It’s silly to make such blanket characterizations, Zenster; all I have to do to refute it is name the “slasher” movies that DO have redeeming value: Psycho, any Dario Argento film, The Boston Strangler (no knives, but surely that’s only a technicality in this case), Silence of the Lambs, The Last House on the Left, Alien (ditto technicality), etc. etc. etc.
Most slasher movies are formulaic rubbish, but so are most movies in all genres. The best films in the genre are classics, which may be macabre but still exhibit great artistry. Dario Argento is a great filmmaker, and John MacNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is a very impressive portrayal of a violent, amoral world created for a minimal budget.
Also there is Alejandro Jodorowsky’sSanta Sangre, possibly the greatest movie ever made, might not be strictly a slasher movie but certainly owes a lot to the genre, and to Argento’s movies and Hitchcock’s Psycho in particular (that link is to Roger Ebert’s article on the film in his Great Movies series).
ArchiveGuy, there’s nothing like a ringing endorsement from Joe Bob Briggs. I believe Carol J. Clover’s work will change or at the very least invite a reconsideration of the slasher film for anyone, even avid fans.
Both Miller and Zebra bring up aspects I wanted to mention: that the slasher film is closer to the genre of the fairy tale and the urban legend than simple mindless violence. They often serve as instructive or disciplinary stories–see the constant jeopardy surrounding premarital or teenage sex in the slasher (there are far too many examples to list) or the callous disregard for fellow humans in need seen in the recent Cabin Fever, which results in disaster for all.
In addition, there’s the fact that a lot of people just like to be scared. And not scared in the more “highbrow” Sixth Sense or The Others fashion but downright body horror kind of scared, where things jump out from the shadows wielding chainsaws and machetes and drills. By watching a slasher film, and sitting through it to the end (goes the theory), one is able to gain mastery over irrational fears and go on to lead healthier lives. That’s the “nameless dread” Miller mentions: you give it a name like Jason or Freddy and construct a narrative around it, and then you’re vicariously able to conquer it through your alliance with the Final Girl and the other characters who work to defeat the killer.
So basically, I see plenty of redeeming value in the slasher film. Would it be too much of a stretch to also suggest that the slasher film and horror films have also been influential in developing innovations in cinematic language (camera shots and angles, the use of the I-camera perspective, not to mention special effects) we see all over the place in contemporary cinema, television, and literature?
And weepies. Don’t forget weepies.
Yes, yes, yes. Bingo.
Teenagers have a very strange relationship with death and mortality. They no longer enjoy the innocence of childhood, wherein death simply isn’t part of their worldview, and yet they haven’t fully internalized the reality of the finite life, i.e. they don’t quite understand that they and everybody they know will inevitably die sooner or later. There’s an uneasiness that often manifests as defiance, which is why so many teenagers entertain themselves doing suicidally stupid things like street racing and jumping off bridges and stuff. (A minority chooses a very different type of defiance, and rather than disregarding the threat gets obsessed with the idea, sort of an “I must know as much as possible about it so it can’t threaten me” response, as contrasted with the more common “I’m immortal and your rules don’t apply to me” response. It’s where the simplistically-labeled vamp/goth cliche comes from.)
Slasher movies fulfill an important rite-of-passage function in a society that no longer has culturally formalized rites of passage. Whereas some contributors above have suggested that people like to be frightened in these movies, I would note rather the real-world response the slasher movie typically elicits for its target audience: laughter.
And that’s the most misunderstood aspect of these movies, I think. The audience doesn’t laugh at the suffering of the characters; really, they’re laughing at themselves. Consider the standard situation: Generic teenager follows strange noise into dark, unoccupied space (wooded clearing, gymnasium, boathouse, whatever). Audience tenses up, anticipating outcome. A few moments of suspense as inevitable result is delayed. Then the teenager is suddenly attacked and/or killed in some outlandish manner, whereupon the audience first reacts in mock horror (“AWWWW!”), and then laughs, not with the tone of, haw haw, wasn’t it funny that guy just had his lungs carved out with a hedge trimmer, but more like, heh heh, you really got me with that one: either you legitimately startled me, or you surprised me by showing me something I wasn’t expecting (which is where the “creative deaths” aspect comes in).
In this reading, the mysterious unstoppable force is obviously a metaphor for death itself; no matter how fast you run or where you hide, Jason (i.e. the Grim Reaper) will find you when you least expect it. By personalizing the figure of death, and in some cases “humanizing” him (as in Freddy Kruger, who has buckets of personality), the looming fear of mortality is made comprehensible and palatable. And by couching the story in a loose morality-play format (e.g., people are killed in the order in which they have sex), the entire structure of the world is reduced to an understandable cause-and-effect form. Remember, while teenagers make the most noise about having all the answers in excess of their actual maturity, in reality that conceals how deeply confused and uncertain they are about their place in the world.
Further, the largely generic characterizations of the teenaged protagonists plays right into this, providing a tabula rasa onto which the young viewer can project him or herself. The more distance the audience feels from the protagonist, the more difficult it is to identify, and the less popular the movie as a result. The characters in Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp and all the rest are empty archetypes specifically because that’s what the audience wants to see: It’s how they buy into the movie.
This rite-of-passage function used to be fulfilled by campfire stories, those shiver-and-grin tales kids have always told each other for exactly the same reasons as above. If you don’t recall, these vignettes were horrifically gruesome, with severed heads and toothy monsters and buckets of blood and much more. “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out” is a song about putrefaction, for God’s sake. Campfire tales and ghost stories still have their place, but as movies are a much more powerful medium, they’ve taken over this social function to a large extent.
It’s worth noting that horror movies that don’t follow the slasher model don’t catch on with the standard teenage audience. The classic Wicker Man, for example, is deeply disturbing primarily because of its inexplicability, which is, as we’ve seen, anethema to the slasher-movie demographic, and therefore its fans tend to be older, able to understand the point of the ambiguity. Likewise for Kubrick’s The Shining, which leaves many questions unanswered, to the deep annoyance of people used to ordinary movie storytelling. Earlier this year, we had the film May, which wasn’t popular for similar reasons. Or look at the French movie Irreversible, which isn’t entirely successful, but which I would characterize as a horror movie more than anything else, because it’s truly horrific. The teenagers who go to slasher movies don’t like to feel bad simply for the sake of feeling bad; they want to see material that, objectively, can be labeled negative (death and torture), but that is presented in the context of a larger (if broadly unformed) philosophical goal.
It’s instructive to look at a movie that follows the general format of the slasher, but that didn’t connect with its audience: Dee Snider’s Strangeland. It’s no more or less awful than any other film of its type, but it makes a couple of mistakes that cause the intended youth demographic to shun it: First, it combines sex with death in a very different way than is typical; and second, it lacks a sense of humor. In general, it’s too unpleasant for its target audience to consume in the ordinary way, and while it wasn’t dismissed by adult critics any more forcefully than Final Destination or I Know What You Did Last Summer were at the time, it’s the rare example of a genre movie where the teenagers agreed.
In short, slasher movies wouldn’t be so persistently popular if they didn’t connect with their audience in some powerfully primal fashion. The fact that such a specific formula, refined over the years, can be easily discerned suggests to me that there’s something very interesting going on. You can argue that the movies are bad art, but that doesn’t make them unimportant or worthless.
It looks like Kill Bill, Tarantino’s next flick, is really going to up the ante in slash, and violence in general. Women fighting, whoo hoo!!
I just saw Audition; I doubt Tarantino could up the ante all that much.
Thank you everybody for your replies. I really enjoyed your analysis of things, Cervaise. I openly recognized the cathartic elements of slasher movies in my OP. Speaking as someone who has an extremely good memory, I just cannot bring myself to flood it with the typical images in a slasher flick.
I also remained concerned with the trivializing of violence. I do not assume there to be any direct link between movie violence or video game violence to youth crime, yet I am still extremely leery of exposing malleable minds to such content.
I’ve got a lady friend who absolutely loves zombie movies. I know these aren’t the same as slasher films, but we’re talking bodies ripped open, guts spilling out, etc., etc. I haven’t ahem actually watched one with her yet, though I plan to–at, uh, some unspecified time in the future.
What she tells me is that many of them are highly stylized allegories on all kinds of topics from family dynamics to dangers of unrestrained capitalism to you-name-it. (I don’t know if there’s one that’s a stylized allegory about the dangers of excessively violent entertainment, but I’d like to see it if there is.) So these films, like all good art, have both basic entertainment value and an allegorical/metaphorical subtext.
Anyway, she’s an extremely smart person and I trust her judgment on this, though, as I said above, I haven’t actually seen any of them. She’s got me intrigued though, and I think soon she’ll convince me to watch “Suspiria.”
Ooh! Yes, watch Suspiria! Most of Argento’s transcend the genre. Ditto some Carpenter, some Craven, and most Romero.
Thanks, lissener; I think I’ve heard her mention all of those names. (I do at least know who Carpenter and Craven are.)
But if the system is working correctly and parents are being responsible the “malleable minds” will never see these movies.
Teenages themes be damned, most slasher movies are still designed for the 17 - 21 demographic.