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May 03, 2023

This Forgotten ’80s Horror Is the Most Underrated Slasher Movie

It may not be the most original slasher, but it's an early forbearer that

It may not be the most original slasher, but it's an early forbearer that perfected the tropes so prevalent in '80s horror.

You don't have to be a big horror fan to know that the genre was ruled in the 1980s by slasher films. Halloween's success in 1978 resulted in the subgenre running amok through the decade to come, most notably with 1980's admitted Halloween ripoff, Friday the 13th, and the seven sequels that followed throughout the decade. It wasn't just Jason Voorhees terrorizing cinemas though. There was A Nightmare on Elm Street as well, a slasher that carried the tropes of the subgenre while also moving into more supernatural territory. In the 1980s, it seemed like a new slasher film was coming out every week, so much so, that by the end of the decade, audiences had grown bored with seeing the same old predictable film just with a different title.

The beginning of the decade was different. This is where the template was set for what was to come. It's where tropes became set in stone, from the timid final girl, the horny and drug-addled friends, the victim running up the stairs from her attacker, and a finale with a killer out for revenge who won't stay dead. 1981 was a particularly big year for slashers. Michael Myers was back in Halloween II. We got our first look at a baghead Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th Part 2. There was also the cult classic The Burning, with a young Jason Alexander and Holly Hunter. Titles for every holiday and event imaginable came out in 1981, including My Bloody Valentine, Happy Birthday To Me, and Graduation Day. Then there was the less noticed The Prowler, a creepy slasher that flew under the radar, but whose efforts helped propel the subgenre into what it would become.

RELATED: The 25 Best Slasher Movies of All Time, Ranked

If you're a horror fan, you either love or hate the tropes of the genre. Some see them as comforting beats, similar to how someone who loves romantic comedies hopes for scenes with lovers reuniting in an airport right before one is scheduled to get on a plane. Others see them as laziness, and certainly, by the latter part of the 1980s, it felt like slashers were simply trying to cash in on the past by recreating it.

The Prowler has it all. There's Pam (Vicky Dawson) as the sad-faced final girl. She's a student at the local college and also a writer. The final girl can't do it all on her until the end though, she needs a boyfriend in Mark (Christopher Goutman), a Sheriff's deputy. And our final girl of course needs friends who are the exact opposite of her. Triple check in horny, pot-smoking friends Lisa (Cindy Weintraub), Sherry (Lisa Dunsheath), and Carl (David Sederholm). When the carnage starts, we have the horny friends going down in intimate moments, the final girl being chased upstairs and her being unable to open doors. There's the scene of her hiding with the killer close by, so at that exact moment, a rat enters her space and almost makes her scream. We also have a killer who won't stay down, even when suffering wounds that should have killed them.

Surrounding that, however, is a film that's interested in more than simply being a paint-by-numbers slasher. It's a slow burn that focuses on its heroes more than its villain, and with an intriguing backstory to set up the film's plot. The Prowler starts with a World War II newsreel of troops coming home before showing us a Dear John letter one soldier receives, in which his girlfriend, Rosemary, breaks up with him while he's off fighting for freedom. Any good slasher needs a good intro kill scene and The Prowler gives us just that. It's 1945 in Avalon, California (it was actually filmed in Cape May, New Jersey), and graduates at the local college are going to a dance. Rosemary (Joy Glaccum) and her new beau, Roy (Timothy Wahrer), sneak outside for a little alone time in a gazebo. Obviously, right as they are about to get busy, the lights of the gazebo go down and we see a pair of boots and a pitchfork come into the frame, slowly making its way toward them. Rosemary gets one look at a man dressed in military fatigues, with a helmet atop his head, and a mesh hood covering his face. Does she know who this is the moment before she and Roy meet their end? The killer certainly knows her, as he puts a rose in Rosemary's lifeless hand.

The Prowler doesn't go overboard on kills. A total of eight people die, which is nothing for today's slashers where Michaels Myers can kill that many people in one scene during the newest Halloween trilogy. The film makes its kills count. Rosemary and Roy are a double death, with them both being taken out by the same thrust from the pitchfork. It's a bloody kill, but it holds back, as the scene wants us to put together who is dying rather than how gory it is.

The moment Sherry gets naked in the shower 35 years later, in the same place the gazebo murders happened, you know she's a goner. But first, her boyfriend, Carl, has gotta go. When he steps into the bedroom to undress, the killer grabs him from behind and shoves a bayonet into his head, straight down from the top of the skull and out through his chin. We may not care very much about Carl, but we care about how he dies, for his death is brutal and extended. Director Joseph Zito, whose next film would be the best in the Friday the 13th franchise, 1984's Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, stays on Carl. The opening kill is quick and close up, not showing too much, but here, Zito pulls back and makes us witness Carl's suffering as blood pours down his face and his eyeballs go white, all the while his body shaking. 1970s and 80s goremeister Tom Savini, who made audiences sick with Dawn of the Dead and Friday the 13th, was the man behind crafting the bloodshed. Because of this, Carl's death is one of the best in slasher history. Right after, Sherry is impaled by the pitchfork in the shower by the same GI-looking man from 1945. Again, he leaves a rose in her lifeless hand.

The next kill in The Prowler has Lisa swimming in a pool at night in just her bra and panties. Geesh, doesn't she know what kind of movie she's in?! This kill is the most famous from the movie (a still of it was used on the film's poster). When Lisa goes to get out of the pool, the prowler is there. He kicks her in the face and back into the pool. Stunned, she eventually tries to get back out, only for the killer to jump out of the water and slit her throat. Zito holds onto this kill as well with a Savini effect that shows the blade going deeper and deeper into Lisa's neck, with rose-red blood pumping into the pool water. When a chaperone finds the aftermath, she too must die with a knife to the neck.

The prowler is a creepy masked figure, but we don't focus on him excessively. Zito knew to hide him and focus on the characters, specifically Pam and Mark, in their attempt to locate the killer. The Prowler aims to be a bit of a whodunit, but in this, it fails. We understand that it's going to be the same killer from 35 years ago who was never captured, now out to recreate his crimes when the college holds another dance. There should be a suspect list, but there isn't. The killer is obvious the moment Sheriff George Fraser (Farley Granger) goes on a fishing trip, leaving Mark in charge. George looks to be in his 50s (the same age a man serving in World War II would be now), and now he's conveniently disappeared as the killings start.

While the reveal is predictable, the lead-up to it is fun, with an intense final chase scene involving the prowler, Pam, and Deputy Mark. Mark is attacked and put out of commission (don't worry, he lives) so the final girl can now be completely on her own. During one part of the chase scene, Pam turns the corner to find the prowler standing there. "I'm ready for our date, Rose," he says beneath the mask. This is an extreme rarity in slashers, to have the killer in a mask actually speak. The prowler is going to kill Pam, but before he can, Otto, who works as a janitor, saves the day and shoots the prowler dead, blood bursting out from his fatigues. As Pam looks at Otto with gratitude, the prowler, of course, comes to and shoots Otto dead. After another tussle, he removes his mask, and like we've known the whole time, the killer is revealed to be the Sheriff. They then fight over his gun before Pam gets it under his chin and pulls the trigger. The prowler's head explodes in one of the subgenre's better villain deaths. There's no coming back for a sequel after that.

As slashers are known to do, The Prowler goes for a final stinger, like the hand popping out of the grave in the last moments of Carrie, or young Jason leaping out of the water at the end of Friday the 13th. Here, Pam goes upstairs to her dorm where the shower is still running. She slowly opens it and not only is Sherry there, but so is Carl, now hanging, his eyes still bulging white. It's then that he comes to for one final jump scare before dying. How he lived after having a knife shoved through his head, who knows, but it's a stinger that aims to be more than just a jump scare. So often slashers show the final girl happy and optimistic at the end of a film. The Scream films are bad at this. It's like they've completely forgotten that all their friends are dead. In The Prowler, we get no happy ending. Pam may be alive, but almost everyone she cared about is gone. The final image tells us she'll have to live with that.

Though we never get to know too much about the killer behind the mask, The Prowler tells us enough, hinting at a man destroyed by war, a man forgotten who can't get over the pain. There's something there about PTSD, but the movie doesn't explain it. Instead, we get to see it and figure it out for ourselves. There were better slashers from the 1980s, but The Prowler is certainly one of the better ones. It had the misfortune of getting lost in the immense shuffle of the time. Still, it's the most underrated for how well it leaned into the tropes, and for how well it tried to create something different too.

Shawn Van Horn is a Senior Features Writer for Collider. He is also a Features Writer & Editor and a News Writer for The Sportster. He has written two novels and is neck deep in the querying trenches. He is also a short story maker upper and poet with a dozen publishing credits to his name. He lives in small town Ohio, where he likes to watch rasslin' and movies.