Mr. Robot's charmingly retro slasher movie The Careful Massacre of the Bourgeoisie is available to watch as a short film. While it wasn't the first slasher movie, 1978's Halloween would help kickstart the slasher movie boom of the 1980s. John Carpenter's classic presented other filmmakers with a blueprint for success, which typically involved a masked killer, a special holiday or event, unlucky teenagers and increasingly elaborate kills.
Friday The 13th's huge success not only kicked off a franchise, it only highlighted the box-office gold there was to mined from the genre. Jamie Lee Curtis would follow Halloween's success with other slasher offerings like Terror Train, Prom Night and Halloween II. The decade also spawned slasher icons like A Nightmare On Elm Street's Freddy Krueger and Child's Play's Chucky, while lesser-known offerings include April Fool's Day and Phantom Of The Mall: Eric's Revenge.
Rami Malek's breakthrough came thanks to Mr. Robot, which cast him as Elliot, who is part of a hacktivist group dubbed fsociety. The group's manifesto is delivered via videos presented by a figure wearing a tuxedo and a Guy Fawkes-inspired mask, which becomes the symbol of fsociety. The origins of the fsociety mask and the group itself were later shown in season 2's "eps2.2_init_1.asec," with the mask coming from a fake slasher movie Elliot and his sister Darlene love called The Careful Massacre of the Bourgeoisie.
Like most 1980s slasher flicks, the plot of Mr. Robot's The Careful Massacre of the Bourgeoisie is quite simple. It follows two rich, snobby siblings as they prepare to celebrate New Year's 1985 with their yuppie friends, and while doing drugs they mention their late Uncle Conrad, who disappeared five years earlier when their father fired him from the family business. This movie is loaded with Mr Robot easter eggs, with the mask and suit the killer - fittingly dubbed "Uncle Conrad" - wears being identical to their mascot. The Careful Massacre of the Bourgeoisie is available to watch online as an eight-minute short, which features a couple of gory kills and some pointless nudity.
The Careful Massacre of the Bourgeoisie is a decent novelty short film for it what it is, though its parody of 1980s slasher tropes is a little too arch for its own good. The title is also a nod to Luis Bunuel's film The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie from 1972. Still, it's kind of fun that Mr. Robot's fsociety was so heavily inspired by a low-rent horror flick.