‘He Knows You’re Alone’: the low-budget slasher that gave Tom Hanks his movie debut
Slashers are one of the most popular horror subgenres, with movies like Halloween, Friday 13th, Scream and A Nightmare on Elm Street remaining some of the most popular scary movies ever made. The original slasher movie has been widely debated, with some citing Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho as the first.
The film, released in 1960, was one of the first to show graphic violence, with a masked, knife-wielding killer acting as the antagonist, an essential component of the slasher movie. However, Psycho might be considered more of a proto-slasher, with the genre only beginning to take its true form in the early 1970s with works like Black Christmas and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Both films feature the common slasher trope of a final girl outliving or escaping the killer, using the framework as a conduit for strong social themes. Yet, it wasn’t until John Carpenter released Halloween that the slasher genre truly took off, echoing early exploitation pictures but with considerably more graphic gore and violence. Carpenter’s movie, starring Jamie Lee Curtis as an innocent babysitter who finds herself tormented by a masked killer, was a huge success.
Set on Halloween night, the movie established many iconic horror tropes in mainstream consciousness, such as the killer successfully murdering the sexually active characters while the virgins survive. The film has spawned an extensive franchise and is credited with inciting the wave of slashers which came to dominate the 1980s.
While some of these were big hits, such as Friday the 13th, others were negatively received, although that didn’t stop them from being widely viewed due to their surefire guarantee of graphic violence and nudity. Many of these movies lacked originality, following a stereotypical slasher template in the hopes of attracting an audience.
The 1980 film He Knows You’re Alone was one of the first movies to try and replicate Halloween, with critics arguing that the director, Armand Mastroianni, had simply borrowed all of his ideas from Carpenter. Despite its overwhelmingly negative reviews, the movie grossed $5million in the United States against a budget of just $250,000.
He Knows You’re Alone focuses on a killer who only targets women engaged to be married. Meanwhile, a detective whose wife-to-be was killed years earlier arrives to investigate. While the movie is one of many slashers that failed to achieve the heights of Halloween, it is responsible for inspiring Wes Craven’s Scream 2.
In the opening of the 1997 film, Omar Epps’ Phil gets murdered in the bathroom of a movie theatre before Jada Pinkett Smith’s Maureen is stabbed inside the screening. However, this is lifted from the opening of He Knows You’re Alone, where a bride-to-be is followed into the movie theatre bathroom before she is murdered in front of the cinema screen.
The movie is also responsible for giving Tom Hanks his first film role, playing the small part of Elliot. It would only take Hanks four years following his role in the low-budget movie to land the starring role in the Oscar-nominated romantic comedy Splash alongside Daryl Hannah.
