‘Hookman’ at UCSB

At this point, the tropes that power the slasher film subgenre have become second nature to even the casual horror fan. Thanks to such movies as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Candyman (1992), Scream (1996), and many, many others, we all know that anniversaries of traumatic events reactivate killers, and that, once the promiscuous couples have been chopped to pieces, the virginal final girl (I’m looking at you, Jamie Lee Curtis) will have to undergo a strenuous finale in order to evade the bad man’s blade. 

It’s not the most promising material for adaptation to the stage, yet Lauren Yee, one of the country’s most in-demand playwrights, has done just that with Hookman, which opens at UCSB’s Performing Arts Theater on Saturday, February 15.