A Nice Place to Slash!

Watching a film consumes anywhere from seventy-five minutes to three hours of your life.  Knowing you have a finite number of hours to live, why in the world would you ever watch the same film twice?  But certain movies beg us to come back.  Reasons vary, but for the filmmaker trying to make a movie that will be watched over the generations, one way to guarantee return trips from the same audience is atmosphere.

            Why did Blade Runner attract such a huge audience when it came out on video?  Critics (most of whom did not understand what they were watching and, by the way, most of whom have since recanted their initial assessments) bashed the movie when it showed up in summer, 1982.  There were severe problems—the voice-over and the sappy ending.  But when people had the opportunity to view it multiple times on VHS, the movie became a hit in spite of the damage done by paranoid studio executives and brain-dead movie critics (Leonard Maltin, by the way, sticks to his shitty review to this day.  Way to be stubborn and stupid, Leo!).  Why?  Atmosphere.  Blade Runner is a bleak, depressing story.  But Ridley Scott did such a fantastic job creating the environment the film takes place in that watching the movie again feels like actually going someplace familiar.  That’s the key to atmosphere.

            What the hell does that have to do with slashers?

            Good question.

            Blade Runner was released on the same day as John Carpenter’s The Thing.  Carpenter’s The Thing is widely considered the best horror film of the 1980s.  With good reason.  It’s a movie that stands up today, just as Blade Runner does (although some young people complain about the special effects—they have no appreciation for the artistry of in-camera effects; I’m not going to go into the whole ‘CGI sucks’ routine—anyone born before the year 1980 knows it and those born after have to live with the fact that their legacy in cinema is a batch of remakes and reboots made by computers with no soul at all.  Sucks to be them, but, by and large, it’s not the fault of the individual Gen Yers, it’s their collective inability to put a stop to the Hollywood machine that doesn’t give a shit about craftsmanship anymore).  Both Blade Runner and The Thing suffered because of Spielberg’s E.T. and the beginning, gradual shift from dark, introspective realism, to sunny, materialist, blind 1980s-optimism (which, admittedly, was fun while it lasted).  What’s important to note is that both Ridley Scott and John Carpenter understood atmosphere.

       We can move, then, to the subject of slashers.  Carpenter was heavily influence by Howard Hawkes.  Ever noticed how the movie Rio Bravo never gets old?  Hawkes was a master of creating atmosphere (Big Sleep, anyone?).  Carpenter managed to make Pasadena and a street just off of Sunset Boulevard look like a small, midwestern town in Halloween.  During his reign as king of the big(ger) budget b-movies, he directed and/or produced a string of movies that hold up today simply because of his mastery of atmosphere (of which, oh by the way, music plays a big role—an aspect Carpenter saw to himself).  Any time Escape from New York is on AMC, I stop and watch the whole damn movie.  I’ve seen it a dozen times.  I love the end, I think it’s a great piece of nihilism that modern, ninnified America would never tolerate today, but what glues me to the movie is the attention paid to the environment depicted in the film and the music.  The main ingredients for atmosphere.  Even when Carpenter was only a producer (Halloween II and III), his imprint is still obvious and, as mediocre as those films are, they are still re-watchable.

            So, on to the subject of slashers.

            When the slasher boom took off in late 1980 and 1981, the filmmakers responsible were desperate to figure out what ingredient they needed to steal from Carpenter’s Halloween in effort to make a similar film.  Some of them got the suspense right (The Prowler), some of them understood the necessary makeup of the characters (teeny boppers or college students), but the best took all those elements and added atmosphere.

      Think about the original Friday the 13^th—what do you hear?  The goofy k-k-k-ma-ma-ma motif and the whooping cranes (or whatever bird it is) heard throughout all the daylight scenes.  The film made excellent use of its forest location.  When I watch that movie again, I am taken back to summertime in the late 70s and early 80s.  Whether intended or not, the movie does a great job creating atmosphere appropriate for the eventual slaughter that takes place.

            The king of the Halloween rip-offs, in terms of atmosphere, however, is the original My Bloody

Valentine.  I love this movie.  The killer is absolutely awesome.  The best in any of the golden age (post-Halloween) slashers.  The producers veered away from the other slashers in the very important aspect of economics—the characters in My Bloody Valentine are blue collar, a little bit older, and therefore, I believe, more sympathetic.  The director did a fantastic job of creating the fictitious town the story takes place in.  The night scenes are drenched in eerie, blue light and smoke.  It’s actually not a very scary film—not a lot of suspense is used and the ending is a little goofy.  But none of that matters.  I go back and watch My Bloody Valentine once a year because, like all films that do a good job with atmosphere, it’s like visiting somewhere familiar, seeing familiar people (who, unfortunately, get chopped into little bits and pieces), it’s like a small, hour and a half vacation. 

            Exactly what a movie is supposed to be.

The Slasher "Formula"

Just as assumptions regarding the Final Girl have been cemented in any dialogue regarding slasher films, so too has the formula upon which the Golden Age Slashers were constructed.  In the simplest terms: someone is wronged in the past, young people in the present are punished for that crime.  There have been numerous interpretations of what this formula “means.”  Because these critical readings have come from film scholars who tend to lean toward the left, the conclusions are biased accordingly.  The slasher is inherently conservative, they say, and they use, primarily, the myth of the Final Girl to support this contention.  But are they correct?

When I began exploring slasher films with a critical eye, I tended to agree with theorist Sarah Trencansky, who, in her article, “Final Girls and Terrible Youth,” makes an argument that the teens in the slasher films represented “the other,” fighting off a reactionary force from the past.  This played well into my suspicion of the cultural shifts that took place in America under the leadership of Ronald Reagan.  It seemed that the 1980s, in general, were a reaction to the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 60s.  It made sense, thus, that a potent political argument could be flown under the radar with a group of pale faced camp counselors or high school students standing in for non-whites and women.  It’s a bit of a stretch, and I’m beyond guilty of running with it several miles too far at Jimmy Callaway’s review site, Let’s Kill Everybody!, where I applied this theory, in different ways, to analyses of The Burning, Graduation Day, Halloween II, and, to some degree, Friday the 13^th.  Some anonymous poster left a comment suggesting I had said “nothing” in my review of Halloween II (a review in which I get particularly hostile with Reaganites).  I suspect the anonymous poster was a conservative and was offended by the review, but it’s possible this person may have had a point he or she was simply incapable of articulating—It’s possible that I’m wrong.

Let’s look at some evidence:

Per Robert Nowell’s book on slashers, Blood Money, I agree that Black Christmas is the first real slasher, since it directly inspired John Carpenter’s Halloween.  Black Christmas begins with the killer making his way into a house full of college-aged women where he kills them for reasons we never quite know.  There is no event from the past to reference and suggest the “return of the repressed,” as so many critics have described the slasher (and other horror genres) as an expression of;  However, Black Christmas has the extraordinary plot device of the Final Girl being pregnant and deciding to have an abortion.  Abortion would, of course, be taken up by the religious ‘right’ in the United States by the end of the 1970s and would play a major role in the union between the Republican party and the Christian Coalition.  Can we assume that the legalization of abortion could represent, in some ways, an offense to a “reactionary” order?  The father of the Final Girl’s unborn child is presented as a red herring in Black Christmas.  He displays the kind of rage that makes the hyper-sensitive left cringe (when he destroys his piano) and he is generally portrayed as an irrational, reactionary male.  Because Black Christmas was such a unique film at the time it was made, I seriously doubt director Bob Clark had any grand, political intentions.  The film is primarily a scare vehicle with a classic, nihilistic conclusion that almost insists on a sequel.  John Carpenter, of course, ended up making an unofficial sequel, Halloween.

In the years since the release of Halloween, Carpenter has been asked over and over again about the so-called conservative undertones in his film.  While it seems as though someone as stubborn and individualistic as John Carpenter would have the sense to tell these interviewers to give it a rest, he has instead attempted to craft some sort of counter-Freudian reading of the film to respond to these questions.  He says Laurie Strode and Michael Myers are both repressed, and this is what draws them to each other.  I think that’s a load of hooey.  Per my previous article, “The Myth of the Final Girl,” we know that Laurie Strode is not repressed.  Shy, maybe, but not actually repressed.  Halloween does, however, spawn the past-episode element of the slasher formula.  Young Michael Myers sees his sister go upstairs with a boy for a quickie.  This event takes place in 1963, just as the sexual revolution is getting revved up for the Summer of Love, four years later.  By 1978, the year Myers breaks out of the loony bin and returns to Haddonfield, the sexual revolution is in full swing.  So there is obvious room to make an argument that Myers represents the social ‘norms’ of 1963 coming back, fifteen years later, to punish those who represent the ‘new norms.’  Carpenter ups the ante on Black Christmas’s nihilistic ending by suggesting man’s best friend, a snub-nosed .38, isn’t even good enough to stop this reactionary force.  The formula didn’t take, pardon the pun, complete shape, however, until 1980, when the Big Three Slashers of that year (Friday the 13^th, Prom Night, and Terror Train), cast the formula in stone.

Robert Nowell contends that Friday the 13^th and Prom Night were the films that actually spawned the slasher boom.  He has good evidence to back this claim.  Halloween was a road show, entirely independent of the studios, and it took a long, long time to build its reputation.  Friday the 13^th, on the other hand, benefited from a Paramount Studios advertising campaign that made it a proverbial overnight success.  The event from the past that is avenged in the “present” of the film takes place in 1958.  Sex is involved again.  Friday the 13^th differs from Halloween, however, in that the filmmakers had the benefit of both Carpenter’s film and the success of National Lampoon’s Animal House to build their movie on.  Thus, the leftist (sometimes referred to in this case as “hedonistic,” which I think might offend some folks on the left) slant of these films becomes more pronounced.  Animal House is a rather fierce anti-establishment comedy (frat boys who worship this movie today, I think, don’t really understand what it’s about—for an excellent review, see Jimmy Callaway’s analysis of the John Landis film at Let’s Drink Everybody!).  The kids in Friday the 13^th who will pay for the “crime” of the past resemble the residents of the Delta house.  They mock a useless police officer, smoke grass, drink, and do their best to get laid before the reactionary force from the past (Mrs. Vorhees) swoops in to kill them.  Prom Night and Terror Train use the same formula, only setting their stories in different environments—Prom Night’s event from the past takes place in the early 1970s, at the absolute zenith of the sexual revolution (and while preteens are responsible for the crime, the clueless adults blame a “sex offender” for the  murder) and the catalyzing event for Terror Train involves an elaborate prank at the expense of a sexually inexperienced college student.  From then on, few slasher films didn’t begin with a crime from the past that needed to be avenged.  That crime, almost always, involved sex in some way.  Thus, while the punishment aspect may strike leftist critics as reactionary, the films themselves can be read as a critique of reactionary attitudes themselves.

It is interesting that right smack in the middle of the creation of this formula, Kubrick’s The Shining was released to an audience that had come to expect some sort of slasher element in contemporary horror films.  Kubrick’s movie openly flaunts its Freudian inspiration.  The films argues that America, or even history itself, is an endless series of brutal crimes committed, forgotten, and brought back to life, over and over again.  The Shining is not a slasher, but I think it echoes the more enlightened interpretation of the slasher, set forth by Sarah Trencansky.  As I have pointed out in reviews written elsewhere, it’s interesting to note that by the mid-80s, when the Reagan (counter) revolution was in full-swing, audience sympathy in slasher films shifted from the victims to the killers.  To me, that suggests the reactionary force had become the status quo.

Photos courtesy of Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, and AVCO Embassy.

The Myth of the Final Girl

One of the first things I’d like to address is the “Final Girl.”  Many critics have dealt with this subject (it seems to be one of the only things anyone has to talk about when it comes to slashers), most of them parrot the same misguided interpretations that were spawned by the likes of Carol Clover and Vera Dika back in the early 1980s, when slashers were first recognized as a genre.

The old criticism works like this:  The Final Girl is virginal.  She possesses matriarchal attributes that conflict with modern, feminist objections to motherhood being a mandatory role for women.  She doesn’t do drugs, doesn’t drink.  She’s basically a church girl and that affords her the power to thwart the killer (or, at least, survive until someone else can help her).  Criticism of the Final Girl has fueled overall criticism of the genre, claiming it is a conservative genre (this misinterpretation was even embraced by Ralph Reed, who once called John Carpenter’s Halloween the greatest film ever made).

I’m not going to go into whether or not these films are conservative.  At least, not today.  When we look at the early wave (1974-1981), it’s very difficult to convince anyone capable of critical thinking that these are across-the-board conservative narratives.  For this first post, I would rather address the conception of the original Final Girls—from Jess (Olivia Hussey), in Black Christmas, to Pam MacDonald (Vicky Dawson), in The Prowler—the last major slasher released in 1981.

The contention that the Final Girl is “pure,” or virginal, does not hold up well when compared to the evidence.  In Black Christmas, arguably the first real slasher, all the women exhibit post-feminist traits—they cuss, they drink, they smoke weed, and they like sex.  The Final Girl, Jess, is actually pregnant and in the process of convincing her boyfriend to go along with her decision to get an abortion.  Now, I’m not a doctor or anything, but I think once a woman is carrying a child in her womb, she’s going to have a tough time convincing anyone she’s a virgin.  Add the abortion to the mix, and you’ve got one extremely hip young woman.  The ink on Roe v. Wade was still wet when Black Christmas was filmed.  What separates Jess from the other girls in her house is, quite simply, she’s a tad more intelligent than the rest of them.

The same can be said for Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), often referred to (erroneously) as the original Final Girl (Halloween).  Laurie isn’t quite as “advanced” as Jess.  She’s still in high school.  Is it a horrible crime that she might still be a virgin at seventeen?  No matter, because nowhere in the film is it suggested that she is a virgin.  While smoking a joint on the way to her babysitting gig (Hello, marijuana! Not exactly the sort of thing a “pure” little girl does!), she reveals to her friend Annie  (Nancy Loomis) that she likes Ben Tramer.  While this may be stated in high school terms (“likes,” verus “lusts after”), the implication is that she wants to get down with Mr. Tramer at the dance and, possibly, after the dance.  She is the Final Girl attributed with “motherly” traits feminist critics find so reprehensible.  Paying careful attention to the film reveals, however, that she is actually the only responsible adult in the film.  This hardly warrants the charge that she may be exhibiting old fashioned mother-like behavior.  Someone in the movie needs to stop Michael Myers.  Even the good Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) requires a signal sent by Laurie (telling the kids to go down the street to a neighbor’s house) before he can try to save the day.  The only criticism I would have of Laurie Strode is that she does require someone to show up with a (useless) gun.  Other than that, I don’t see her as all that different from her friends who end up dead.

Jamie Lee Curtis would go on to help jumpstart the genre by starring in two Canadian-made slashers released in 1980—Prom Night and Terror Train.  In both films, she is a party girl.  Her survival hinges on her intelligence, nothing else.  One aspect of early slasher criticism, however, could apply to her character Alana, from Terror Train.  One of the more moronic theories set forth by Carol Clover is the notion that the Final Girl is masculine.  For evidence, she suggests that all the early Final Girls had masculine names and physical attributes.  The killer, she says, possesses more feminine traits (see Clover’s sex-drenched book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws, for more whacky fantasies designed to reduce the horror genre to nothing more than an ongoing insult to women, perpetrated by repressed filmmakers).  Thus, you have Alana, a women with a man’s haircut and variation on the name Alan, facing off against Kenny Hampson (Derek MacKinnon), the most effeminate villain ever put on screen.  This is, however, one film in the genre.  These attributes are not repeated in other films of the first wave.

Alice (Adrienne King), from the original Friday the 13^th, is a great example of a Final Girl who meets none of the early critic’s expectations.  First of all, Alice is a woman’s name.  The character in the film is actually involved with two of the males at the camp.  When asked if she wants to accompany some of the men to check on the generator, she declines (a “masculine” woman would be all over such a task).  She drinks beer, smokes pot, and plays strip Monopoly.  Words that come to my mind when thinking about a woman like Alice: Fun, adventurous, feminine, intelligent.  Notice how the word “pure” didn’t make my list.  Alice is the first Final Girl to kick the shit out of the killer on her own.  I believe she, more than the Jamie Lee Curtis Final Girls, set the standard for the golden age slashers.

If we accept 1981 as the true end of the golden age, a quick rundown of the Final Girls in the slashers released that year will reveal more similarities with Alice, from Friday the 13^th, than the virginal, old-fashioned girl critics would prefer these women acted like.  The first example comes from My Bloody Valentine.  Sarah (Lori Hallier)—not a very masculine name, oh by the way—juggles two men throughout the film.  She’s sexy and confident and intelligent enough to survive the massacre.  Then there’s Ginny (Amy Steel), from Friday the 13^th part 2 (possibly the best slasher of that year).  The filmmakers make no attempt to portray her as virginal.  She carries on what looks to be a healthy relationship with a man and demonstrates astute awareness of the killer’s psychological foibles when she convinces him that she is his mother.  In The Prowler, the Final Girl works with a police officer she obviously has the hots for (she gets jealous when he dances with another woman).

Of course, there are exceptions to all rules—the folks who made Happy Birthday to Me named their Final Girl Virginia (oh, weren’t they just clever?).  The criticism had already started to creep into our collective consciousness by then, so it makes sense that some filmmakers would adhere to the criticism like sheep, just as the general public continues to do so when discussing these films.  Happy Birthday to Me is an oddball anyway, considering the producers and distributors tried to market the film as a thriller instead of a slasher.  And then there’s the hideous attempt to completely subvert the genre by having a Final Boy instead of a Final Girl (The Burning).  But these films are exceptions, and a look at their box office performances reveals that audiences didn’t buy it.  By taking away the power of the Final Girl (making that character male, or mocking her by playing along with the critics’ misconceptions), these filmmakers pulled the rug from what should be considered a positive, post-feminist genre of horror. 

The Final Girl, ultimately, represents strength and intelligence.  I’ve yet to meet a feminist who would argue that those aren’t desirable traits for any woman to possess.

Photos courtesy of Paramount Studios, Universal Studios, Columbia Pictures (Sony), and A-Film Home Entertainment