#spree killers

The black phone is NOT a slasher movie. The grabber is NOT a slasher. I am just getting super technical with terminology, you don’t have to listen but hear me out.

Slasher movies are the movies like Halloween, nightmare on elm street , Friday the 13th etc. Where a big bad hacks and SLASHES through a main cast of teens etc etc. Not much plot besides a good ol chase and kill. Sometimes there’s motivation, sometimes they’re just evil etc .The black phone, despite being around abduction, murder etc. We only - to my memory- get two on screen deaths.

The Grabber is a Spree killer.

Quite literally by definition. He’s much more like real life killers than slasher villains, which is one of the reasons I love this movie so much? The degree of realness/rooting with true crime etc. It’s fresh compared to how horror now likes to overuse the slasher genre(which I’m still a fan of btw).

He’s a crime of passion type killer. Also staying to the particular suburb(where as depending on the kind, slashers will follow and go anywhere. Usually without limitation or worry)

Slasher 🚫 Film with murderer

Slasher 🚫 The grabber

Slasher 🚫 The black phone

Guys it’s quite literally the opposite of a slasher and never intended to be a hack and slash teenage gore fest I don’t know where this expectation came from but I’m losing it.

On March 8th 2013, Nathon Brooks, a high-achieving and apparently happy 14 year-old from Moses Lake, Grant County, Washington, walked into his parents’ bedroom while they were sleeping and shot both of them multiple times in the head. No one, not even Nathon, seems exactly sure why he did it. Chilling CCTV footage from the night shows Nathon running through the house in his underwear, carrying a revolver, just prior to the shooting. We now know, from Nathon’s confession in police custody, that he had taken the .22 Smith and Wesson pistol from a locked case in a bedroom within the house, walked into his parents bedroom, aimed and emptied the pistol.

-CCTV footage from the night shows Nathon running through the house in his underwear carrying a gun. It is unclear why the cameras were set up in the first place.

Remarkably, both parents survived and were conscious enough to make the 911 call. Beth Brooks was shot beneath the eye and has permanent damage to her sight. Nathon’s dad, Jon, was shot in the forehead. When the police arrived on the scene, Nathon was treated as a victim initially and stated that a tall man with a mask broke into the house and shot his parents. It wasn’t until detectives saw the video footage that they discovered that the Brooks’ own son was the “intruder”. Nathon immediately admitted to his crimes and showed a great deal of remorse.

After Jon and Beth’s ordeal, they went through PTSD and struggled to sleep at night. They moved into a new home after the incident, partly to escape painful memories. It’s hard to comprehend how the parents could begin to come to terms with what had happened, but Jon perhaps makes a telling comment when he says, “I’m extremely good at bottling up emotions.”

- Forgiving: Jon and Beth visiting Nathon in prison.

Though the true motive for the shocking attack is still unclear, Nathon expressed that he was sick of the strict rules back at home and that him getting grounded was what finally caused him to snap. He stated that his father banned him from participating at a basketball tournament and that was the final trigger. Unlike most shooters, Nathon speaks candidly about his crime, a crime that could have easily resulted in a much more severe double homicide. His remorsefulness has earned his parents’ forgiveness, though it’s likely their relationship will never be the same again.

In American slang, the phrase “going postal” means flying into an uncontrollable rage at work. It’s likely many of us have had moments where we’ve felt like this, but the origins of this saying are a lot darker than you’d expect.

In 1986, a post office worker by the name of Patrick Sherrill shot 20 of his post office co-workers, killing 14 of them and drastically injuring the rest. He then ended the rampage by fatally shooting himself in the forehead.