Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film
- brisk
- intimate
Neutral, kinetic, measured documentary / slasher, grounded in texture. Ambivalent, intimate, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →This historical and critical look at slasher films, which includes dozens of clips, begins with Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Prom Night. The films' directors, writers, producers, and special effects creators comment on the films' making and success. During the Reagan years, the films get gorier, budgets get smaller, and their appeal wanes. Then, Nightmare on Elm Street revives the genre. Jump to the late 90s, when Scream brings humor and TV stars into the mix.
Our read · Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film (2006) reads as a neutral, kinetic, grounded documentary · slasher entry — measured in intensity, intimate in scope, measured in temperature, ambivalent in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
More info & search links
The shape of Going to Pieces
What watching it is actually like.
“You want clip-heavy history of why slasher films rose, fell, and mattered.”
Skip it tonight — Skip if gory horror clips or talking-head docs will bore or disturb you.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
What does your Movie DNA look like?
Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.
Calibrate yourself