Stephen King names the worst slasher movie in cinema history: “Oh, my god, that’s awful”
His name might be synonymous with horror, but Stephen King doesn’t write slasher stories. His bibliography features plenty of death, despair, and dismemberment, but he’s never been one to craft tales that feature a character along the lines of a Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, or Freddy Krueger.
It’s been one of cinema’s most popular genres for almost half a century, and it’s easy to see why. Audiences will always be drawn towards films that promise to scare them out of their seats, and fear is one of those visceral reactions that brings the house down in a crowded theatre.
From a studio’s perspective, it also helps that they’re usually pretty cheap to make, easy to turn around, and can typically be relied on to turn a tidy profit. The downside is that the market has been saturated with them, and there are just as many shoddy slashers as there are successful ones.
King has no doubt seen his fair share as a lifelong cinephile who favours everything from 1950s B-flicks to modern-day classics, which means he too has sat through some shite. However, there’s only one that ranks at the very bottom of the barrel, with his general malaise to the subgenre in general becoming clear in Feast of Fear: Conversations with Stephen King.
“I think that some of the people who go and see the hacker movies are also people who would like to go out and do that exact same thing and don’t have the guts to do it,” he said. “That is to say, they would like to get a woman alone and probably… You know, some of them are pretty tabloidish films. They’re pretty graphic and they’re blunt. There don’t seem to be any real twists.”
While it’s probably a good thing King ended his train of thought before going too far down those unsavoury tracks, he reserved special ire for a 1978 slasher that was briefly outlawed in the United Kingdom at the height of the ‘Video Nasty’ panic for its graphic depictions of gore and violence.
“The worst one I ever saw was The Toolbox Murders,” he explained. “There’s a guy who gets a girl at one point with a nailer, one of these gadgets, right in the forehead. But there’s a part of me that reacts to that and says, ‘Oh, my god, that’s awful. Let’s do it again.'”
Even the worst slashers triggered King’s darkest impulses, and in his estimation, they didn’t come worse than The Toolbox Murders. Director Dennis Donnelly’s picture was just one of many movies released during the time that claimed to be inspired by actual events, but as was often the case, no proof was ever provided that it was genuinely the case.
As the self-descriptive title would suggest, The Toolbox Murders does indeed follow a deranged serial killer who commits murders using the contents of his toolbox. That’s all anyone needs to know, really, because even the faintest of familiarity with the slasher film should outline what happens throughout the 93-minute orgy of brutality.
