The only teenager left alive runs frantically down a quiet, dark suburban street. Injured and bleeding, she trips and scrambles back to her feet. Somewhere in the shadows behind her the killer continues his slow plodding chase – unstoppable, without feeling or remorse. Somehow, he is always just behind her. She runs to a large, well-maintained, upper-middle-class home. All the windows are dark. The girl furiously bangs her fist on the door, screaming for someone to save her. After a moment a light turns on in the house; someone is home and has heard her pleas. The girl begs them to help her. She is injured, there is a man after her. She needs a refuge, a lifeline, or surely she will die. The door remains locked; it does not open. After a moment the light turns off, the house returns to darkness. Whoever was home either did not believe her or did not care. The message was clear: no one will help her; she must save herself.

This specific scene takes place near the end of John Carpenter's Reference Carpenter1978 horror film Halloween. In many ways, Halloween is the quintessential slasher film, and was certainly the most imitated. Though credit for the first American slasher film is often given to 1974's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or Black Christmas, released that same year, Halloween was the film to most clearly establish the formula that all the others, with slight variations, would follow. And follow they did. Nearly three hundred slasher movies were made in the ensuing decade. Some attempted to be suspenseful or clever, like The Stepfather or April Fool's Day, while others merely reveled in the conventions of the genre, like Maniac. If a film was particularly successful, it was likely to spawn sequels, but only a few had the financial success and studio support to become full-blown franchises. From the late 1970s to the early 1990s three slasher film franchises sharing similar structures, characters, and narratives dominated the horror genre in the United States. Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street received the lion's share of both the horror box office and critical attention in the long 1980s. All three films were then remade in the twenty-first century. The enduring popularity of these slasher film franchises in the long 1980s and late 2000s can be explained, in part, by paying close attention to the social and economic contexts in which the audience experienced these films, as a weak economy coupled with governmental cuts to social welfare programs gave teenagers in particular a deep sense of insecurity. This paper posits a socioeconomic theory behind these films' continued success and mass-market appeal among specific audiences; these films functioned as an allegory for the horrors of impending adulthood in a largely harsh political and economic environment.Footnote ¹

Popular memory views the 1980s as an optimistic time, a time of economic growth, an era when Americans' lives improved and technology flourished. It was the decade that gave us the yuppie, the young urban professional. In Ronald Reagan's 1984 reelection campaign he declared it “Morning in America.” He won by a landslide, winning 58 percent of the popular vote and forty-nine out of fifty states in the electoral college. Many Americans' lives, however, looked quite different and the losses at the end of the 1970s, especially in home ownership and job security, would become a permanent fixture of the American political economy. For a large segment of the population, the 1980s represented the end of post-World War II prosperity and post-New Deal activist government. The optimism and opportunity of the 1980s were only for certain members of society; for many others the decade would be filled with financial anxiety and economic pessimism.

Cinematically, the 1980s gave us what Andrew Britton labeled “Reaganite entertainment.” A decade of escapist entertainment which sought, through repetition and self-reference, to reinforce the dominant narratives of white, patriarchal American hegemony.Footnote ² While the films of the 1980s mostly reflected this optimistic narrative, slasher films can be seen as a counterpoint to the dominant ideology, one that through incredibly violent allegory represented the failings of the modern economy. According to Vera Dika, slasher films required the specific social and economic transitions of the late 1970s and early 1980s to evolve. Slasher films “explain how old ideas, especially those of pacifism and extended personal liberties, are outmoded, and that survival rests on the realization of the exigencies of life in eighties America,” Dika wrote in her analysis of what she called the stalker cycle. She concluded that “self-awareness, a more conservative stance in personal and sexual matters, and (as did the Western) the readiness to use violence are once again the attitudes that will best ensure survival.”Footnote ³ For theorist Robin Wood, what he termed the “teenie-kill pic” was reactionary and had its roots in the capitalist ideology of the 1980s. At the same time these films had the potential for subversion.Footnote ⁴ Wood concluded that “the satisfaction that youth audiences get from these films is presumably twofold: they identify both with the promiscuity and with the grisly and excessive punishment.”Footnote ⁵ So while these films are the product of a conservative and repetitious environment, audiences had the ability to interpret and decode the films to fit their particular situations.

That slasher films flourished in harsh financial times makes sense from the production standpoint. The connections between slasher film cycles and the economy is explored in Richard Nowell's Blood Money, where he examines industrial developments, the market shifts, and film distribution from the production side.Footnote ⁶ Slasher films were made very cheaply and did not need expensive, or even very experienced, actors. The scripts were so formulaic they were fairly easy to churn out, and if a movie was successful, the studio could just keep remaking it over and over again and call them sequels. From the consumer perspective the films represented, to their largely teenage audience, the perils of coming of age in those very same harsh economic times. Summer camps, small towns, and suburbs, the very hallmarks of safe middle-class America, the world their baby boomer parents created for them was, in fact, not safe at all. They were faced with the tough reality that they would not be as financially successful as their parents. In slasher films, this looming uncertainty took the form of an unstoppable serial killer. In reality, it took the form of rising unemployment, cuts to social services, loss of unionized manufacturing jobs, a shrinking middle class, rising tuition costs, the resurgence of the Cold War in the 1980s, and the housing and financial market crashes of the 2000s. The teenage audience of slasher films would soon be thrust into this adult world, and it was a terrifying place; moreover, they could not count on modernity or authority figures to help them.

The film genre first emerged in the late 1970s and flourished during a time of economic and cultural shift in American society. In the United States postwar prosperity and New Deal liberalism, which ushered so many families into the middle class, was crumbling. As scholars have detailed, working and lower-middle-class Americans saw many of their postwar financial gains disappear along with unionized manufacturing jobs.Footnote ⁷ For middle-class American adolescents who were coming of age in this era, it became very clear that they were not going to have the same advantages and opportunities as their parents. After the postwar economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s came a decade marked by a wholly new economic problem, stagflation, a term coined to describe the particular combination of economic stagnation and inflation that had appeared by the late 1970s. Nor did the economy improve with the arrival of a new President. Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 and brought a slew of cuts to job training and school lunch programs, and tightened requirements for welfare programs.Footnote ⁸ While teenagers were probably not closely following the stock market or the political wrangling that went along with governmental budget cuts, they would certainly have been aware of their worsening job prospects and the disappearance of federal programs designed to help working- and middle-class youth. By 1983, unemployment had spiked to over 10 percent, the highest since the Great Depression, and unemployment among sixteen- to twenty-four -year-olds was 19 percent, nearly twice the national average.Footnote ⁹

So, on the eve of adulthood, or at the very least high-school graduation, young people would be staring down an unfavorable economy, an adult world fraught with peril, a world where not all of them would succeed. And they went to the movies. They went to slasher films populated by teenagers who were firmly ensconced in the working and middle classes. The parents in these films were police officers and small-time real-estate salesmen. They lived on idyllic suburban streets in Middle American towns. They went to wholesome-seeming summer camps and spent their evenings babysitting for the neighbors. Their lives were idealized representations of the audience. But there was danger lurking in the heart of Middle America. In the world of slasher films, that danger was represented by masked serial killers as anonymous and unstoppable as the market and government forces threatening their futures.

To fully understand how these socioeconomic factors were reflected in slasher films it is important to define the genre. Both Carol Clover, in her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in Horror Films, and Adam Rockoff, in his work Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978–1986, attempt to categorize exactly what makes a slasher film.Footnote ¹⁰ While their criteria are slightly different, they both pinpoint key elements that identify the genre. First, the killer is almost always male and is, or at least was at one point, human. The killer is not a ghost, or an alien, a virus, a creature, or a robot. He is a man usually without any special powers, or magic, though he often displays some measure of invulnerability. The killer always uses a melee weapon. The weapon is usually something hands-on, sharp, and phallic – a butcher's knife, a machete, finger knives, and so on. Though anything lying around will do as long as it is hands-on, in fact often they simply use their hands. Occasionally a projectile is used – bows and arrows, a harpoon – but never, ever, a gun. The victims are mostly teenage, slightly more likely to be female, and almost always white. The films always have a specific setting: a school, a small town, a summer camp, a suburban neighborhood, anywhere teenagers congregate. Within this setting, there is usually a place that should be safe but has been perverted by the killer, filled with the corpses of his victims, left precariously balanced, waiting to fall upon the hapless final girl. Cover specifically identifies the hallmark of the slasher film as “the final girl.” This character is almost always female, bookish, usually virginal, with some extra skills or hidden talent. The final girl will be the first to notice that things are not right, that something strange is going on, and it is she who will survive when most of her friends perish.

The target demographic of slasher films, historically speaking, was adolescent males, though a large part of the audience was likely to be female. Horror was a genre long believed to appeal to young men, and slasher films added a distinct element of sexualized violence and female nudity to play on that appeal.Footnote ¹¹ At the same time, studios realized that young women were a large part of their market, and while the basic slasher formula seemed to presuppose a male audience, there were nods to female fans of the genre, in terms of both marketing and plotlines.Footnote ¹² Regardless of race, class, or gender, the common denominator of the intended and actual audience of slasher films was youth. Most of these films were made specifically with teenagers in mind – teenagers, that is, with enough disposable income to buy movie tickets. Part of the appeal for the audience lay in the fact that teenagers also starred in these films, or at least adults pretending to be teenagers.Footnote ¹³ The onscreen youngsters indulged in every stereotypical teenage dalliance: they drank beer; snuck out past curfew; smoked marijuana; had secret, and not so secret, trysts. The characters indulged in all the same teenage rebellions the audience did, or wished they could. Of course, the onscreen adolescents who engaged in this behavior were very likely to die as a result. Traditionally, slasher films have been read as modern, if bloody, morality tales.Footnote ¹⁴ In these films, teenage actions were policed by supernaturally invulnerable killers who punished sex, drugs, stupidity, or any form of deviant behavior. Sexuality, especially in young women, was punished by particularly gruesome deaths.Footnote ¹⁵ But almost any illicit rebellious behavior was likely to receive the same result: a horrific, if inventive, demise. The problem with using only this analysis is in its audience appeal; that adults would want to make cautionary morality tales espousing exaggerated stranger danger makes sense. You can imagine them wagging a warning finger and saying, “Do not drink or have sex, or Freddy Krueger will get you.” Teenagers, on the other hand, often glorified and reveled in those very same behaviors. Why, then, would they want to see their onscreen avatars punished for the very things many of them did, or wanted to do?

While adults were the ones responsible for the creation of slasher films, they had teenage protagonists, as well as victims, and a largely teenage audience. Much has been written on the phenomenon of the final girl and the gendered dynamics of these films in an effort to explain their mass appeal.Footnote ¹⁶ Gender, while a fascinating dimension of the slasher genre, does not entirely account for its popularity with teenage audiences. The mere fact that the protagonist was a teenager helps explain some of the appeal these films had for their main demographic. Furthermore, teenagers had to save themselves. In the context of declining economic fortunes for working- and middle-class youths, the palpable sense of being on one's own was reflected in slasher movies by the absence of adults capable of solving their problems or providing safety. These films rarely featured an adult who saved the day. There was no parent, guardian, or authority figure who would sweep in at the last minute and rescue the youngster from the monstrous killer.

In slasher films, adults were absent or ineffectual, or contributed to the problems of the protagonist. Each film dealt with adults in a slightly different manner. In the three major franchises, there are three different ways of marginalizing the adult presence. In Friday the 13th, adults were absent save for a token figure, the owner of the doomed summer camp, or a parent vacationing with their teenage children, but they were never central to the plot. In fact, in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, the protagonist's mother leaves the vacation home and simply never returns.Footnote ¹⁷ She was viewed as so inconsequential, she was not mentioned again, and her fate was cut from the film. No explanation was given by any of the characters as to her whereabouts. Within the symbolic world of slasher films, the Friday the 13th films taught teenagers that when trouble hit, be it financial or homicidal, they would be on their own. Young adults would be expected to navigate this new dangerous world without any help from authority figures.

Of the major franchises, the Halloween series has the most adult presence. It is here we see adults who attempt to help the imperiled youth, though they prove to be mostly inept. The Halloween movies are the only films to have an adult character who actively tries to save the teens. Dr. Loomis, played in five Halloween films by Donald Pleasence, is a psychiatrist who seems to spend most of his time chasing after Michael Myers, his mute, psychotic, invulnerable patient with a knack for murder and escaping mental institutions. Loomis is supposed to oversee Myers, yet Myers continuously escapes. Loomis tries to stop Myers, yet Myers is always able to ratchet up a large body count. Loomis tries to defeat Myers, yet Myers always returns in the next installment. Dr. Loomis does, on several occasions, step up to save the final girl, though he can never stop Myers from killing again. This series also has more police officers than any other. Like Loomis, however, the police in Halloween can do nothing to save the teenagers. In the first film, the sheriff is unable to save even his own daughter. By the fourth installment, police protection was something of a joke, and Myers dispatches the officers almost as quickly as the teenagers. While the police officers, and Loomis, use guns to try and stop Myers and save lives, this protection proves completely ineffective. At the very best, they bought the would-be victims a little time as the killer staggers backward, but more often than not this accomplishes nothing. The message was that even if teens could get adults and authority figures on their side, the latter would prove to be ineffectual, and the end result would remain the same: death, defeat, poverty. This was perhaps an even bleaker view of the modern world than in the Friday films, for here even adult intervention is ultimately useless in the face of the prevalent forces of the time.

Abandonment and betrayal by adults was most clear, however, in A Nightmare on Elm Street. In the first film, in particular, adults and parents actually make things harder on the adolescent heroes. While adults are absent in Friday the 13th and ineffectual in Halloween, it was in A Nightmare on Elm Street that the behavior of the adult characters blatantly, if metaphorically, betrayed the young adults in the films. Here authority figures, even if well-meaning, were completely counterproductive. In the film the parents who live on Elm Street kill Freddy Krueger to try to safeguard their children from his murderous child-molesting ways. They do this to protect their children and then cover up their crime. While the children's lives improve in the short term, when they grow up Krueger returns to kill them in their dreams. The adults are unwilling to acknowledge the supernatural consequences of their actions and more kids die as a result. This backstory most clearly reflects the shortsighted economic policies of the era. Middle-class life in the suburbs was good for kids but the economic situation and policies created in the 1970s and 1980s were having a negative impact on young adults' futures, and those in power did not want to hear it. They wanted Reagan's “Morning in America.” In fact, A Nightmare on Elm Street was released in 1984, the same year that Ronald Reagan ran for reelection and released his famous campaign advertisement. Adults in the world of Nightmare were unwilling, or unable, to grasp the long-term consequences of their actions, and were the most responsible of those inany of the franchises for dooming their offspring.

Within the film, the authority figures of A Nightmare on Elm Street do not believe that Freddy Krueger could return as a dream demon ghost, and as a result they constantly try to get the teenagers to go to sleep. Sleep represents the greatest danger in the world of A Nightmare on Elm Street, and the teens must battle their well-meaning, but completely unhelpful, parents and doctors in addition to Krueger. It is in this franchise that the authority figures' myopic worldview is the most harmful to the young people in the town. They simply refuse to see the dangerous situation that they created and insist that the youngsters will be fine, even as they are killed off one by one. There was the notable exception of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, in which Nancy, the final girl from the first film, returns as a graduate student, though she looks no older than the films' “teens.” She, her sheriff father, and a doctor attempt to save the kids from Krueger. They were largely unsuccessful, however, and two of the three die before the film ends. Adults and traditional role models, even the attempt to better oneself through education, were no match for the harsh realities of slasher films or the 1980s economy.

When a young person is in danger, an authority figure with a gun should represent protection and safety. In slasher films it represents neither. In these films authority figures, be they police, parents, or doctors, cannot, or will not, help the young people. Moreover, modernity itself works against the characters. The accoutrements of modern society do not help the victims in slasher films. Guns do not work or they jam, electricity and phones fail or the lines are easily cut, and cars are notoriously unreliable. Modern conveniences, things that are supposed to make life easier, or safer, provide no help or protection to teenagers in slasher films. This serves to highlight the idea that the teenagers in the films, and in the audience, were betrayed by modern society. Places that were supposed to be safe were, in fact, dangerous. People who were supposed to protect them were, in fact, useless. And while the modern American economy was failing the audience, they watched the objects and conveniences created by that modern economy fail the teenagers onscreen. One of the clearest examples of this is Jason Lives! Friday the 13th, Part VI. An early scene in the film has two camp counselors lost while driving through the woods. They come upon Jason, who incapacitates their car with very little effort. When the man gets out brandishing a gun, and shoots Jason, he is quickly dispatched. The woman then gets out of the car and, thinking it is a robbery, pulls out her wallet to offer Jason money. She is also killed. The scene ends with the cash and credit card she tried to give Jason floating away in a puddle as it was released from her dead hand. In slasher films the trappings and protections of modern society merely create an illusion of safety; in the end everyone iss at the mercy of unstoppable forces.

Automobiles in particular, which were so instrumental in the creation of an American suburban middle class, were central to slasher films. They represented freedom to teenagers who drove around their small Mid-western towns, like the fictional towns of Haddonfield, Illinois and Springwood, Ohio where, respectively, Halloween and Nightmare were set. In their cars, teens smoked pot, parked on dates, and generally enjoyed the mobility that came along with suburban middle-class automobile ownership. Within these films, cars also represented the betrayal of the very reliability and promise of blue-collar workers who were feeling the pains of modernity, as automation and capital mobility destroyed well-paying manufacturing jobs. Teenagers knew that they could not follow their parents into the factory and be guaranteed a decent job. The social and economic realization of the falsity of blind faith in modernity was reflected onscreen. The bright yellow school bus, a symbol of modern public education and the advantages allowed by mobilization, is taken over by Freddy Krueger in the opening vignette of Nightmare on Elm Street 2. The children inside are all driven to their doom. The auto industry was failing the American worker in the same way that actual automobiles were failing fictional teenagers, stranding them at the side of the road at the mercy of whichever half-undead serial killer might wander past. One film, A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, actually has a teen that is killed when Freddy Krueger possesses his motorcycle, melding the boy's body to the bike and ultimately killing him in a fiery wreck. Not only do automobiles let characters down when they need them most, but they can also actively kill by turning unsuspecting characters into machines and destroying them, the true horror of automation.

The failures of modernity are highlighted by the survival of the most unique identifier of slasher films: the final girl. Every installment of Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street has a final girl, and every once in a while a final boy or child as well. The final girl is immediately identifiable to an audience well versed in the slasher formula. She is shy, industrious, and hardworking – qualities that her friends often lack. She does not have time for frivolity or boys. She takes things more seriously than her friends. She often has a special skill – she might be particularly book-smart or artistic; occasionally she is mechanically inclined and knows how to fix cars. And while these special attributes and talents are what allow her to outwit or escape her inevitable attacker they are the very same traits that are necessary for success in times of economic hardship. While her less clever, superficial friends, who spend their time having sex and drinking, die, she is going to live. She alone will succeed where all the rest fail.

The necessity of the final girl's industriousness and self-reliance in the 1980s was a direct reflection of the disappearance of the liberal New Deal order which had dominated American politics and society since the Great Depression. The New Deal consensus, originally established by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, and in many ways continuing through Lyndon Johnson with the Great Society of the 1960s, became an entrenched part of liberal American politics. These policies attempted to create both a social safety net and some semblance of economic parity within the United States.Footnote ¹⁸ Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 signaled the end of the New Deal order, and the federal government began actively trying to demolish many of the programs, especially those designed to help the working poor. While manufacturing jobs dried up, increasingly high numbers of young people were attending college. By 1980 tuition costs were rising much faster than inflation. Since 1978 college tuition fees have increased by 1,220 percent.Footnote ¹⁹ Young people attempting to gain an education could find themselves trapped under student loan debts with no guarantee of a successful career. In this context, the final girl's struggles take on a new meaning, one rife with political and economic significance. Unemployment specifically hit young people hard in times of recession, making the youth unemployment nearly twice the national average at the same time college tuition costs began to increase exponentially. Interestingly, in economic downturns, the demographic groups who felt the recession the most were men, especially minority men, and the group that had the smallest increase in unemployment and the largest increase in college attendance was white women – a demographic reflected in the final girl.Footnote ²⁰

The popularity of slasher films rose, in part, because they functioned as an outlet for teenage anxiety. In the 1980s, the dread of impending adulthood, combined with fears of an economically unwelcoming world, created an environment in which scores of teenagers eagerly watched, and sometimes cheered, as their onscreen avatars were slaughtered.Footnote ²¹ When these films are viewed through the lens of adolescents who were facing harsh realities and impending adulthood, their joy in the onscreen massacres and their support of the eventual final girl protagonist becomes understandable and even cathartic. Teenagers are then able to watch their fears displayed viscerally onscreen, knowing that because of the inherent optimism of youth and near identical plotlines, one of their own would emerge triumphant.

By the late 1980s the slasher genre began to taper off. Halloween 5, A Nightmare on Elm Street 5, and Friday the 13th Part VIII were all released in 1989 to diminished returns.Footnote ²² While this could be explained by these films being some of the worst of their respective franchises, it was also clear that slasher films could no longer fill theaters as they could earlier in the decade. The age of the slasher film was over.Footnote ²³ The genre, however, never really disappeared. It experienced a meta-resurgence in the mid-1990s with films like Scream, directed by Nightmare on Elm Street creator Wes Craven and using many of the ideas he first proposed in New Nightmare. The 1990s slasher films predicated their success on playing with the acknowledged rules of the genre. The films of the 1990s – what Sotiris Petridis labeled the postmodern period of slasher filmsFootnote ²⁴  – played with a tongue-in-cheek tone. While they could be scary, and quite good, they lacked the tautness, urgency, or gleeful blood splatter of the earlier films. The moderate 1990s, with its relatively low unemployment and balanced government budgets, produced slasher movies that were merely commentaries on earlier films. In the 2000s the film Saw ushered in a new and particularly brutal subgenre of “torture porn” films which came to dominate that decade. Neither of these, however, experienced the unprecedented success and sheer volume of imitators and sequels of the three lead franchises of the 1980s.

In Reference Yu2003, New Line Cinema finally made the much-hyped Freddy vs. Jason. The film was first teased at the end of Friday the 13th Part IX: Jason Goes to Hell, but was not actually made until the next century. The new film was a success and proved that the old franchises were still financially viable. This financial success, however, was not a foregone conclusion and was predicated on a decent final film.Footnote ²⁵ Freddy vs. Jason proved that there was a public appetite for slasher films. Once again ahead of the pack, Texas Chainsaw Massacre was remade in 2003. Like the previous cycle it was a herald of things to come. Also on the horizon in the mid-2000s was a new financial crisis that would devastate the American economy worse than any in decades.

In 2006, there were murmurs of the financial tumult to come. There was talk of too much spending on credit, both by individuals and by the federal government. Experts were predicting that the housing bubble – inflated home prices and an unsteady home mortgage market – was going to burst.Footnote ²⁶ And they were right. Home ownership, for decades one of the main hallmarks of the middle-class American dream, became something of a trap. By the end of 2006 many American home owners were defaulting on their mortgages in increasing numbers. The foreclosure rate in 2008 was 225 percent higher than it had been in 2006.Footnote ²⁷ Many found they now owed more on their homes than the houses were worth. Large banks began to falter. The stock market took a steep dive and at the same time consumer debt continued to rise. By 2009, unemployment had spiked to over 10 percent, for the first time since 1983.Footnote ²⁸ Once again the unemployment rate for young people aged sixteen to twenty-four was roughly twice the national average. For young people college seemed more necessary than ever and at the same time tuition costs rose at more than twice the rate of inflation. The resurgence of youth anxiety about their futures and financial prospects resembled that of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

It was into this economy that all three of the major slasher franchises were remade. Halloween was remade in Reference Zombie2007, and a sequel was released in 2009. Friday the 13th was rebooted in Reference Nispel2009, and A Nightmare on Elm Street in 2010. Perhaps the most interesting difference when the originals are compared to the remakes was that the financial situation of the leads changed. In all three films the main characters went from firmly middle-class to working-class, or at least less economically comfortable than their predecessors. Michael Myers was no longer from a nice middle-class home; he was instead from a poor family, his mother a stripper and his stepfather an abusive alcoholic. In the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Nancy has an after-school job as a waitress at a diner, something her 1980s counterpart never had. The final boy in the remake of Friday the 13th was not a part of the affluent group of teenagers vacationing at Crystal Lake, but rather someone who's clothes and shabby motorcycle mark him as lower- or working-class in comparison. While initial scenes of the remake of Halloween take place in the late 1970s, and the later part in the mid-1990s, both A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th take place in modern times. Chronologically, this means that the adults in the current films could have been the teenagers in the originals and things have not gotten better; in fact, they have gotten worse. Teenagers in modern times are even more critical of the idealization of the middle class and the assumption of American affluence. It does not fit their lived narratives and the films have adjusted accordingly. Even the surface optimism of the 1980s is absent in the remakes. Wealth was something other people had, not something inherent in the lead characters' lives.

This change in the financial circumstance of the lead characters can be attributed to several factors. In some ways the economic realities were harsher and more obvious for young people in the 2010s than they were for their 1980s counterparts. Instead of losing the prospect of future home ownership, some were actually losing their homes. Rather than being told they could not afford the same sort of house their parents had, many watched family and friends grapple with bankruptcy and eviction. Instead of being told that a high-school diploma did not guarantee them a job with a comfortable income and the prospects of advancement, they were told that a college diploma, and the ensuing student loan debt that accompanied it, did not guarantee them that either. More undergraduates worked in addition to going to college. In the United States in 1970, 33 percent of eighteen- to twenty-two-year-old full-time students also worked; by the year 2000, 52 percent were also employed.Footnote ²⁹ In addition, they had to confront the reality of student loans and future unemployment.Footnote ³⁰ The majority of American college graduates had student loan debt averaging over $26,000. At the same time, unemployment for young college graduates was almost 9 percent.Footnote ³¹ News outlets bombarded the country with stories of college graduates who had to move back home with their parents; that is, if their parents still had a home.Footnote ³²

For young people this was compounded by the ubiquitous presence of new media in their lives. While many studies have shown that young people are less likely to regularly read the newspaper or watch news programs, new and social media have in many ways replaced more traditional news sources for them.Footnote ³³ The use of the Internet and new media gives young people greater control and direction in their news consumption, and at the same time social media allow them to have a greater focus on personal and local concerns. These nontraditional news-gathering techniques mean that young people can be almost instantaneously aware of changes in their circumstances. Both access to information and a difficult-to-navigate economy are simply a part of everyday reality for most young people in America. It was also during the 2000s that the federal government reduced the top marginal tax rates and capital gains rates. This served to increase income disparities. It did marginally help the middle class, though most of the benefits went to those in the highest income brackets. At the same time median wages stagnated. The gap between the rich and the poor in America was once again growing.Footnote ³⁴ This new reality was, in turn, reflected in the more recent cycle of slasher films. It is most evident in the lives of the lead characters in slasher films, who reflect the expanded economic consciousness of the audience. Wealth is not assumed; it is coveted, mocked, or enjoyed, but not taken for granted.

While technology and the economy changed the lives of American adolescents, it simultaneously had an impact on the studios that produced slasher films. Perhaps ironically Paramount and New Line Cinemas, who now jointly own the Friday the 13th franchise, cited financial reasons for the delay of the sequel to the 2009 remake. While the film was largely successful, bringing in $65 million from a $19 million budget, due to the recession the studios did not want to take a chance on a sequel. As of 2015 Paramount is back working on another attempt to reboot the franchise. This was in direct contrast to the situation in the 1980s, where studios valued slasher films because they were very cheap to make and would almost guarantee a profit.Footnote ³⁵ In modern times, because of ballooning production costs, due in large part to the cost of computer-generated special effects, these films no longer represent a sure financial bet. Studios once again began to shy away from the genre, putting both Friday the 13th Part II and Halloween 3D on hold. The future of the slasher genre, like the modern economy, is uncertain.

In many slasher films there was a harbinger, a character who exists to predict the demise of the film's teenagers. Harbingers, in some form or another, occur in each of the major franchises. In Halloween, Dr. Loomis tells the sheriff, “Death has come to your little town.” In Friday the 13th a drunk hillbilly shouts, “You're all doomed!” at a van of incoming camp counselors. In A Nightmare on Elm Street the final girl, Nancy, dreams of children who sing a nursery rhyme which begins, “One, two, Freddy's coming for you.” Harbingers were carried over into the remakes as well. In one of the opening scenes of the new A Nightmare on Elm Street, the teenagers watch as one of their friends seemingly commits suicide in a very brutal manner while yelling, “It's not real.”

Harbingers in slasher films exist to tell the onscreen teenagers what the audience inherently knows: they are all doomed. Most of them will not survive. For the members of the audience who are approaching, or have just entered, adulthood, that sentiment must have resonated and, subconscious or not, slasher films served as a parable of the modern capitalist economy. In the 1980s the target audience for these films were adolescents who knew the modern economy would decimate their ranks. If the teenage audience of slasher films felt like they were grist for the mill of American society, then they wanted to see a film where their onscreen avatars were literally ground up in a mill. In this case a gruesome death was a stand-in for the very frightening concept of an adult life filled with drudgery and financial failure. The return of these films in the aftermath of the 2007 housing market crash and the 2008 economic collapse can be seen as a reemergence of these fears. The only way to make it out alive was through a combination of luck and hard work, and if it was already predetermined who was going to succeed then the audience might as well enjoy the ride. Besides, you're all doomed anyway, right?