason would be he was the keyboardist for the band Yes. (Which should give you an idea as to how fantastic this score is, I mean, classic prog rock meets 80’s slasher score? What more could you want!?)

This film is also notable for it’s pre-stardom cast, writers, and producer. We get treated to baby Jason Alexander, Fisher Stevens, and Holly Hunter (for a brief second). But this film was also what launched the Weinstein Corporation! Bob and Harvey both had a hand in writing this slasher (and Harvey produced) and it was the very first film project they collaborated on.

This film also has often been brushed off as a Friday the 13th rip off, but it was apparently written before Friday was released, and was based off of a classic campfire tale that circulated around the east coast about “Cropsey” a maniac who was reported to have murdered children in a wooded Staten Island. That makes this movie all the more creepy and that much more worthy of it's cult classic status!

Deep Red

We've seen this movie hundreds of times, but when we saw the new blu-ray release at the Trylon last October, we were blown away. There's a version of this movie that actually makes sense! Not that the nonsensicalness of the other version was overwhelming, but there are a few key scenes in the Italian dub version that make things fall together in very satisfying ways after having wondered “why?” for so many years.

The plot unfolds something like this: While walking home from the bar Marcus, sees his downstairs neighbor in her apartment window pleading for help. He rushes to her rescue, but he's too late. Haunted by the circumstances of her death, he takes a personal interest in solving her murder. With the help of a plucky reporter he'll uncover more truth than he bargned for as they follow a bloody trail to the killer's identity.

Creative kills: Decapitation by necklace. Drowning in a tub of scalding water. 

Things to watch for: Long drawn out closeups of children's toys rotating around, scenes that are shot so wide that the entire planet seems devoid of people (save the one we're focused on), bloody death scenes, and creepy kid's drawings.

The score: This is one of Tim's favorite Italian horror scores and his absolute favorite Goblin score. Entertaining from start to finish, and less prog-rock than their other scores, you can listen to as an album and never guess it has anything to do with a movie. (This score is also marks the first time Goblin worked with Argento.)

Special effects: Carlo Rambaldi (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Alien, Close Encounters of the Third Kind)

Why we love it: This is one of the only Giallo films that mostly makes sense, is plentily gory, visually stunning, and has a stellar soundtrack all in the same film. Deep Red is the mark you hope all the other Giallo will reach, but most fall short, especially in the sense making department.

Version to watch: Italian dub with English subtitles.