Following the successes of Halloween (1978) and Friday the Thirteenth (1980), the teen slasher came to dominate early 1980s North American horror cinema. Although ostensibly characterized by an emphasis on mimetic realism, the genre has always contained subtle (and in some cases not so subtle) elements of the fantastic, most notably relating to the figure of the killer as an often ubiquitous and seemingly unkillable entity. Whether shot at point blank range, burnt to a crisp, decapitated or blown to bits, the killer somehow always manages to return, either in the film’s final moments or in later sequels. In thus establishing the killer as a borderline mythological figure – in a sense outside time and space - the teen slasher may be categorized as a form of speculative fiction whose main narrative and stylistic feature is the introduction of a seemingly fantastic character into an otherwise realist storyworld. Building on previous research, this paper explores the teen slasher as a form of speculative fiction, focusing on early examples such as Black Christmas (1974), Halloween and Friday the Thirteenth. It argues that fantastic elements within these films establish a tension between two different models of history and time, namely a premodern, which emphasizes repetition and return, and a modern, which instead emphasizes change and difference through individual agency. Moreover, it suggests that this dynamics of repetition and difference must be understood within the larger context of late-capitalist society and the tension therein between what Slavoj Zizek has called “the terminal logic of capitalism”, on the one hand, and emancipatory subjectivity, on the other (Zizek, 2010). In so doing this paper can hopefully contribute to a new understanding of the teen slasher’s paradoxical ontology, its relationship to speculative fiction, as well as to larger cultural forces.