This isn’t my first foray into the history of the Slasher film genre.

I still do love me some Slashers, but something like 90% of my experience with them comes in the form of franchises. Your Halloweens or Fridays The 13th or A Nightmares On Elm Street or even a Maniac Cop or three. I dig them, but I tend to dig them in bunches, with recurring villainy hunting down teenage victims.

I’ve actually managed to watch precious few single outing Slashers. Not because I’m avoiding them or anything–I’ve still seen two or three handfuls–I guess I just prefer their extended brethren. It happens! I do need to expand my horizons, though, and get more into the Slashers that somehow did not beget a series of related cinematic outings.

To that end, imagine my joy when I was scrolling through Shudder, and I found today’s offering to you: The Burning.

The Burning is a movie that I, as a genre fan, have heard about a’plenty, but I had never managed to get around to watching. It was hard to find or I was too lazy to look far enough, but it just always escaped my grasp while being this constant niggle in the back of my brain. “Hey! Watch The Burning sometime!”, it would say. And I’d kind of ignore it and trudge on with my life.

Until today! Thank you again, Shudder!

The Burning starts off like some slasher before it by flashing back to the past. There, we see a group of school-aged children at a summer camp decide to play a prank on Cropsy, the old man caretaker of the camp. They set up a flaming, maggot-infested skull in his little shack, then stand outside and bang on his window until he wakes up. When he does, he’s panic-stricken at the sight of the skull and knocks it over, setting himself and his shack ablaze!

Cropsy is taken to the local medical facility for care, and he stays there, still alive but very badly burned, for five years before the hospital goes, “Well we’ve done all we can. Back to society with you!”.

Cropsy’s mental health is ill-prepared for the outside world, though, and the first thing he does is kill a prostitute.

After this prologue, we zip over to summer camp and see a fresh group of counselors and kiddos enjoying their time away from school. Little do they realize that Cropsy is making his way back to the scene of his disfigurement, determined to take revenge on anyone there that he finds…

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ For a 1980’s slasher, the character work and acting is actually pretty strong. The characters have a full sense of selves, and I actually knew probably about 8-10 of their names the whole way through. Dave, Todd, Eddie, Glazer, Sally, Tiger, Woodstock, Alfred… they all seemed like decent movie characters to me even though slasher victims are often so negligible and ill-formed.

Some, like Glazer, are stereotypes, sure, but they still came across as vibrant and memorable. The Burning does a great job building up human beings for you to root for and hope to see survive. It’s definitely something you appreciate when you are used to a hundred other versions of these characters from dozens of other films, and you don’t even know their names as you are watching them! They are just meat.

+ It’s Slasher 101 for its era. A summer camp for kids. A tale of revenge. Some light female toplessness. Tom Savini and his effects work. It hits all the right notes to be satisfying comfort food. And it does so with pretty good filmmaking (we’ll get to its one flaw in a minute…) and what feels like a genuine sense of care for the final product.

For all I know, this was slap-dashed together to capitalize on a trend in the wake of Halloween and Friday the 13th to make some money, but it at least feels like everyone involved was trying their best to make a quality picture. The effort shines through, and this is a decently superior effort compared to its contemporaries.

– There are not a ton, but there are some occasional scenes shot in the dark or at night, and the lighting is atrocious. The screen essentially goes black for seconds at a time. Some filmmakers lose the ability to shoot a coherent or visible scene because they are trying to ramp up the spookiness factor or the tension. You’ve got to be able to make things eerie, but also accessible to your audience. When the rest of this picture was handled so well, I couldn’t help but be disappointed by this aspect.

– Jason Alexander–Yes! George Costanza is in this!–being the biggest star of the picture and one of the strongest actors in it, it’s very weird that he gets written out of the third act and climax. He just… leaves the action. And it’s not like he was a cameo; he was one of the most focused upon characters of the first two acts. The camera clearly sees his future ahead of him and just loves the guy. Which… again… makes it all the more bewildering that the screenplay just sends his character away during the movie’s height.

OVERALL

I’m pre-disposed to like a bad Slasher and to outright love a good one. And The Burning is absolutely a good one. Between this and [the admittedly weirdly similar in some ways] Friday The 13th Part 2 that came out literally one week earlier in 1981, you were feasting if you were an early adopter of the genre. I’m glad I finally got around to watching this flick!