A Must-See For Slasher Addicts [Chattanooga Film Festival 2025]

A Must-See For Slasher Addicts [Chattanooga Film Festival 2025]

Horror

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killer party

The Red Eye section at the Chattanooga Film Festival is always a fun deep dive into horror curios, from cheesy creature features to genre films that simply fell between the cracks, giving long-time fans of any given subgenre the chance to add something to their repertoire they might not have even known was there before.

I’m always impressed by the Red Eyes, but this year I came away especially impressed with Killer Party, a Canadian slasher film from the mid-1980s, just after the subgenre’s golden age when so many of these films found their audiences through VHS rentals. Even as a perpetual student of the 1980s slasher boom, I hadn’t seen this one before, and while it meanders a bit before it actually cuts into its true concept, my patience was rewarded. 

The film initially presents itself as a hybrid of The Initiation, The House on Sorority Row, and April Fool’s Day. Three best friends—Jennifer (Joanna Johnson), Phoebe (Elaine Wilkes), and Vivia (Sherry Willis-Burch)—are pledging the same sorority, which holds its initiation proceedings in an abandoned fraternity house where a frat brother tragically died during a hazing accident years earlier. 

Also Read: ‘Alan At Night’ Skewers YouTube Pranksters in More Ways Than One [Chattanooga Film Festival 2025]

When Vivia, the resident inventor of the group, engineers some haunted house gags to freak out her new sisters, the sorority suggests that she organize their annual April Fool’s Day party, set to take place in just a few days in the same possibly haunted frat house. As Vivia throws herself into the party, Phoebe and Jennifer do their best to assimilate into the sorority, find dates, and get into the rhythm of their new college lives. 

Slasher films can often be divided into two categories: The ones that pepper the kills throughout the film, and the ones that build everything up for one third-act bloodfest. For the most part, Killer Party fits into the latter category, which means it might grate just a little on slasher fans eager to get to the blood (though, to be fair, there is a good amount of fake blood earlier in the movie).

Still, directed William Fruet and writer Barney Cohen establish a promising atmosphere very early on, using the idea of April Fools pranks as a backstop on which they can bounce plenty of macabre gags, and letting Jennifer, the most reluctant new pledge in the sorority, do a little research about what really happened in that old frat house. All this, plus wonderful character work from Willis-Burch as Vivia and Ralph Seymour as the nerdy Martin, keeps the wheels turning up until the third act, when the party gets underway and things get grim.

Also Read: ‘Self-Help’ Review: A Heartfelt and Unpredictable Horror Effort [Chattanooga Film Festival]

It’s here that the film’s House on Sorority Row influence really starts to show, and it works in the film’s favor. For much of its early runtime, Killer Party is a film you can’t quite pin down, but it’s all barreling toward a party—a costume party at that—where people will hook up, secrets will come to light, and character dynamics will shift, all amid a spooky old house where someone or something has decided to start taking lives. It’s not a film heavy on gore, at least compared to other hits of the genre at the time, but the more you watch, the more you realize that all of those seemingly detached ideas from the first hour were careening toward something unifying, something unsettling and exciting for the final act. 

If you still don’t know the turn that Killer Party takes for its finale, I really don’t want to spoil things for you. The film’s great weakness is the sense that it’s pinballing, swinging from one concept to another with no clear throughline. Is it a movie about a prank war gone wrong? A movie about a haunted house where death lurks? A simple revenge slasher? It takes until the final minutes for you to realize it’s all three, and then some, and while that makes it an occasionally scattered, overstuffed-feeling film that lacks the tightness of better-known slasher classics, it also makes Killer Party a wonderful discovery. It’s one of those conceptually ambitious slashers that truly tried to take some well-worn pieces of the subgenre and do something new, and if you love slasher movies, you should consider it an essential. 

Summary

Killer Party is a conceptually ambitious slasher that truly tries to take some well-worn pieces of the subgenre and do something new. If you love slasher movies, you should consider Killer Party an essential. 

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