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.