Gen X here. The great slasher era of cinema started when I was a teen, and was morally inspired by Silent-generation commentary on the boomers and us. It was supposed to warn us If you indulge in sex and drugs and rock-&-roll (Satan approved!) and you’ll come to a bad end.

So Friday the 13th (1980 with Kevin Bacon) was the same as Reefer Madness except for general debauchery and bacchanalia rather than just for cannabis. And mostly the silents were pissed that they didn’t get to party while young with sex and drugs, and instead drowned their sorrows with hard liquor and cigars.

Curiously, the slasher format came not from classic horror but mystery. The Ur-slasher was And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, regarded as one of her greatest stories, from an author that was prolific like Stephen King.

As per many of Christie’s novels, ATTWN was an experiment in defying the (alleged) rules of mystery writing (e.g. the detective must be beyond reproach ) and still being a valid whodunit. She’s had the story told by the killer before, and this time the narrative followed one of the victims.

Crystal Lake was a closed circle much like Soldier Island, and the neighborhood of Elm Street was made inescapable because everyone sleeps.

Remember also that Jason Voorhees was actually dead, and the slasher was doing the (double-plus grisly) murders for vengeance of camp councilors for their negligence, while they got high and got freaky. So technically it wasn’t about the sex, it was about being AWOL when duty called. (Says the latch-key kid with major depression.)

Also, pre-internet, boobs on screen was one of the few times grown men people who like looking at boobs got to see some that were not their spouse’s / exclusive partner’s (or just their own), and people having sex on screen was an excuse for flying free. Truthfully, until the Skinemax era of late-night cable soft porn, the love scene and the nude scene were commonly different scenes. By the aughts, the obligatory horror titties became only optional and by the age of the internet they almost faded out entirely …until the age of subscription television series like Game of Thrones and Sopranos and nudity came back swingin’

But this cartoon points to a curious reality in the United States: The birth-rate is imploding. Given in 2022, one of the justifications for the Dobbs decision was white babies as a commodity (seriously), they were expecting the new generations to keep churning out new generations of school kids to be indoctrinated into the next working / fighting force. But it’s not happening. Young men and women are just less interested in that old time romance. This is what has J. D. Vance (and his shadowy billionaire masters) freaked out about childless cat ladies.

It’s no wonder, really. 80%+ of the households live in precarity. Employers are skipping the OSHA rules and Millennials and Zoomers are being worked like old-time miners on the truck system ( another day older and deeper in debt… ). Upward mobility is a joke. Wages aren’t enough to sustain one adult, let alone a family. The dream of a homestead? Gone. We can’t even afford a car. Everyone knows they’re going to work and be miserable until they drop dead from exhaustion, where’s the point in having kids? Tommy and Gina, are living on a prayer and on accumulated debt until their limit drives them out of their rental.

Gen-Z doesn’t have time for Crystal Lake, and are glad for a weekend sleeping in. If it’s a holiday, they expect the boss will call them in and then forget to pay them holiday time. The horror zoomers have to face is not slashers in the dark, but the society gone dystopian, making it literally impossible to make ends meet, while tracking you like Big Brother from all the telescreens. Your horror isn’t Jason, but Ingsoc.

And that’s before global agriculture collapses from water shortage, which is expected to happen when you’re middle-aged (in your forties and fifties), at which point your life becomes a Roland Emmerich film. Or Slaughterhouse Five.