This 0% Rotten Tomatoes Slasher Has the Highest Kill Count in History

Summary:

• The Summer of Massacre, a not-so-famous slasher movie, made history by setting a Guinness record for the highest number of on-screen deaths.
• However, while franchises like Halloween and Saw make the killing brutal but justified and inventive, The Summer of Massacre kills for the sake of killing.
• Apparently, director Joe Castro's initial goal was to have the highest kill count – in the film's finale, there is a scene where an atomic bomb is dropped on Los Angeles, which nominally increases the body count by several million more.

Slasher movies started out as scary flicks for teenagers, but they soon became pure fun: the more killing on screen, the more enthusiastic viewers became.

The Halloween franchise is a perfect example of the changing attitude toward the subgenre. With each installment, the body count grew exponentially, and the villain became more inventive in his sadistic methods.

The Summer of Massacre Has the Highest Number of Kills

But Halloween is nowhere near the champion for most kills in a single movie. The Summer of Massacre may not be the most famous horror film, but it has gone down in history as the project that officially set the Guinness record for the most on-screen kills to date.

The greatest "success" in trying to kill as many people as possible on the screen was achieved by director Joe Castro – the creators included the deaths of 155 characters in a movie with a running time of 98 minutes.

The characters are cut, beaten, and torn to pieces – one dies from a blow with a thermometer, another is hit on the head with a frying pan, a third has his face torn off.

Of course, such a spectacle is not intended for a wide audience, but the problem is that the movie makes little impression even on a narrow circle of fans of such violence, which is confirmed by the Rotten Tomatoes rating of 0%.

The Summer of Massacre is Bloody But Pointless

In the Saw franchise, for example, every murder, though overly cruel sometimes, has a justification and an original execution. The Summer of Massacre simply kills for the sake of killing.

The movie is notable for its at least minimal ingenuity – in order to add some dynamic to the bloodletting, the authors divided the movie into four short stories, each of which tries to stand out in its own way. Unfortunately, there are no controversial situations, challenges or tragedies behind the constant deaths – nothing that could captivate the viewer.

An interesting detail of the ending gives reason to believe that the maximum number of killings was the goal in itself, because the movie ends with a news report about an atomic bomb being dropped on Los Angeles.

It seems that Joe Castro was simply hedging his bets in case someone in the near future decided to compete with him in terms of gore – it would always be possible to dismiss the attempt with the argument that a bomb exploded at the end of the movie, so several million more people would have to be added to the body count.

Although it is unlikely that anyone would want to break such a dubious record, not only in the near future, but ever.