With October and Halloween arising, people are starting to put out pumpkins, buy costumes, and put on scary movies.

One type of horror film many people enjoy watching is a slasher film. A slasher film is a film where the main antagonist, or bad guy, kills people with sharp objects like knives, machetes, hatchets, or any other weapon that is sharp and can kill.

Usually in slasher films the main target of the slashing are teenagers. In movies like “Friday The 13th,” a large group of teenagers get together and one by one they start disappearing. They usually start disappearing whenever it’s a rainy night and the teenagers are feeling frisky or when one teen is looking for another missing teen.

The bad guy in slasher films is usually killing the teens to seek revenge for something that happened to him or just out of pure evil. In “Friday the 13th,” Jason Voorhees’ mother kills the counselors of Camp Crystal Lake to seek revenge because years before the counselors let her son drown in the lake while they were goofing off.

Near the end of the movie, only one or two teens will be remaining and will start finding their dead friends bodies scattered around, mutilated by different weapons. In “A Nightmare on Elm Street” the bad guy Freddy Krueger uses his glove of knives to kill teens. In one of the films he also used syringes on his glove. He seeks revenge on teenagers in their dreams after the teenagers parents burned and killed Freddy.

The foundation of slasher films is said to be “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” a film released in 1974. In this movie a brother and sister with their friends set off to find whoever vandalized their grandfather’s grave. They arrive to their families old farmhouse but they don’t realize that their next door neighbors are crazy murderous lunatics who wear people’s skin.

The movie is based on the serial killer Ed Gein; Gein killed his victims and wore their skin just like Leatherface does. He had an odd obsession with his mother which also helped inspire movies like “Psycho” and the TV show “Bates Motel.”

After “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” slasher movies started pouring out. Another movie said to have part on the foundation of slasher films is “Halloween.” “Halloween” is a movie about Michael Myers, a boy who murders his sister on Halloween night and then is sent to an asylum. He escapes 25 years later on the night before Halloween, going back to where he killed his sister.

After “Leatherface” and “Halloween,” movies like “Friday the 13th,” “Nightmare on Elm Street,” and “Saw” came out. There are some movies in between Leatherface and Halloween that came out that not a lot of people talk about like “Alice, Sweet Alice,” “Black Christmas,” and “Terror Train.”

Slasher films are still coming out to this day. Most recently films like the new “Halloween” and “HellFest” have come out. “Hellfest” being a slasher film about teenagers going to a haunted amusement park. Where they began to get followed by a masked man who “works for the park.” They find out that this masked man doesn’t work for the park and is after the teenagers. He continues to kill the teens one by one, until the teens finally make it known they’re getting stalked and killed.

The New “Halloween” is the 11th movie to the “Halloween” franchise. Michael Myers escapes a prison transport and heads back to Haddonfield. It’s been 40 years and Laurie Strode played by Jamie Lee Curtis has prepared the whole time, getting weapons and preparing her home for Michael to come back.

There’s another type of Horror movie that have many similarities to slasher movies, and that’s psychological horror movies. In psychological horror movies, the movie scares you with mental, emotional, and psychological fears to scare you and make you feel disturbed and unsettled.

A lot of the popular horror movies that use psychological horror are “Psycho,” “The Shining,” “The Omen,” and “The Sixth Sense.” “Psycho” and “The Shining” are both also slasher movies.

“Psycho” is the oldest both slasher and psychological horror movie. It was released in 1960 and written by Robert Bloch and directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

The last type of horror movie that have been recently popular are supernatural horror films. These are the films about demonic possessions. The most popular supernatural horror movies are “The Conjuring,” “The Nun,” and “Annabelle.” These films all include demons that possess a person or an object.  Movies like “It” and “Sinister” are also popular supernatural movies that are scary.

Many people are a lot more scared of supernatural horror movies instead of slasher and psychological films because in supernatural horror movies they have a lot more jump scares and characters that strike a lot more fear in people.

All of these different kinds of horror movies are all scary. They all put fear into the people watching them so Halloween is a perfect time to watch all of these movies. Don’t forget your popcorn and your blanket.