There are slashers, there are psychological horrors, and then there’s The Slayer. It has the basic ingredients of an early-’80s slasher: a group of people isolated in an unpleasant location, an increasingly impressive collection of corpses and somebody who really ought to stop wandering off alone. But director J.S. Cardone isn’t particularly interested in following the rules. Instead, The Slayer is slow, eerie and strangely dreamy, like somebody having a nightmare about a conventional slasher.
The story follows Kay (Sarah Kendall), an artist plagued by disturbing dreams since childhood, who travels to an isolated island with her husband David (Alan McRae), her brother Eric (Frederick Flynn) and his girlfriend Brooke (Carol Kottenbrook). They’re expecting a quiet break, but the island isn’t exactly the sort of place where you feel compelled to unpack the picnic basket. Kay begins experiencing increasingly vivid nightmares involving murder, strange figures and a sinister presence, and before long the boundaries between what she’s dreaming and what’s actually happening become increasingly difficult to distinguish. The other three aren’t exactly thrilled about spending their holiday listening to Kay’s nightmares either, particularly when people start turning up dead.
And this is where The Slayer becomes rather confounding. The film famously refuses to give you a concrete solution to its central mystery, and whether that works for you will probably depend on how comfortable you are with a horror film essentially shrugging its shoulders and saying, “You tell me.” Is there actually something supernatural stalking the island? Is Kay experiencing some sort of psychotic break and actually committing the murders? Or is Marsh (Michael Holmes), the weird pilot – who does that horror movie thing of warning people in as creepy a manner as possible – somehow involved in all of this? The film leaves all three doors open, and while that might sound frustrating, I actually think it’s one of the things that makes The Slayer so memorable.
It’s also remarkably slow. We’re talking really fucking slow. There are long stretches where Kay and the others simply wander around the island, talk, sleep, have nightmares and generally look as though they’re waiting for the ferry home. If you’re expecting a kill-a-minute approach, then you’ll probably start checking the runtime and wondering whether you’ve accidentally put on a documentary about damp coastal architecture. But the sluggish pace is also responsible for much of the film’s atmosphere, because Cardone gives the island plenty of room to breathe, and that isolation gradually becomes oppressive.
The location does a lot of the heavy lifting. The island feels ancient, desolate and almost detached from the real world, with its empty buildings, bleak coastline and constant sense of abandonment giving everything the quality of a half-remembered dream. There’s something almost mythical about the place, as though these four people have wandered into some forgotten corner of the world where normal rules no longer quite apply. You can understand why Kay’s dreams seem to bleed into her surroundings because the island itself already looks like somewhere something from a nightmare would live.
When the film finally decides to start killing people, however, it makes the limited body count count. David gets perhaps the nastiest fate, becoming trapped in a doorway before the mechanism slowly chokes the life out of him, eventually leaving him decapitated. It’s an unusually grim death for a film that has spent so much time quietly wandering around, and the mechanical nature of it makes it particularly uncomfortable. There’s something wonderfully mean about spending half a film convincing you that the killer might be supernatural before murdering somebody with what is essentially a really fucking malicious piece of carpentry.
Eric gets an even more bizarre fate, receiving what I can only describe as the Hellraiser by way of Captain Birdseye treatment. He’s impaled with fishhooks and dragged into the ocean, which sounds ridiculous written down but is genuinely nasty when you see it happen. Brooke’s death is considerably simpler but no less memorable, as she’s stabbed through the tits with a pitchfork. It’s the sort of kill that reminds you exactly what decade you’re watching, because subtlety clearly wasn’t invited to the production meeting.
The performances are decent, particularly Sarah Kendall as Kay, who has the difficult job of carrying a film where the audience is never entirely sure whether the things she’s experiencing are real. She sells the growing fear and confusion without turning Kay into a generic screaming final girl, and the ambiguity works because Kendall makes her seem genuinely uncertain about what she can trust. And I’ve got to say that she really sells raw primal fear with some of these expressions she pulls. The rest of the cast are more functional, but that’s hardly a major problem when the island itself is doing most of the character work. You could probably replace half the dialogue with shots of empty corridors and windswept beaches and lose very little.
The biggest problem is also the most obvious one: The Slayer is fucking boring if you’re not in the mood for it. There’s no getting around that. The pacing is glacial, the characters spend an awful lot of time doing very little and the film deliberately withholds the answers that most horror audiences would expect to receive. It isn’t helped by the fact that the mystery becomes more interesting than most the characters, meaning you’re often watching simply because you want to find out what the hell is actually happening rather than because you’re particularly invested in whoever is currently wandering around the island.
But then that’s also why I’ve got more time for The Slayer than its reputation as a slow slasher might suggest. It doesn’t simply fail to explain itself because the filmmakers couldn’t think of an ending; the ambiguity is baked into the entire experience. Dreams, reality, supernatural events, and psychological breakdown are constantly bleeding into one another, and the film never gives you a convenient point where you can say, “Right, that’s what happened.” You can interpret it as a supernatural horror, a psychological breakdown, or something altogether stranger, and the film accommodates all of those readings. I mean the film ends with a flashback (or is it?) to Kay’s childhood – to the start of this whole chain – but if you really wanted to you could see it as some fucked up Quantum Leap.
It’s also a good example of how atmosphere can compensate for a lack of conventional horror mechanics. There aren’t enough deaths here to satisfy a serious body-count enthusiast, and the killer isn’t exactly carving a memorable niche alongside Jason, Michael, or Leatherface. Instead, The Slayer creates an almost hypnotic sense of unease, with the empty island, strange dreams and increasingly unpleasant deaths gradually making you feel as though you’re watching somebody else’s nightmare through a dirty window.
So, is The Slayer a great slasher? Probably not. It’s too slow, too strange and too deliberately ambiguous to work as a straightforward example of the genre, and anyone expecting a traditional body-count movie is likely to come away wondering why four people spent so long wandering around an island before discovering that fishhooks are dangerous. But as a strange, dreamlike piece of early-’80s horror, it has something going for it that a lot of its more conventional contemporaries lack. And whether the explanation is an actual supernatural occurrence, Kay’s mind finally coming apart at the seams, or Marsh being exactly as creepy as he fucking looks, I suppose is entirely up to you.
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