Classic Review: Friday the 13th

Here's the last review Alec Cizak contributed to Let's Kill Everybody. It's the most audacious in that he claims the original Friday the 13th is a feminist movie. Enjoy.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2011

Friday the 13th (1980)

by Alec ‘Mama WOULD hurt a fly!’ Cizak

Not much has been written about the original Friday the 13th that can actually be called relevant. It’s a thin film, to say the least. An obvious combination of Meatballs, Jaws I and II, and, of course, Halloween, F13 is actually the movie responsible for the wave of slashers that followed. It’s the movie that made money right out of the gate and demonstrated to the studios that a market existed for Animal House/Halloween hybrids. Most critics seem hell-bent on pointing out that the final girl in F13 is “tomboyish,” a claim I’ll demonstrate is ludicrous. There are the usual accusations that it promotes puritanical values. Of course, actually watching the movie reveals those notions to be rooted in ignorance. Oddly, what no one has caught on to is the fact that F13 may be the most powerful pro-post-feminist text ever created.

A few months ago I discussed Halloween with a feminist film professor from Minnesota. She insisted that Halloween was a sexist text because the survivor was a traditionally matriarchal woman. She pointed out that Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) protected the children and did not engage in the “juvenile” behavior of her female peers. As I listened to this woman froth at the mouth over the notion that a young woman would not feel the need to participate in “hedonistic” activities along with her cohorts, I began to wonder why the idea of a woman as protector was so offensive to old school feminists. I refrained from getting into an argument, from explaining that every now and then, somebody needs to be an “adult.” As I studied F13 to write this article, I realized that Sean S. Cunningham and screenwriter Victor Miller had responded for me. Whether intentionally or by accident, their rip-off of Halloween answers the very concerns feminists have about the slasher genre at large.

For those who have lived in a cave and not seen the film, let’s do a quick summary:

Kids gathered around in a circle singing songs in 1958 (a set up taken right out of Jaws). Two of them break off to go someplace private and make their own personal Kumbaya. A stranger emerges from the darkness and stabs them. Cut to roughly twenty years later. The camp where the murders took place is being reopened. A group of young people arrive early to set the camp up. Murders start happening again until the final girl, Alice (Adrienne King), dispatches the killer who (spoiler alert! [really?]) happens to be the mother, Mrs. Vorhees (Betsy Palmer), of a boy who drowned at the camp in 1958.

Can you already see how radically feminist this movie is?

Before I make that argument, let’s put a rest to the notion of Alice, the final girl, as either “tomboyish” or a prude. Alice wears pants in the movie. That’s pretty much where the pro-“tomboy” argument begins and ends. Early in the film, she reveals that she does not like doing manual labor. In that same scene, it is hinted that she has been fucking Mr. Christy (Peter Brouwer), the ‘adult’ of the lot who disappears almost right away so that the counselors are on their own. As the film progresses, Alice proves herself more and more feminine. She casually takes over kitchen duties when the cook never shows up (having been snuffed while trying to get to the camp). A snake in her cabin scares the shit out of her. When some of the other counselors decide to go check the generator, a masculine activity if there ever was one, Alice refuses to go with them. To further thwart the claim that her character is a prude, she plays strip Monopoly while drinking beer and smoking pot. And most striking, one of the other counselors, Bill (Harry Crosby), is clearly her boyfriend. Thus, we have a final girl who is fucking two guys!

What the character of Alice adds up to is a progressive, post-feminist American woman. She is sexually liberated, feminine, and decides on her own what work she will and will not do. Coupled with her ass-kicking solution to the problem of the killer (beheading Mrs. Vorhees on the banks of Crystal Lake), we have a prototype for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Lara Croft and every other butt-whooping heroine Hollywood has been selling for the last twenty years. One begins to wonder why this film isn’t taught in every feminist course on every campus in the nation.

To cement this theory, the film uses Mrs. Vorhees as a diametric example of the traditional, matriarchal woman, and advances the suggestion that the ultimate mindset of such a woman is not only detrimental to herself, but psychotic and, ultimately, dangerous to those around her. Mrs. Vorhees is a ‘loving’ mother. So much so that she is willing to brutally kill in effort to avenge her son’s death. In addition, she rationalizes her actions in a manner that turns motherly concern into a violent, vicious form of denial (“Oh, I couldn’t let them open this place again, could I?”). Her obsessive tending to her matriarchal duties traps her and her dead son in a roiling, co-dependent relationship that requires the boy come back to life and repay his mother’s vengeance upon her murder, establishing a cycle that spawned eight legitimate sequels, none of which released either mother or son from the horrid grip of pre-feminist societal expectations.

Discard your Laura Mulvey and Robin Wood diatribes! There is only one feminist text to be studied and intellectually digested. It is the battle between the liberated final girl of Friday the 13th and the enslaved mother who kills and loses her own life to maintain a dying status quo. I fully expect Sean S. Cunningham to be a keynote speaker at a future NOW convention…

Classic Review: Halloween II

Another classic review by Alec Cizak that originally appeared at Let's Kill Everybody. This time it's Halloween II, the anemic sequel to the godfather of the slasher boom. This one elicited a hostile comment from an anonymous reader. The grad school gibberish is strong, but doesn't really warrant the hostility.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2011

Halloween II (1981)

by Alec "Progress? We don’t need no stinkin’ progress!" Cizak

How can you tell when Hollywood has taken over a subgenre of films? One word: Explosions. Halloween II’s got two of them. Early in the film, when it’s clear that the whole exercise is nothing more than an unnecessary continuation of the first movie, a kid in a Shatner mask is blown up when a police car shoves him into a van. It’s Hollywood logic—two cars colliding automatically explode. It’s called production value. Need your movie to look bigger than it is? Hire a helicopter and shoot from the clouds. Or rig something to explode. Then, of course, there’s the big boom in the end, when both Mikey Myers and his goofy doctor go to hell together.

Now, the movie poster for Halloween II never promised anything other than ‘More of the Night He Came Home.’ John Carpenter has admitted that, while writing the script with the help of Budweiser, he realized he was crafting the same film as the original Halloween, only, “not as good.” Halloween II kicks off with a retread of the final three or four minutes of the original. The soundtrack is altered and we get a different angle of Mr. Myers dropping from the second floor with six slugs in him (seven, according to Halloween geeks who make me look completely sane). The big problem with Halloween II is that it is, from a narrative point of view, entirely pointless.

Halloween ends with some nice, nasty, Kentucky nihilism, courtesy of Carpenter and his bleak view of, well, everything. Michael Myers is evil. Evil never dies. End of story. Of course, the real reason Halloween II exists is because the first film spawned a gold rush of independent filmmakers splicing together Animal House and Halloween to cash in on Halloween’s success. Beginning with Friday the 13th, however, the element of danger—the stalker—became, momentarily, human. This demanded an explanation for the killer’s destructive hobby. The opening of Halloween, the murder of Judith Myers in 1963, morphed into some kind of ‘wrong’ committed against the eventual killer or someone close to the killer. Hence, Jason drowning and his mother then celebrating the (roughly) twentieth anniversary of that special event by killing some horny camp counselors. Every slasher from the golden age imitated F13’s misinterpretation of Halloween’s prologue.

The F13 template, I’m sure by accident, allowed ‘serious’ critics to view the killer as a symbol of reactionary forces from the past. That the heart of the civil rights movement generally sat between the inciting event and the “return of the repressed” allows an easy comparison to the return of right-wing zeal in the 1980s. Mind you, this was never, ever mentioned in any of the original slashers. It carries weight, however, because, as I have stated in previous reviews, it is appropriate to think of the kids who are stalked and killed as “the Other.” That’s correct, folks. Those smiling, middle class, ivory-faced teenagers (played by twenty and thirty-somethings) took on the burdens of every oppressed group in America and demonstrated their gains with their ‘hedonistic’ dismissal of authority (read as the status quo).

Most of these elements were included in the original Halloween. Carpenter and his buddy Debra Hill were young, most of the people working on the film were young. Judging by They Live, a film Carpenter made ten years later, these kids were not Republicans. It makes sense, thus, that their sympathies rested with the ‘progressive’ side of the neighborhood. But the larger issue of evil represented by a ‘shape’ lurking in darkness, toying with its victims before snuffing them, seemed to be lost on the imitators. Halloween, ultimately, was about death. Early in the film, Jamie Lee Curtis sits in a classroom listening to an instructor lecture about fate. “Fate never changes,” she says. That, I believe, was the only message John Carpenter ever intended his film to have: Try as you might, you cannot escape the grim equalizer.

The original theatrical trailer for Halloween II echoes the poster’s tagline—“More of the Night He Came Home.” The narrator of the trailer, however, goes on to promise “(t)here is no place to hide. He will always find you.” Whether conscious of it or not, Halloween II slammed the door on the golden age of the slasher by reiterating the fact that Michael Myers represented death and nothing—not a resourceful “final girl” or a demented knight in shining trench coat (Donald Pleasance and his useless pistol)—would stop him.

By cashing in on the family ties bombshell that made The Empire Strikes Back (probably) the most effective sequel of all time, Halloween II accidentally predicted the movement of anti-authoritarian sentiment from external symbols (police, politicians, school deans, etc.,) to internal, family symbols. Less than ten years after Animal House, the teenagers in John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club would identify their parents as the prime oppressors in their lives (even with the character of the school’s principal serving as a peripheral reminder that oppression is bred by institutionalized authority). This removed the young people/“Other” in the slashers and mainstream subversive comedies such as Caddyshack and Meatballs from the role of “the Other” and placed them in their proper, white, middle-class demographic. By ‘revealing’ that Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis in a useless wig and hospital gown) and Michael Myers (wielding a tiny, useless medical scalpel) were siblings, Carpenter (and replacement director Rick Rosenthal) demeaned his mystic messenger of death from the status of primordial myth to human, all too human.

The fear of the status quo that fueled the great transgressive comedies and horror films of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, was a fear of death converted to a fear of change represented by women and ‘minorities’ demanding equal status in the culture. For whatever reason, bigots all across the land could not cope with the idea of competing for a job with someone whose skin color was not the same as their own. The status quo rested their hopes for a restoration of “order” with Ronald Reagan. The word ‘prosperity’ became code for ‘safety’ and ‘security’ which were, in turn, code for “the good old days.” Revenge movies would thrive under Reagan’s watch. A decade and a half of ‘restoration’ would bring us Forrest Gump, a movie that suggested success in America comes easiest to those who don’t think. Police and hospital dramas would dominate television. And on September 11, 2001, twenty years after Laurie Strode sought ‘security’ in Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, President George Forrest W. Gump Bush would declare America “vulnerable” and call on the people of the United States to prepare for an endless war on an invisible enemy. A little outfit called The Department of Homeland Security would be formed and any hope for civil liberties surviving the reactionary forces of the right vanished.

Halloween II, for all its bigger budget trappings (explosions and the most awesome boobs in any slasher ever, courtesy Pamela Susan Shoop), makes one final stab at the illusion of safety and security. By setting the majority of the film in a hospital, Carpenter makes it clear that there is no such thing as security. Shortly after Laurie Strode is brought to Haddonfield Memorial, she begs the staff not to put her to sleep. The audience might echo that sentiment, partly because a “final girl” in a coma makes for an uninteresting film (which, for the most part, Halloween II is), and partly because that must have been what it felt like when Reagan and his regime took power and turned the clock backwards—those who slept through the 1950s, woke up for the ‘60s and ‘70s, surely must not have wanted to go back to sleep.

As in the first film, the “final girl” does not actually save herself. In a slight improvement, she ‘helps’ Dr. Loomis dispatch Michael Myers. In pure Carpenter cynicism that I believe is lost on most viewers, Laurie is wheeled out into the parking lot of the smoldering hospital and loaded into an ambulance that will take her to another hospital. No grand story arc here. Nothing learned. Nothing gained. Haddonfield Memorial created an illusion of security. Laurie Strode helped destroy it. For what? To be taken to another hospital, another illusion of safety.

1960=1980=2000=?

Classic Review: Pieces

Here's another classic review by Alec Cizak that originally appeared at Let's Kill Everybody! In this review, the grad school gibberish gets a little out of control as Cizak attempts to find something good to say about the grindhouse classic, Pieces.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 12, 2011

Pieces (1982)

by Alec “We’re all just meat” Cizak

I have spent the last year searching for the perfect slasher movie. It doesn’t exist. There’s Halloween, a great suspense film, and then there’s a string of imitations that continue to be produced to this day. After reading criticism of the slasher genre, both supportive and hyper-critical (Robin Wood, I’m looking at your pseudo-intellectual, paranoid corpse), I got the notion that there was something very subversive about the early slashers. I wanted to believe that there was some play on “the Other” going on between the kids getting chopped up and their attacker(s) (as well as the adults who were, generally, spared the blade). As with every assumption made about slashers, the patterns simply weren’t there on a consistent basis.

For instance, the “Final Girl” in virtually every golden age slasher (pre-1982) is not pure and virginal, as so many critics have suggested. The original “Final Girl” smoked pot (Halloween), another “Final Girl” played strip-Monopoly (Friday the 13th), another boogied like she meant it (Prom Night), another was in on a sexual prank (Terror Train), still another juggled men (My Bloody Valentine), and still another was involved in a seemingly normal relationship the audience had every reason to assume included sex (Friday the 13th Part 2). It wasn’t until psychoanalytic film critics poked their unwelcome snouts in the genre that studios, picking up on both the success of the independently produced slashers and the assumptions of the idiot critics trying to gut the genre, that the virginal “Final Girl” became mandatory. Of course, the moment the studios began backing slashers with their own money (1982 on, though I would make the argument that Halloween II, appropriately enough, put the dagger in the slasher’s independence), the genre was, essentially, dead. And yet, to this day, so-called experts parrot this tired myth about virgins vs. sluts like mindless sheep.

Despite my disappointment in failing to find commonalities that would demand the genre be considered subversive, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something anti-establishment was going on in the early films. These movies made the status quo squirm. The goody-goody motherfuckers who cheered on the new president in 1981 pointed to the gore as a reason to hate them. That, I realize, is the clue to understanding why these movies bother those in charge. Violence has always been a part of storytelling. But violence in popular narratives is usually reserved for punishing those who do not fall in line with the status quo. Hence, it was OK for Rambo or any Arnold character from the '80s to slaughter hundreds with a machine gun. They were faceless representatives of the enemy (and here the psychoanalytic critic may substitute ‘enemy’ with ‘the Other’ and I will not protest). Take note that by Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (part 4), the trend of characters being hacked up without having been introduced in any way, given any personality, becomes commonplace in the studio-backed slashers (remember the obese girl on the side of the road in F14 pt. 4? Her murder was symptomatic of the conformist mentality that gobbled up this country’s conscience in the 1980s: She’s fat. Slit her fucking throat, Jason! There’s a good boy).

The victims in the early slashers were people. We got glimpses of their personalities. The filmmakers attempted to generate audience sympathy for those getting sliced and diced. By making them real people, and then showing their bodies mutilated in a manner most Americans like to pretend couldn’t possibly happen, these films were snubbing an unspoken agreement between the masses and their masters (once the government, now corporations)—Your function is to work, consume, and die of natural causes. Sometimes our masters will send the youth off to die in a foreign country to protect local business interests. Mostly, though, you are not allowed to die until you have exhausted your usefulness as a worker who then spends his or her pittance on the very products you waste your life helping construct (today things are even worse as we become a nation of service representatives while poor folks in poor countries are assimilated to the process of work-consume-work-consume…) Why else, my friends, would suicide be considered a crime?

In short, your body does not belong to you. Sorry if you thought otherwise. Showing bodies hacked to bits suggests that someone other than our masters may determine when we shuffle off this mortal coil. That’s a no-no. That’s why those wonderful, independently-produced slashers are, indeed, subversive.

Look how long I’ve gone without writing something about digression!

Enter a small film from Spain. Pieces. 1982. Well into the age of the studio-backed slasher in America. In order to see something remotely subversive in the grindhouse or at the drive-in, you had to rely on imports. Does Pieces stand up to the imitations it intended to imitate?

Let’s go back to that bit about your body and who controls it. Ask any woman and she will tell you this is in no way breaking news. Women have known for a long time that the Man, or the system, or whatever the hell you choose to call our collective master, likes to have complete control over all the little kiddies born within their respective borders. The Supreme Court made it legal for a woman to have an abortion in 1973 and fuckers are still trying to reverse that. Why? Not only does that allow a woman to make a serious decision about what happens to her body, she is, according to the opponents of Roe v. Wade, also making a decision regarding another body. A body our master(s) will not be allowed to control unless it is born. I mention this only because the victims in Pieces, unlike most other slasher films, are exclusively women.

Pieces doesn’t fuck around with a lot of plot. There’s some sort of psychological bullshit going on—the film opens with a child putting together a jigsaw puzzle of a naked woman. Before he can put the final piece of the puzzle in (the woman’s vagina, hohoho!), his mother busts in and punishes him (A nifty way of showing how women counteract the Man’s attempt to control their bodies by controlling the male libido). She berates him and his absent father. The boy lands an axe in his mother’s skull and is then “rescued” by some law enforcement officers who are too fucking stupid to realize the kid is the killer.

The film jumps forty years ahead, to 1982. The killer has decided on this arbitrary moment to put together a human puzzle of a woman and fit it with his mother’s bloody dress (the logic problems inherent in why the son of a murder victim would have access to the victim’s dress is one of many canyon-sized holes in the plot). He cuts off a woman’s head in a park with a chainsaw to start the process. Enter the tragic Christopher George, the near-worthless cop in charge of the investigation. George, the actor, dropped dead from disbelief over how shitty his career had gotten by the early 80s. The awful dubbing in the film, coupled with his casual, uninterested performance, turn almost any scene he’s in into comedy—after a body is found cut up near a blood-stained chainsaw, he asks the coroner, “Could that have been done with a chainsaw?” It’s beyond Ed Wood terrible.

There are multiple red herrings. Paul Smith plays a hulking gardener who does everything he can to convince the audience he’s the killer. Then there’s the anatomy professor (hohoho!), Dr. Brown. When all the suspects gather (again, for no logical reason), at the site of an attack on an elevator, the one character who is not set up as a red herring is obviously revealed as the killer.

The movie is an absolute farce. It easily competes for the honor of worst slasher ever made. But it gets a few things right, and they’re worth pointing out and they make the movie, for all its incompetence, worth a single viewing:

The gore in Pieces is astonishing. It is messy and ruthless. Supposedly the filmmakers decided to use real animal blood. It certainly looks like it. In the movie’s brutal final killing, a woman is cut in half in a shower stall. When the upper half of her torso is discovered, the white walls are drenched in blood, the way you’d expect a healthy massacre to look. The attack in the elevator is graphically realistic. Even the inciting murder of the boy’s mother is shocking. We see the axe hack right into her skull. There’s an acceptable amount of nudity, which I consider essential to a good slasher. Finally, the soundtrack, provided by a band (or, I’ve read, a stock library of music) called Cam, is a simple synthesizer score that could not have come from any other era. But these things only make the incompetence of the film even more tragic. What could have been, had this puzzle been put together by filmmakers who were not merely interested in cashing in on a dying trend?

Alas, that is what Pieces ultimately is: A cheap imitation of a slasher film and an insipid entry in the post-golden age where the victims are only women (giving credibility to those critics who believed the slasher was a reaction to feminism). The “Final Girl” in Pieces isn’t even allowed to save herself. She is drugged into paralysis so that the men can save her. Any slasher that denies women in the audience the pleasure of seeing a woman defeat the monster who has been cutting (mostly) women to shreds is unforgiveable.

No, Pieces is just another opportunistic cash grab. That becomes obvious late in the movie when a cop and a student researching files to figure out who the killer is are shown in a room with a large poster of Ronald Reagan hanging on the wall. To make the moment complete, there is obvious product placement from Wendy’s. The commercialization of the slasher had arrived. Jason would rise from the dead (F13 pt.6) and become the hero, instead of the antagonist, and Freddy would evolve into a stuffed doll appropriate for children. As is often the case with subversive art, the establishment learned that banning it wouldn’t defuse its power. So they appropriated it instead. Like Nike, using “Search and Destroy” to sell tennis shoes, or that SUV commercial from a few years back that played “TV Eye” while some yuppie snowboards over the gas guzzler being peddled.

I propose that this will be my last slasher review. May I end on a bit of a digression? That glorious year, 1981, was for slashers what 1967 was for the counter-culture—a brief moment where a little bit of magic happened that irked the mainstream. How beautiful those goofy Halloween imitations look, with their porno-style lighting and synthesizer soundtracks. Their twenty and thirty-something actors attempting to look like teenagers. Their mad rush to execute the most gruesome special effects their low budgets could afford. It can never happen again. I recently watched Hatchet, which had been touted as a return to the old-style slashers. No way. Didn’t even come close. The golden age of slashers was a flash of inspired stupidity that rests in the wounds of nostalgia. There is no way to recreate, remake, or, for shit’s sake, “reboot,” them. Let’s accept the handful of originals as they are and find new ways to make our collective master angry by harming our rented bodies.

Classic Review: Graduation Day

Another classic review from Alec Cizak that originally appeared at Let's Kill Everybody! This time he skewers one of the most laughable slashers every made, Graduation Day.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1, 2011

Graduation Day (1981)

by Alec "Foiled Rotten" Cizak

The class of the slasher genre emerged in 1981. Not that these movies were that great or classy. They were among the last “spam in a cabin” flicks, as Joe Bob Briggs once referred to them, to uphold some basic tenets of late ‘70s/very early ‘80s subversive cinema. In the case of the slasher, the youngsters represented the Other. This was reinforced any time an adult was present. Adults and especially authority figures, such as police or deans or politicians, were generally safe from the killer because they represented the old order, which was threatened by the new order. There are numerous essays and books that attempt to explain other aspects of the genre. Most of them focus on the idea that sexual activity was the prime cause for the kids being punished. If you watch the majority of the slashers released in 1980 and 1981, which unfortunately, I have, it’s obvious that this wasn’t really true across the board. Terror Train, for example, came the closest to proving the gender critics’ theory about the old switcheroo taking place between the killer and the final girl (i.e., the killer is effeminate, the final girl is masculine). But even Terror Train doesn’t dwell on the notion that sex will get you killed. Jamie Lee Curtis does not play a “virginal-type” in Terror Train or Prom Night. I would go so far as to argue that her character in Halloween is not all that pure either. She smokes a joint, after all, on the way to her babysitting gig.

But I digress. You’ll notice throughout this piece that I digress frequently. I’m a digresser. Things might be different were I reviewing any other movie.

The slasher genre was already dying by 1981. It was clear that no filmmaker trying to cash in on Halloween’s success understood why John Carpenter’s template worked. A few films got the suspense part, but failed to create any characters worth caring about, so that when the characters got killed, the audience’s emotional response was hinged to the cleverness of the murder or the believability of the gore (which was not a part of Halloween). By 1981, the genre was subjected to “deconstructionist” experiments, such as The Burning and Slumber Party Massacre. And the genre was ready to be outright spoofed. Student Bodies was an example of a film removing any remaining elements of horror and suspense and demonstrating that the genre had become a joke. Quite by accident, ex-rabbi Herb Freed co-wrote, co-produced and directed the silliest slasher ever made, Graduation Day. The title, thus, is more appropriate than Freed might have intended. Graduation Day marked the end of any possibility of taking the genre seriously. After 1981, very few slashers were worth watching, let alone discussing in any critical manner.

Graduation Day is bad. It approaches Ed Wood-bad. Throughout the film, a flash-editing technique is employed to no dramatic effect at all. The result is annoying. The opening sequence is a great example of this. The event from the past that will cause the eventual stalk and slaughter of teenagers occurs amidst a flurry of flash cuts between a track meet, the track coach, and the crowd in the bleachers. Most of this is set to a disco song called “Everybody Wants to be a Winner,” which is appropriate considering everybody who imitated Halloween did so not out of respect for the style John Carpenter employed, but the profits the film earned. The winner of the track meet drops dead at the finish line, which is also appropriate, and off we go on an adventure of cinematic incompetence that’s not even coherent enough to warrant the ridicule of an audience at a midnight movie.

Things are suspect right away. Paula, the eventual final girl who spends the majority of the film off-screen, has hitch-hiked with a truck driver wearing a purple shirt and yellow ascot. The driver tries to feel her up, tells her he has “enough tongue” for the both of them, and then accuses her of being a “lesbo” when she refuses. She is set up as the first red-herring when she gets out and walks through a forest where the first killing will take place. The killer uses a stop-watch to commemorate the confusing track meet from the beginning of the film. The first victim, like everyone who is actually murdered in the film, is an anonymous member of the track team the audience is never allowed to get to know and generate sympathy for. The coach is then set up as another red-herring in one of many terrible musical sequences in the film. As he walks across campus, we get a "meet the crazy kids!" montage cross-cut to a heavy metal tune called, for absolutely no logical reason, “Lucky Strike.” Oh, yeah: half the “crazy kids” we meet have nothing to do with the film’s alleged plot.

Crammed in among all the nonsense and moronic killings (after the first victim, the killer, for no apparent reason, adopts a fencing foil as his or her weapon of choice), we manage to learn that a character named Kevin, who looks like he’s thirty-five-years-old and belongs in a Lord of the Rings movie, was in love with Laura, the girl who dropped dead at the track meet in the beginning of the film. So much for red-herrings. So much, also, for the film maintaining its rep as a piece of subversive cinema. The moment the killer in a slasher turns out to be one of the “crazy kids,” the notion of the teenagers being the Other is pretty much snuffed.

One could write a book on the disjointed elements of Graduation Day—there is an inexplicable acoustic “jam” in the middle of the movie. Some guy who has nothing to do with the other characters cross-breeds Elvis and T. Rex for a god-awful performance of a god-awful song called “Graduation Day Blues.” Most notable is the eventual killer singing back up and “jamming” along with a harmonica. Then there is the most notorious musical number in the film—some horrific New Wave band called Felony plays a song called “Gangster Rock” for seven and a half minutes. By the time it’s over, the song’s annoying refrain is stuck in your head for the rest of the movie. Finally, the film’s most memorable line of dialogue is uttered near the end when a detective who is barely connected to the plot asks the final girl, Paula, “Who are you? What’s your stake in all this?” It’s a question that could be presented to every character in the movie.

But I digress. Again.

It’s my job to extract some sort of meaning from this mess, to come up with a clever take that suggests there is more going on than just an embarrassing narrative failure that still managed to rake in nearly twenty-four million dollars. It took me three miserable viewings to figure out what’s really going on in Graduation Day. Then, of course, in a half-waking state, I realized that the gold nugget of wisdom Graduation Day offers is this:

Life ends after high school.

For most of the conformist, yuppie clones that litter the American landscape, nothing could be more true. High school is it. Life never gets more glorious than scoring a winning touchdown on Friday night or “finger-banging old Mary Jane Rottencrotch through her purty pink panties” in the back of a beat up Chevy on a Saturday night. It’s no accident that the killer and victims in Graduation Day are athletes (save Linnea Quigley, who gets killed simply because she showed her famous tits to her music teacher. But I digress). These are the shining jewels of every high school, and in most cases, as we all know, they go on to get married; work mindless, routine office jobs; put their fluids together to pump out one or two replacement clones and die without ever having established any meaning to their lives. Depressing? Of course. That’s why God invented suicide. But they don’t even have the guts to do that. So, enter Kevin, the goofy thirty-five-year-old with a goofier white-boy afro.

Herb Freed wants us to think Kevin is avenging the death of his true love, Laura. In fact, he is saving his classmates and teammates from entering the adult world and becoming one of the half-dozen jaded, corrupt, dishonest authority figures lurking in and around the high school. Folks like the music teacher, who dresses like Jerry Lewis, talks like Liberace and bangs young girls “just like the old man in that book by Nabokov.” Folks like the principal and his secretary (played by a healthy, pre-bulimia Vanna White), who banter back and forth about doing work, particularly the bothersome task of explaining to parents where their children might have gone off to, before agreeing to meet up later to drink and screw. The worst kind of adult these kids can become (and a great many athletes do, in fact, become) is a law enforcement officer. The school cop is a smarmy fuck who threatens to throw the kiddies in jail for smoking weed before lighting up a joint for himself (read: Adults are hypocrites). The detective who shows up late in the movie to look for the students who have been murdered is the worst of them all. He has no interest in doing his job. When asked where his badge is, he shrugs and says, “Must have lost it.” And he harbors no illusions about his feelings towards the youth (thus, the Other) when he tells the principal, “I hate schools.”

The one adult the movie tries to set up for a ninth-inning Gatorade shower of sympathy is the track coach. The film fails, however, for several reasons. The coach is a red-herring right up until the very end. Also, he’s played by the bad guy from El Dorado, Christopher George (who ended his career pretty much the same way Bela Lugosi did, in one bad horror movie after another), who looks like a mean old fuck even when he’s smiling.

Nope. There’s nothing attractive about growing up and becoming “mature.” Adults are just teenagers who are allowed to get away with their bad behavior. The message of Graduation Day is difficult to find, but it’s there:

Trust no one over the age of twenty.

Halloween established, among many other conventions of the slasher genre, the contempt for authority. When Annie’s (Nancy Loomis) father fails to recognize the stench of marijuana in his daughter’s car, the audience knows he’s useless. When he blames the break in at the hardware store on teenagers, the audience knows he’s an enemy. Like most so-called conventions of the slasher genre, this element is used and abandoned throughout the canon of films that picked up the loose dollars Halloween left in its wake. Friday the 13th opens with a truck driver who won’t take a camp counselor all the way to Crystal Lake. That allows Mrs. Voorhees to pick up the unlucky gal and slit her throat in the forest. Like most slasher conventions, the contempt for authority gets twisted around in movies such as Terror Train, where the authority figure is a senior citizen whose demeanor is so friendly the audience can’t help but sympathize with him. This, of course, ruins the convention as it was originally intended. Some films incorporate authority into the band of kids being stalked, an example being The Prowler. The point here, before I digress again, is that the conventions of slasher films, as they have been defined by critics and theorists, are barely conventions since they don’t play out the same way on a consistent basis from film to film.

Graduation Day, however, bears the honor of taking the useless, corrupt authority figure to a campy, inept extreme. The film’s cynical portrayal of all adults is, in fact, its only redeeming feature.

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