TEENAGE WASTELAND: THE SLASHER MOVIE UNCUT

J.A. Kerswell

In case you didn’t know, Justin Kerswell is the force behind Hysteria Lives!, about the biggest slasher devoted website around now Slasherpool has vanished quicker than a horny couple at Camp Crystal Lake.

I’ve been a casual acquaintance of his a few years: I gave him my VHS of Dead Girls, he scarred me with Satan’s Blade. We’re even. Weirdly, the author biog bit in the back of the book says that Justin is a vegan. And this is Vegan Voorhees. But I’m not a vegan, merely an animal-loving 85% vegetarian (for shaaame!) Weirder still, years ago he lived in Brighton, while I was out due west and then he moved due west and I moved to Brighton. I’m pretty sure if we ever met we might both drop dead in some Drew Barrymore Doppelgangy way.

Anyway, the book. “You should have written this!” my friend Lorna told me when she found my leafing through Teenage Wasteland a couple of weeks ago. Well…not really. As much as a slasher film geek I am, I’ve never committed fully to the cause. That’s to say, I’ve not picked up a lot of memorabilia aside from a handful of posters and my beloved Jason doll. Justin Kerswell, on t’other hand, could start a museum. Frankly, if I had all the posters, quads and lobby cards he does, I’d never be happy until I had enough walls to emblazon them on, dancing among them dementedly like that chick from To All a Goodnight.

Furthermore – and this is going to make me look lazy – there’s a few chapters devoted to the prototype era of the slasher film. Psycho, fine. Peeping Tom, great. And then it goes into the Italian giallo ouevre. Being part Italian I should rightly be proud of this kind of heritage but it’s practically alien to me. I couldn’t do it. So no, Lorna, I could not have written this.

What impresses most about Teenage Wasteland is the product itself: the book is beautiful. The covers fold out to reveal pristine recreations of posters for Friday the 13th (at the front) and Terror Train (at the back); there are numerous foreign and domestic prints, almost all of it’s in colour and it’s as stunning as a Kevin Spirtas calendar.

It’s so great that there’s some tomes on the genre now, coming from my hazy early days of addiction in the 90s where there was nothing but a few scathing mentions in almanacs and the Dika and Clover academic texts, I genuinely believed nobody else watched these films. With comparative ease Teenage Wasteland outperforms the competition just by the nature of its evident love for it.

Criticisms? None really – OK so I noticed a typo – it’s a journal of a love affair between man and film. Suffice to say, after this the world doesn’t need another overview of the genre’s golden years. What could it possibly say that hasn’t been touched on here? A guide to shot-on-video films? Ugh. Perhaps in a decade or so’s time it’ll be right for a retrospective on Scream and its disciples but I think I’m gonna stick with fiction, that way I can be lazy and blame it on art!