Editor’s Note: This article contains reference to blood, gore, violence and death.

The slasher is a universal symbol. We all know Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Leatherface, Pinhead and so on. It’s been a while since we’ve had a character like these apart from their ill-fated and ill-advised reboots, remakes and prequels that hardcore fans tend to scoff at.

The modern slasher movie has been in a bit of limbo, but as we have seen in recent news with Damien Leone’s “Terrifier” film series, we might be in for a bit of a renaissance — a rebirth of our roots.

I watched Terrifier 3 just a few weeks ago, and the theater was packed. What followed was two hours of the most vile, nauseating gore I’ve ever had the (dis)pleasure of sitting through in a movie theater. I’ve seen hundreds of horror movies, but none have turned my stomach quite like Terrifier 3. Despite, or perhaps because of, its gruesome content, the film is slated to defy box office predictions and reel in an impressive $50 million, while reporting just a $2 million budget.

One thing that stuck out to me wasn’t just the horrific violence on screen but the audience at my screening. I got there early and watched as fans walked in wearing “Nightmare on Elm Street” T-shirts, donning hats embroidered with Jason’s mask and chatting about how much they loved the last movie and couldn’t wait to see what “Terrifier” focus Art the Clown would get up to next.

What stands out to me is how characters like Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees are decades old, yet their iconography certainly persists. But what is it about the slasher specifically that leads to this kind of reverence?

I think they live on because they’re really not as simple as one would think.

I’m not going to sit here and pretend these are the deepest movies on the planet or even the deepest horror movies. However, the slasher film is what the horror genre evolved into, essentially starting with Hitchcock’s revolutionary chiller “Psycho” in 1960 and dominating the horror landscape from the mid-1970s onward. From that point on, these films consolidated evil and violence into one entity, establishing genre tropes that would persist for years.

However, this subgenre is not as simple as masked killers wielding chainsaws or machetes and chasing around cheerleaders.

Beyond their hacking and slashing, these iconic on-screen killers can be rich with subtext and symbolism. Michael Myers can be read as a metaphor for the breakdown of the nuclear family and the violence that underlies suburban American life.

Leatherface, in my personal favorite slasher “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” could be taken to represent the brutal, dehumanizing nature of industrialization, as evidenced by his gas-powered chainsaw tearing through his victims.

Ghostface, from the phenomenal “Scream” franchise, could represent how the sensationalization of violence in media blurs the lines between reality and fiction.

It is clear these films are not one-note, however they are all operating within the same horror space. They use the bones of the slasher subgenre, its symbols and tropes, to tell different stories that offer serious insight into issues of their times, issues that are as vital as they are diverse.

The thing that is so powerful about horror, a quality not really shared by any other genre, is that it is in constant conversation with itself.

Even in “Terrifier 3,” one can spot homages to “Halloween” and “The Evil Dead,” and the film even features a small cameo from horror legend Tom Savini, the SFX pioneer behind such classics as “Dawn of the Dead” and “Friday the 13th.”

These aren’t just chances for the audience to point at the screen and feel a brief satisfaction for getting the references; they are working through and alongside the genealogy of blood and guts that has made up this puzzling and mortifying subgenre.

That brings us to the horror of the modern era and the “Terrifier” film series, which might be a bit different from these aforementioned classics.

The period of modern horror has given us fantastic films like “The Witch” in 2015 and “Hereditary” in 2018. We all know the type, with its eerie music and long, suspenseful takes, where the real horror is what we don’t know or can’t see, rather than some crazed killer in a hockey mask. Don’t get me wrong, I adore these films, I just view them as a different set of methods within the horror genre that attempt to achieve similar goals.

“Terrifier 3” might not be tackling the most complex themes in the world, or doing so with the utmost grace and artfulness of the greats, but does it really have to?

Maybe people are getting tired of these cerebral slow-burns that have begun to color the horror landscape. Sometimes people just want to see some cheesy acting, excessive violence and a whole lot of blood. Sometimes audiences like to see a clown hack and slash through his victims in over-the-top, unbelievable ways. Is that healthy? I’m not sure.

Is it fun? I would say so.