Stephen Graham Jones breaks down the key ingredients in every good slasher

23:23Stephen Graham Jones: X-raying the slasher genre

There are two key elements to a slasher film, says Stephen Graham Jones.

In an interview with Q guest host Talia Schlanger, the bestselling horror author explains that every good slasher needs a prank and a "disproportionate response."

"Pranks are really important in the slasher," he says. "There's some terrible joke that goes awry and injures someone, or permanently disfigures them, or psychologically scars them. Ten years later, at prom, they come back and get their vengeance."

The "disproportionate response" refers to the way in which the character chooses to take their vengeance: beheadings, dismemberments, elaborate traps, etc.

Both elements are present in Jones's new novel, I Was a Teenage Slasher, which puts the reader directly into the mind of a killer. Set in the late 1980s in small-town Texas, it's written from the perspective of Tolly, a young man who finds himself driven to kill by forces beyond his own understanding.

"He has more or less become infected with this need for justice," Jones says. "It's nothing that he felt welling up inside him. He was happy to let the prank pass, to let it wash off of him. But because he's in the genre he's in, he doesn't have that option. He has to go out at night, become a slasher [and] take care of business."

It was so rare I could find someone who was as devoted to the slasher as I was.- Stephen Graham Jones

Jones is a lifelong horror movie fan. He says that when the hit meta-slasher Scream came out in 1996, he went to see it in the theatre for seven straight nights. He adds that it felt like the characters in Scream were speaking his language.

"They were speaking how I always wanted to talk to people, but it was so rare I could find someone who was as devoted to the slasher as I was," he says. "But suddenly, here was this movie lighting up the world, and everyone in it was conversant in the slasher, and it was just an amazing, magical moment for me."

When Jones wrote the character of Tolly, however, he wanted to create a character who wasn't conversant in the genre at all, allowing him to be both horrified and mystified by his own actions.

"If Tolly were an expert from the get-go, he would know immediately what's happening to him, and that would kind of kill that initial expositional arc, where he has to figure out his powers and figure out the story he's in," Jones says. "He's a killer, for sure. It's right there in the title. He would never deny all the bad that he's done, but he's also … a victim. That combination of 'I'm doing this, I don't want to be doing this, but I have to be doing this,' that, to me, was the crux of who he is."

The full interview with Stephen Graham Jones is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Stephen Graham Jones produced by Ben Edwards.