Stock Slasher

"One shudders to imagine what inhuman thoughts lie behind that mask... what dreams of chronic and sustained cruelty." ^note From left to right: Michael Myers, "Leatherface" Sawyer, Jason Voorhees.

"All people want to see nowadays is men running around in ski masks, hacking up young virgins."

— Peter Vincent, Fright Night (1985)

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) was one of the first true Slasher Movies, and its most prominent monster with villainous traits — Leatherface, the hulking, voiceless, chainsaw-wielding cannibal in a mask made of human skin — became an instant pop-culture icon. It wouldn't be until the end of the decade that the character's true influence would begin to be seen, however — first with the blank white face of Michael Myers in 1978, and then the machete-wielding Jason Voorhees in 1981.

Since then, Leatherface, Michael and Jason have inspired countless imitators in the slasher genre and beyond. Though their ubiquity in the genre would lessen following one Freddy Krueger's shakeup of the slasher world, these characters remain synonymous with "slasher villain" to this day.

Your average character of the Stock Slasher archetype will usually exhibit the following characteristics:

• They are usually tall, towering over their victims. They are also very robust, able to return from or outright shrug off injuries that would likely mortally wound an ordinary person, and apparently cannot be stopped once they begin pursuing someone. This is sometimes justified by paranormal abilities, but just as often they appear to be human. Because of this, they are almost always male.
• They wear a unique mask, or are severely deformed — often both. (The mask will often be white, or a simple burlap sack.)
• They will have a unique, distinctive or oversized weapon (it will most likely be bladed; Why else would they be called a stock slasher?). More often than not they will avoid using firearms, as a good slasher will always get up close and personal to get their hands dirty with their victims.
• They rarely talk, if ever. For additional creepiness, they may have a loud raspy breath.

See also Hockey Mask and Chainsaw, which is the result of this trope getting a Shallow Parody, and Sackhead Slasher, which frequently (but not always) overlaps with this trope. Compare and contrast with Our Slashers Are Different, which details a bigger variety of supernatural monsters that technically fall within the moniker of "slasher".

---

Examples:

Advertising

• Parodied in this advertisement for Gorilla Glue, with the setup being one such slasher with an axe and hockey mask chasing a jock through a forest... only for his blade to fly off as he prepares to finish his victim off, causing him to complain about it. And once the gorilla gives the slasher Gorilla Glue to repair his weapon, the jock instructs him on how to use it.

Films — Animation

• Scooby-Doo: Camp Scare: The Woodsman is as tall as or taller than the cast, determined, and green-faced (presumably with decay). He rarely speaks, though he more frequently lets loose with an Evil Laugh. He stalks Camp Little Moose with an axe, though he isn't as successful as typical slashers because the movie isn't straight-up horror.

Films — Live-Action

• Axe Murdering with Hackley: Obviously, Hackley is one, being an Expy of Jason Voorhees and all. There's also the other employees at RKS, like Rival, who's an expy of Ghostface.
• Bad Apples: The two girls who fill the role of killers in this movie are always seen wearing masks, and while they do talk at some points, they don't say much throughout the movie.
• Deconstructed (and then Reconstructed) in Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. Leslie himself constructs the perfect persona: he's a tall, imposing, masked figure who is able to walk implacably towards his kill. However, he carefully takes the documentary crew through his preparations, collecting all the weapons, explaining how he has to do cardio in order to make sure he can switch between walking and running when the victim looks away, and inventing a backstory that he is secretly related to the girl who is supposed to be his Final Girl. When Leslie actually puts his plan into action in the final third of the movie, all these aspects are shown going off without a meaningful hitch. He comes back from the dead while in the mortuary at the end.
• Candyman combines this trope with the Bloody Mary urban legend. While Daniel Robitaille doesn't have a deformed or masked face, beneath his coath he's nothing but a rotting, bee-infested corpse from the neck down.
• In The Final Girls, the protagonists find themselves trapped in a B-grade Friday the 13th knockoff called Camp Bloodbath, where they are forced to contend with Billy Murphy, who's effectively Jason Voorhees in all the ways that matter. The protagonists are forced to use their knowledge of slasher tropes to contend with Billy, who as a movie character is still subject to the conventions of the genre, including only being able to be killed by the Final Girl.
• Frankenstein (1931) could be considered the Ur-Example. Its portrayal of Frankenstein's Monster carries many of the traits (enormous size, unique facial features, lack of elaborate speech) that would later be picked up by Leatherface and his many clones.
• The Blissfield Butcher in Freaky starts the film as this, played by the 6' 5" Vince Vaughn wearing a leathery mask and murdering teenagers until he gets a hold of a mystical dagger known as La Dola which he can use to swap bodies with a person he stabs. He does so with petite blonde teenager Millie Kessler (played by the 5' 5" Kathryn Newton) and then goes on a rampage in her body around her school murdering students and teachers alike, choosing to go for a Lady in Red aesthetic for her by dressing in a red leather jacket, skinny jeans, and matching red lipstick. All the while, Millie is trapped in the body of the hulking Butcher, which she occasionally uses to her advantage to harmlessly intimidate bullies.
• Friday the 13th has Jason Voorhees, one of the three main Trope Codifiers together with Leatherface and Michael Myers, having all the traits of being a masked, silent, unstoppable, supernatural Serial Killer who wields a machete as his weapon. Interestingly, this was averted in the first film, as the killer turns out to be his mother Pamela, an ordinary middle-aged woman. Subsequent films would focus on Jason and make him one of the most iconic versions of this trope, laying the groundwork for many films of the genre, especially after he got his iconic hockey mask in Part III.
• While the below-mentioned The Texas Chain Saw Massacre established this trope, Halloween (1978) is the one that made it a pattern. Its villain Michael Myers sports a twisted Captain Kirk mask, never speaks, has superhuman endurance and resistance to pain, and wields a carving knife as a weapon. The only attribute he lacked was size, being played in the first two films by normal-sized stuntmen^note The 5' 10" Nick Castle in the first film and the 5' 8½" Dick Warlock in the second who were paired with the fairly tall Jamie Lee Curtis as the Final Girl — and even then, later films cast taller stuntmen in the part, likely due to the influence of other films on this list, especially the aforementioned Friday the 13th.
• Hayride and its sequel have Ol' Pitchfork (not to be confused with the below-mentioned Pitchfork), a Sackhead Slasher who wields a giant pitchfork. He's a Boyfriend-Blocking Dad who would threaten anyone who came near his daughter, and is now on the hunt for the man that she ran off with.
• Hell Fest has The Other, a silent masked killer whose appearance not only invokes the Stock Slasher, but blends in perfectly with the aesthetic of the titular park, allowing him to commit murders in plain sight while seeming like its All Part of the Show. The end of the film adds a dose of They Look Just Like Everyone Else! by revealing he's a suburban dad who lives with his daughter, who is seemingly unaware of his nightly activities.
• Madman's villain "Madman" Marz, a farmer-turned-axe murderer with a mutilated face.
• The titular Maniac Cop is a bulletproof, horribly scarred, possibly-undead serial killer. Unusually for this trope, Cordell wields firearms in addition to an array of melee weapons.
• Pitchfork: The killer for this movie is the titular Pitchfork, aka, Ben Holister, who attacks and kills a number of people at the barnyard party. Pitchfork wears a mask apparently made from animal flesh, dirty brown pants and shoes (he doesn't wear a shirt), and wields the rusted head of a pitchfork as his weapon, which is attached to the stump of his left hand with barbed wire. Like Leatherface, he's a member of a family composed of psychos.
• Playing With Dolls: The killer in this movie is a man who wears dirty clothes, including a full-head mask that's torn and worn with barbed wire wrapped around it. He's also capable of Offscreen Teleportation.
• Prometheus: Chemical A0-3959X.91 – 15 mutates Fifeld into a Nightmare Faced humanoid who wanders back to the titular ship and promptly begins killing everyone in sight with brute strength. He also proves a bit of an Implacable Man, as it takes being shot, set on fire and run over to put him down.
• Scarred: The killer in this movie is Jonah Kandie, a large imposing man who had his face carved up by his dad when he was a kid. Now he spends his time on the old homestead wearing a mask made to look like a scarred face, and hanging out with his friend Tiny. Oh, and killing anyone who gets close to his property.
• Ghostface from Scream deconstructs the trope. When first appearing in Scream (1996), initially, it's played straight: a single, presumably male figure in a black costume with a screaming mask who implacably hunts, stalks, and carves up his prey. However, when unmasked, it's revealed that part of the reason for Ghostface's ubiquity is that there are actually two killers, switching out when time allows, and that both are actually covered in bruises and cuts from where their victims fought back. Later films twist the Nigh Invulnerable immortal nature that many iconic killers have by turning Ghostface into a Legacy Character, being a symbol that numerous people don, granting a degree of pseudo-immortality to the killer.
• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is the Trope Maker thanks to Leatherface, a hulking, cannibalistic attack dog brute of a man with the mental capacity of a child who wields a sledgehammer and a chainsaw as his weapons of choice and wears a mask made of human skin. Uniquely, though, he's only The Heavy to the rest of the Sawyer family rather than operating alone.
• In Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, the true villain, Chad, ends up looking like a stereotypical disfigured slasher after half of his face is burned in an accidental fire.

Literature

• Kazuo Kiriyama in Battle Royale, though the elements actually vary between the movie, book, and manga (with the latter being the one where Kiriyama appears more clearly to be modelled after a slasher villain). His villainy is emphasised in the film, where he joined the Program intentionally and knowingly. He's shown to being better than everyone at almost everything, brilliantly intelligent, and very, very strong; in the manga, he has a very high pain tolerance, which causes him to seem to be an Implacable Man (something which is more clearly attributed in the book to him having stolen a bulletproof vest from one of his early victims), he is always blank-faced, and he kills the most number of students, helped out by the fact that he got a machine gun.
• How to Survive a Horror Movie refers to this as the "Strong, Silent Type", the first of five different types of slasher villain. His main weakness is his singlemindedness causing him to be very easily led into traps. The "Half-Retarded Hillbilly" also has elements of this, combined with Hillbilly Horrors.

Live-Action TV

• Arrowverse
  • Arrow: Seven 7 features Stanley Dover / The Star City Slayer. While he is mostly presented as normal man during Oliver's stay in Slabside Prison, after escaping he returns to his routes as a Serial Killer who wields a knife and wears a gas mask. His A Day in the Limelight episode invokes a lot of slasher tropes, where his hideout is a creepy abandoned house where he is shown sneaking up and attacking one of the heroes like a slasher villain.
  • Legends of Tomorrow: "Slay Anything": Kathey Myers / Prom Night Slasher blatantly invokes this trope, with her entire character directly alluding to many famous slasher villains. Her surname and white mask are taken from Michael Myers, she's killing out of love for her son like Jason and Pamela. Her son's name is "Freddy" and she also possesses telekinetic powers upon resurrection. She's notably an Invincible Villain who isn't killed like any of the other Encores and is only defeated by being Ret-Gone.
• Murdoch Mysteries: In the Halloween Episode "I Know What You Did Last Autumn", the Clown Killer is a tall, silent figure in a Pierrot costume, with a white papier mache mask. Unusually for the trope she's female.
• Raised by Wolves (2020): Otho, a former Mithras cleric and Tempest's rapist (along with several other women) is a hulking, menacing brute who seems to have devolved into savagery. He evokes a slasher villain's appearance with the spiked metal mask and chains he's forced to wear as punishment, and he demonstrates his brutality by tearing off an android's head. He even obtains superhuman strength, becoming a true monster for all intents and purposes.
• Scream: The TV Series: Despite having two other masked killers, the clearest example of the stock slasher is the one who started it all: Brandon James. He was born with horrible facial deformities that led to him being bullied by the entire town and wearing a surgical mask, and he went on a killing spree of other teenagers at a dance. Despite his presumed death twenty years ago, the series plays around with the possibility that he's still alive, which is confirmed but through less supernatural methods: Maggie helped him to survive and hid him out at his family's pig farm.
• The Walking Dead: Beta, the Dragon for Alpha the Whisperer leader. He's a mountain of a man in a Badass Longcoat, who never reveals his face willingly (hiding it behind a mask made from zombie skin), and seems to have patterned himself after classic slashers; he stalks other survivors through woods and swampland and kills using a trademark pair of knives.

Music

• Eminem's Slim Shady character is sometimes presented as one of these, with a Hockey Mask and Chainsaw, especially on Relapse. But he deviates from the template in a few significant ways — he's small-framed with a cuteness to him, and he also combines a few more Hitchcockian traits like his horrible oedipus complex, his Creepy Crossdresser aspect and his ability to appear disarming and normal until it's time to murder his victims. He's also pretty talkative, with a few songs dedicated to him monologuing to people he's murdering.

Professional Wrestling

• Erick Rowan during his days with the Wyatt Family. The group's brute enforcer, huge and clad in a Michael Myers-esque jumpsuit (though with the sleeves torn off), Erick also favored creepy sheep masks that became more disturbing as time went on.

Tabletop Games

• Hunter: The Vigil: "Masks" are preternatural Serial Killers in the vein of Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. They either have a mask or a Frozen Face; all attacks on them are reduced to Scratch Damage; they can fight on past incapacitating injuries; and they can't communicate or even understand much speech.

Video Games

• As a pastiche of slasher movies, Dead by Daylight of course has a number of these — Evan MacMillan, "The Trapper", is loosely based on Jason Voorhees, while Max Thompson Jr., "The Hillbilly", is an extremely direct pastiche of Leatherface. Interestingly, the later presence of Michael and Leatherface as Guest Fighters makes this a case of Expy Coexistence.
• Maniaxe, one of Kid Chameleon's many forms, is an axe-wielding maniac in a mask, with the addition of a Viking berserker aesthetic.
• The Hunter from Little Nightmares II would not feel out of place in a slasher film. He wears a burlap over his head with a single hole for his eyes, reminiscent of Jason Voorhees. He lives alone in the wood and hunt children for fun. He also has a favored weapon but unlike most slasher portrayals, he uses a gun.
• Manhunt:
  • The protagonist James Earl Cash is what happens when you combine this with the Action Genre Hero Guy. He's a big, buff, and bald man with the Face of a Thug and three names who did something to get himself sentenced to death, and was spared lethal injection only so that Lionel Starkweather could use him as a killer in his Snuff Film operation. While he is a Noble Demon who only kills the bad guys and tries to protect the good, he's still a brutal and unflinching murderer who speaks very few lines and prefers to fight using stealth, which allows him to perform gratuitously violent execution moves that kill enemies in one blow. Certain levels do have him getting into shootouts, but otherwise, guns and ammo are very rare to come by, meaning that melee combat is the name of the game. While he doesn't wear a mask, many of the people he kills do.
  • The Final Boss Piggsy is a cannibalistic serial killer who's completely nude barring the severed head of a pig that he wears as a unique mask, and he speaks in a brief, disorganized way under the belief that he's an actual pig, having been driven to insanity by overindulging in violence. He's extremely fast, wields a dulled chainsaw as his main weapon, can withstand several executions (with wooden spikes and glass), and can kill Cash very quickly with 2-3 strikes of his chainsaw, making him one of the deadliest opponents in the game. He's also confronted in the claustrophobic attic of Starkweather's mansion, where he hides in wait behind corners before lunging out at you.
• Resident Evil:
  • Resident Evil 2 and its remake feature the T-00 (aka "Mr. X"), an enormous mutant who relentlessly pursues protagonists Leon and Claire. Unlike most examples of this trope, the T-00 doesn't have a weapon; he doesn't need one.
  • Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (and its remake) see the main protagonist Jill Valentine pursued by the Nemesis, a modified variant of the T-00; his signature weapon in this case is a rocket launcher designed specifically for him to use.
  • Resident Evil 4 has Doctor Salvadore, a much tougher version of the villager. He is the same height as other villagers, though heavily built, barely speaks, wears a potato sack with eyeholes cut in it on his head, overalls, and wields a chainsaw (of course).
• Silent Hill:
  • Silent Hill 2 introduces the iconic "Pyramid Head", a Humanoid Abomination with a deformed head under an enormous pyramid-shaped metal helmet that wields an enormous scissor blade that it drags along the ground behind it. Particularly in his first appearance, he's unusually scrawny for a slasher villain, but that doesn't make him any less dangerous. The reason he won't stop pursuing protagonist James Sunderland is that he's the embodiment of James's guilt over the death of his wife.
  • Silent Hill: Origins has the Butcher, a very direct Pyramid Head expy that wields a giant meat cleaver and spends its time hunting down other monsters. It wears a metal half-mask, reflecting its duality with the protagonist, Travis.
  • The Bogeyman from Silent Hill: Downpour takes the slasher influence even further, being a gas-masked hulk in heavy waterproof clothing that wields a massive hammer made of a cinderblock.
• Subverted with Rick Taylor of Splatterhouse, a towering, muscular man in a Jason-esque skull mask who commits incredible violence... but unlike his inspiration, he's actually a Nice Guy who's simply out to save his girlfriend (with the encouragement of the Terror Mask).
• The Pyro, one of the nine playable classes in Team Fortress 2, is presented in this way in their Meet the Pyro spotlight video: a mumbling, gas-masked serial killer wielding an axe and flamethrower, who even their own teammates are afraid of. In their own head, on the other hand, the Pyro is living in a Sugar Bowl and spreading joy and rainbows with their whimsical devices.
• Until Dawn features "the Psycho," a tall, bulky man in coveralls who wears a clown (or zombie) mask and occasionally wields a machete. Despite his appearance, he prefers complex traps with Sadistic Choices over mindless brute force, which puts him closer to Jigsaw. He's implied to be a disgruntled employee of the Washington family. Turns out, however, that he's actually Josh Washington playing an elaborate, and exceptionally cruel, prank on his friends as revenge for them indirectly causing the deaths of his sisters. The slasher elements are a deliberate homage In-Universe. What's more, he never intended for anybody to actually die, and the fact that they are is an early clue that there's something else on the mountain stalking them all.

Western Animation

• Being an Expy of Jason Voorhees, The Creep from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) episode "Within The Woods" fits all of the tropes associated with the typical slasher villain; he's a large, implacable, monstrously-deformed Swamp Monster with a humanoid physique dressed in a pair of men's overalls, lurking in the woods to pick off the cast one-by-one so that he could suck out the mutagen in the Turtle's DNA, devolving them into dog-like plant mutant lumps on the ground. He even wears a sack over his head before replacing it with Casey's hockey-mask.
• Total Drama: One of the challenges on Total Drama Island was to survive the night while being chased by a horror movie villain (played by Chef). The campers were being hyped up on stock slasher film tropes and were eventually picked off one by one by not following how the heroes survived in the movies. When news spread about an actual serial killer with a hockey mask and Hook Hand had escaped from prison, nobody took it seriously and thought it was part of the challenge. Gwen was fed up with "Chef's" act and kicked the actual killer in the face before Chef and the other campers alerted her. The killer gave up because being kicked in the face actually hurt, and Gwen won immunity from being voted off at the campfire ceremony.

---