Slasher Movies

views updated

Slasher Movies

With the possible exception of the hardcore porn flick, no modern film genre has managed to achieve quite the level of commercial success in spite (or because) of its inherent controversiality as has the slasher movie. Otherwise known as the "stalker," "dead babysitter," or "teenie-kill" pic, the "slasher" label has been adopted by most fans and critics to designate the entries in a voluminous collection of remarkably similar post-1960 horror films. In these movies, isolated psychotic males, often masked or at least hidden from view, are pitted against one or more young men and women (especially the latter) whose looks, personalities, or promiscuities serve to trigger recollections of some past trauma in the killer's mind, thereby unleashing his seemingly boundless psychosexual fury.

Although the precise formula of the slasher movie varies depending on one's initial characterization, the genre's exploration (at times its exploitation) of some or all of the following themes has remained strikingly consistent through the years: male-upon-female voyeurism, gender confusion and sexual perversion, the spectacle of murder, the efficacy of female self-defense, the substitution of violent killing for sexual gratification, and the utter inability of traditional authority figures to eliminate a communal threat. Vilified by feminists for supposedly promoting misogynistic messages and targeted for censorship by outraged parents and lawmakers, the slasher movie has nevertheless been treated as unworthy of critical discussion by most mainstream academics, presumably because of its "low-culture" status. In recent years, however, the progressive potential of a genre once dismissed as "violent pornography" has been examined by film theorists as well as cultural historians.

The slasher has its roots in two 1960 films, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom. Although the former movie has since received immeasurably more critical and commercial attention than the latter, together they are responsible for establishing many of the slasher's primary generic elements. These elements include an "explanation" of the killer's motive in quasi-psychoanalytic terms, a figuring of the main victim as a sexually transgressive female, and a focus on intimate assault with sharp, phallic, penetrating implements. It is tempting to read the subsequent history of the slasher as little more than elaborations on the themes introduced in these two films.

Like Psycho before it, Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) took for inspiration the monstrous crimes of necrophilic serial killer Ed Gein. Unlike Psycho, however, Hooper's film emphasized gore and bodily carnage, thereby situating itself within the tradition of Herschell Gordon Lewis's notorious "splatter" films, Blood Feast (1963) and The Wizard of Gore (1968). The Texas Chainsaw Massacre also contributed two important elements of its own to the slasher movie formula: a group of adolescent victims who are picked off one by one, and a "final girl" who undergoes a lengthy, terrifying ordeal in the film's second half, only to come out alive at the end. Although John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) eschewed the gore of Texas Chainsaw Massacre in favor of impressively subtle startle effects, it kept the latter film's youthful victims, and made its final girl (Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Psycho star Janet Leigh) even more aggressive and self-reliant. The unprecedented commercial success of this movie ensured its place at the head of the "Stalker Cycle" class; between 1978 and 1981, no fewer than 11 Halloween -inspired slashers were made (including Friday the 13th, Prom Night, Terror Train, and Graduation Day), all structural, if not quite stylistic, copies of the original. In these movies, the predator-prey theme takes on unprecedented importance, as does the emphasis on "creative" murders, and a reliance on camera shots taken from the killer's point of view. To what extent this camerawork forces viewer identification with the killer, however, remains an open question.

Despite the final girl's ever-increasing strength and ferocity—as exemplified by "Ripley" (Sigourney Weaver) in the Alien series of outer-space slashers—public debate over the genre's antisocial consequences only intensified in the 1980s. Representatives from numerous states, citing hastily acquired and somewhat dubious "empirical evidence" for support, complained of a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the depiction of graphic violence in films such as Friday the 13th and the increase in violent crimes perpetrated by youths. In 1984, the "Video Recordings Bill" passed through Britain's Parliament on the heels of an effort to restrict the consumption of arbitrarily designated "video nasties" (the vast majority of which were slashers). By 1989, bills were passed in Colorado, Missouri, Ohio, and Texas granting local prosecutors the power to decide which videos cross the line of "excessive violence" and so cannot be rented to persons under 18 without parental permission.

It is arguable that at least some of this negative attention was unnecessary, even self-defeating. By 1986 the slasher movie was in a state of decline, primarily because of an over-reliance on convention and a glut of predictable entries. But just like its best known psychopaths, Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, the slasher would rise from the dead. Fatal Attraction (1987), Pacific Heights (1991), and especially the Oscar Award-winning Silence of the Lambs (1996)—the so-called "yuppie slashers"—brought a heretofore unimagined respectability to the genre. And with the appearance of self-consciously reflexive slashers such as Scream (1996), Scream 2 (1997), and Halloween H20 (1998) came a whole new range of convention-bending possibilities.

One thing is clear: no easy answer to the question why slasher movies have proven so popular exists. Whether they enforce conservative values by demonstrating "the inefficacy of sexual freedom" (Vera Dika), promote tolerance by "constituting a visible adjustment in the terms of gender representations" (Carol Clover), or further a feminist agenda by "articulating the legitimacy of female rage in the face of male aggression" (Isabel Pinedo), it can hardly be denied that these films appeal to different audiences at different times and for different reasons or that they will continue to engender heated debate in homes, classrooms, and courtrooms.

—Steven Schneider