The moment Janet Leigh stepped into the shower in Psycho, a genre was born. But it took a good decade for the bastard child of Hollywood to grow into the monster we all know and love.

Adam Rockoff’s source book only covers the period from 1978 to 1986, by which time the slasher phenomenon had risen and, if not completely fallen, at least tripped and cut itself quite badly.

But in slicing and dicing its way through nearly 40 years of cinematic gristle, this gleefully gruesome history witnesses the resurrection of the genre via Wes Craven’s Scream franchise and on to Hostel and other Noughties nasties.

Hitchcock may have set the knife in motion but – after quickly passing by Craven’s reviled 1973 shocker Last House on the Left - producers Rachel Belofsky and Rudy Scalese credit John Carpenter for kicking it all off with Halloween in 1978.

Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday The 13th soon followed. But as any true gorehound knows, Jason’s mum was the original killer – her boy didn’t pick up his machete until the first sequel. Actress Betsy Palmer still has empathy for her character: “Mrs Vorhees is the perfect mother.” Aw, sweet.

Surprised at the box office mountains being created out of such budgetary molehills, the studios opened the bloodgates, spewing out increasingly tacky productions with even tackier marketing campaigns.

Prom Night; Splatter University; Don’t Go In The Woods; Slumber Party Massacre; My Bloody Valentine; Silent Night, Deadly Night… the carnage was unrelenting.

Plot was irrelevant, generally involving promiscuous young victims being slashed, gashed, hacked, whacked, hung, wrung, chopped, lopped, incapacitated and decapitated by silent, unkillable bogeymen. The why didn’t matter; only the how.

(Step forward effects guru Tom Savini, who has a seemingly bottomless well of ideas when it comes to staging spectacular deaths. Interestingly, his fascination with mutilation began after witnessing the carnage in Vietnam.)

The moral majority were predictably outraged, spurred on by a critical backlash (just hark at the holier-than-thou Siskel and Ebert). Studios began to get scared. Worse, audiences were getting bored. Lazy sequels and tired copycats were bleeding the genre dry.

But even though Freddy is old hat and Jason has lost his edge, ever since Drew Barrymore stuck her neck out for Scream, Hollywood has decided that horror is cool again.

After all, some big careers started on the killing floor: Tom Hanks (He Knows You’re Alone), Kevin Bacon (Friday The 13th), Holly Hunter (The Burning), Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger (The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre), Johnny Depp (A Nightmare on Elm Street) and George Clooney (Return to Horror High).

Stars are notable by their absence in Going To Pieces (as are benchmark movies The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Brian De Palma’s Dressed To Kill). But the insight and enthusiasm of the filmmakers nicely complement the feast of meat-and-gravy shots on display.

Anyone with even a passing interest in horror should give it a stab.

Elliott Noble