By Arrin Dembo.
In a slasher movie, the images are always the same.
The happy adolescents, gathered for a party. A place where there are no parents, no teachers, no chaparones to keep an eye on things. The keg of beer, the forbidden joint, the kids pairing off for a little experimental groping. The ruthless, faceless killer who emerges from the darkness and butchers them, one by one and two by two, until only one is left: the brave and virtuous girl who manages to survive until dawn, or even turn the tables on her attacker.
There are several criticisms that have been leveled against the films of this type, over the years, but I'm only going to mention three of them.
Number One: Like all disturbing art, slasher films are subject to the tired old accusation that violent art leads to violent behavior. I.e., these movies should be censored because watching them leads the viewer to commit (or want to commit) the acts that they see on the screen.
Bunk, of course. This simplistic monkey-see monkey-do argument really only applies to porn movies, in my experience (and even then, only if you're lucky!). But I'm going to assume that the readers of Pretty Scary (Now FanGirltastic) are also Pretty Smart; I do not need to waste time explaining that there is no causal relationship between violent images and violent acts. We're all horror fans here, and I'm sure all of us have seen a lot of blood on screen; somehow, we've managed not to turn into Ed Gein or Lizzy Borden. So fuck that noise.
Number Two: Some critics condemn these films not just because they are violent, but because they are particularly violent toward women. It was Roger Ebert who specifically cited the 'point of view' camera angles in which female victims are often killed, in a slasher film. It was Ebert's argument that the audience was standing in the killer's POV, in those scenes, and thus 'we' as the audience were killing the girls by proxy, and being asked to identify with the monster's sadism.
A lengthy and ongoing feminist attack on slasher films followed after Ebert opened that floodgate in 1981. It got quite hysterical, to put it bluntly. For a while there, it was commonly accepted wisdom that all movies of this type were dangerously sexist trash. People said they were designed to gratify the juvenile, misogynistic appetites of a teenage male audience, who wanted nothing more than to see girls naked and then dead. Slasher movies, according to these critics, were part of a bad attitude that all men in our society held toward all women, because ours is a culture that is consistently violent toward women and girls. Watching the films might even encourage the rape and murder of women in real life (returning to argument #1).
Bunk. But this bunk was more difficult to toss over your shoulder. Yes, the ominous threat that watching bad movies would make you a bad person was easy to dismiss, but it was harder to dismiss the idea that the bad movie might be a function of our bad society. It was certainly impossible to deny that there were a lot of pretty girls being terrorized and killed in these films. The audience certainly had a lot of boys in it. And there sure was a lot of violence toward women in our society.
Someone had to do a very serious analysis of these films before these arguments could really be put to bed, but the legwork was eventually done by Carol Clover, the author of Men, Women and Chainsaw. MWC is probably the definitive critique of the slasher film for the horror community nowadays; Clover's thesis about the way the male audience identifies with the famous 'Final Girl' of the American slasher movies has been embraced as a sweeping defense for the entire genre. Nowadays, the accepted dogma is that slasher movies are OK and not misogynistic, because the Final Girl defeats the evil killer in the end.
Personally, I am not going to short Clover's book by trying to summarize all her arguments here. It's an excellent book and people who care about women in horror should definitely pick it up. But at the end of the day, when it comes to slasher films, I think that Clover's analysis missed the boat. For that matter, I think Ebert's analysis didn't even make it to the docks. And if comes right down to it, anyone stupid enough to think that violent art creates violent crime? Is trying to launch a dinghy in the Sahara.
When it comes to analyzing slasher films, I think the people who identify these movies with urban legends come closest to truly understanding them. Stephen King stripped down the slasher story to its essential elements when he recounted the old campfire tale of 'The Hook', in Danse Macabre: the two horny kids, the dark private place, the madman with the hook. A demon from the past, the hunter of Lover's Lane, now returned to seek new prey.
Unlike most of the kids in a slasher movie, the two lovers in the story of the Hook survive their encounter with the escaped lunatic. That girl in the car, fending off her boyfriend and forcing him to drive her home, frustrating his sexual urge so badly that he peels out of Lover's Lane in a cloud of dust, is the story's Final Girl. In the story of the Hook, she saves her own life AND her boyfriend's life, but she does it by the traditional means: she hangs on to her virginity. Ultimately, she and her boyfriend survive their encounter with the demon because the two of them did not consummate a sexual act. And ultimately, I think that this detail of the story points to the real nature of the slasher, and the real nature of the Final Girl, at the mythic level which trumps the superficial gender politics level hands-down.
The reason that the Final Girl can emerge victorious at the end of a slasher movie is that she remains a girl - a child who does not take any independent steps toward adulthood. The traditional acts 'punished' by the slasher are drinking, smoking and sex - all of the fun things that adults are allowed to do and children aren't. The very things that most teenagers want to experiment with, as they stand on the cusp of adulthood.
The slasher is a demon of the threshold. It defends the barrier between the world of children and the world of adults, and will not allow anyone to pass. If you look at the background story for all of the classic slasher figures like Freddy, Jason, Michael Myers - you find that every one of them emerges from a torturous realm of abuse as a child (sometimes, as in Freddy's case, a child cursed even before conception). If you could rip away the killer's dreadful mask, you would find the face of an angry child, trapped forever, like one of those fiendish things from the old German fairy tales which begin as a little boy or girl and then spend centuries not growing up, until they become unspeakable.
The slasher cannot grow up, and he does not want any other child to grow up either. And anyone who steps onto the doorstep of adulthood who begins to embrace adult pleasures and take the risks associated with them must be destroyed before they can make the transition. That is his mission, and his power: he slams the door.
The Final Girl archetype has been examined from many angles, but her one truly consistent feature is relentless prudery. At the end of the slasher film, the Final Girl's beauty and purity are victorious: throughout the film she has not taken a drink, smoked a cigarette or a joint, or taken too keen an interest in anyone's penis, and that is the source of her power over the demon.
You see, ultimately, the Final Girl and the slasher are on the same side. They are agents of the same morality. They deliver the same message, metaphorically, to the teenage audience for this film, which may consist mostly of teenage boys, but could just as easily by peppered with teenage girls. And the message they deliver is this:
'Don't grow up, kids. Those cigarettes give you cancer. Those drugs will destroy you. That booze is dangerous. Sex will be the end of you. And if you abandon your childhood, the demon of the threshold will be waiting to pounce.'
It seems on the face of it to be an evil message, imposed by the controlling adults of a prudish and Victorian society. But if there was nothing more to it than that, the kids wouldn't dig it; teenagers are amazingly sensitive to preaching and browbeating, however subtly you try to hide it.
And yet the kids eat these movies up like greasy popcorn and malted milk balls, which means that they are ready to hear this message. These movies are valuable to them in some way. They're scary, and yet you want to watch, which must mean that the movie is giving you a chance, somehow, to deal with your fears.
Standing farther along the track of life, an older woman raising two children of my own, I'd like to be able to comfort those kids in the audience. I wish I could tell them it was all OK, and they don't have to be afraid.
But I can't.
The demon of the threshold is real.
It doesn't wear a hockey mask or chase people around with a knife, but it can certainly kill you. Plenty of kids I knew in school who just didn't make it. Overdosed on drugs. Killed or crippled driving drunk. Pregnant at age sixteen. Committed suicide. Ended up in prison. The process of emerging from the chrysalis went badly for them, and they didn't come out of it able to fly. It happens.
It must also be said that the final stage of becoming an adult, the real end of childhood, is the day that you finally realize that someone else's life matters more to you than your own. That you would die, so that they might live. That's what being a parent is like, or loving someone enough that it makes sense to marry them, for that matter. You accept your own mortality; the knife descends. It is a death of sorts: the death of a child who regarded himself/herself as the center of the universe, and the birth of an adult who is capable of real love and sacrifice for another.
Roll credits. The demon wins. And you can't say you weren't warned.
I remember the Ebert take being taught in university and thinking, "That doesn't seem quite right." I'm declaring this my new favorite interpretation of the subject. Excellent piece - I'm forwarding it around to everyone I know.