action movies in the 1980's where a single (usually cishet white male) figure serially murders a bunch of people on their way to some sort of final denouement where they face off in single combat with an adversary who is also some mirrored version of themselves, unambiguously evil, are a daytime mirror of the nocturnal slasher, focusing subjecthood on the single cishet male agent of violence, rather than the community of individuals which are eliminated one by one via this agent until only one victim is left (usually cishet female) to confront the agent of violence or die. Slasher movies resite the POV with the traumatized, both on an individual and communal basis. We don't know much about the daily lives of the endless (frequently non-white, non-english speaking) people killed by the action hero but the slasher spends a lot of time getting to know through mundane activity the people hurt and forever changed by violence.

(at the halfway? mark of the 1980's slasher/action dichotomy lies a common ancestor in the 1970's (rape) revenge movie which can operate in both patriarchal and quasi-feminist modalities wherein a survivor of trauma/loss takes revenge upon the group of perpetrators. these movies give a semblance of agency and lived reality to the perpetrators of the initiatory trauma in order to ground the film when violence comes to them. the 1980's films are fundamentally different because they are about the stark evacuation of agency and personhood from either collective targets or the individual violent actor

((the atomized individual agent of violence vs. community is indicative of the reagan/thatcher war upon and denial of society cloaked in virulent anti-communist rhetoric. only the individual possesses agency. individual agency is experienced in solitude, in an evacuation of selfhood innately tied to loss of community, loss of reflection of the individual in and among others, become a not-person, a death-dealer