What Is The SLASHER Genre?

(https://levizilla.wordpress.com/junk/sep2009/) 
This website summarises what the slasher genre is: 

"The slasher genre is a sub-genre of horror. Some critics refer to the genre as 'dead teenager movies', 'slice and dice films' or 'gross out films' (Wong, 2006)". Slasher films do typically contain high levels of violence, blood and gore and almost always contain a group of teenagers as the protagonists. The antagonist is always a killer, who sometimes wears a mask (as in the films 'Halloween' and 'Scream'), is usually a male wearing all dark clothing and kills the protagonists of the film one by one throughout the course of the film. Alfred Hitchcock's Pscycho (1960), is considered to be a slasher film, since it matches the traditional narrative formula of the slasher genre". 

Some of the first films to be defined as slasher films, came ten years later in the mid seventies. The first box office success was John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), a movie about a babysitter and her friends who are stalked, and most of them killed, by an escaped killer named Michael Myers. Similar films began to be produced including Friday the 13th (1980), a film with a narrative similar to Halloween but with much more gruesome death scenes. Prom Night (1980) was another release that kept a similar narrative structure, but added a 'whodunit' aspect to the film. This left the audience to guess the identity of the masked killer. Both films were made on a small budget and were financial successes. This convinced Hollywood Studios to continue creating more and so, the slasher genre was born. 
This website states that many of the slasher films were released in the 1970's (see list below for examples of Slasher films and their release dates). They all had in common a similar narrative - stalking, gruesome killing, .....but Prom Night, according to the website, had a new dimension 'whodunit' which deliberately left the audience in doubt who the masked killer(s) were.  The website informs us that the films were "made on a small budget"; also they were successful in finanancial terms.  For this reason, it is stated that the Hollywood Studios continued to create more.  From this "the slasher genre was born".

This was the start of the slasher genre and from then hundreds of films have been made using the same narrative approach...

First example was Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978). This was a film 


Examples of Slasher films:

1. Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960)
2. Friday The 13th (Cunningham, 1980)
3. Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)
4. Scream (Craven, 1993)
5. Scary Movie (Wayans, 2000)
6. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974)
7. The Slumber Party Massacre (Jones, 1982)
8. Babysitter Wanted (Manasseri, 2008)
9. Prom Night (Lynch, 1980)
10. Bride Of Chucky (Yu, 1998)