‘HALLOWEEN’ AND THE DEATH OF THE SLASHER FILM: At Acculturated, Sonny Bunch posits that the young people in a dystopian future genre has largely displaced the teen slasher movie at the box office:

The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Divergent: These are all series in which teenagers are thrown into horrifying, life-or-death experiences not because they are bad or immoral but because their parents have created a world that’s not worth living in. If the slasher flick exists as a way for adults to express their concern over the uncontrollable behavior of the nation’s kids, then the teen dystopia serves as a means for adults to worry about the world they’re leaving behind.

Whereas the slasher flicks concerned themselves with adolescent issues—who’s screwing who; who’s getting the beer—the teen dystopia concerns itself with a much more middle-aged host of concerns: economic inequality and environmental degradation and class structures, oh my!

To be fair, Meryl Streep’s Hillary-esque answer at the climax of last year’s dystopian film The Giver sums up both genres rather well: “When people have the power to choose, they choose wrong. Every single time.”