It’s a big deal in “Halloween” and (I think?) in “Friday the Thirteenth.” I haven’t seen that many teen horror films…but I’m rewatching “I Know What You Did Last Summer” where I’m pretty sure all four main characters are non-virgins. Their sexuality doesn’t seem to have much of an impact on whether or not they survive. So when did horror films stop becoming so preachy when it cames to kids and sex?
UNBOXED SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE SCREAM
I don’t watch enough horror movies to make a good analysis for you, but I Know What You Did Last Summer came out a year after Scream- a film which breathed new life into the genre while, not subtly, deconstructing it.
In Scream it’s said outright that, when chased, one should never run up the stairs- yet characters run up the stairs without getting killed. It’s said outright that no one should ever say “I’ll be right back”, yet the phrase is spoken without a corresponding kill.
And, it is said outright that sex marks a character for death and that only a virgin will survive a Horror movie, yet Sidney Prescott, the main character, loses her virginity during the course of the film yet lives through the entire trilogy.
Scream called out all of the cliches of the genre. With as popular as Scream was, it afterwards became impossible for a horror film to use those cliches and expect them to go unnoticed.
Also, culturally, I think the time was overdue for the whole “virgin=good / sex=bad” thing to finally come to an end. The good kids want sex too.
If you look at some of the bigger name slasher movies, the virgin victory really only comes in to play because the main characters don’t have sex on screen. They often have boyfriends or girlfriends and likely are sexually active, just not during the few hours or so a supernatural killer is roaming the neighborhood.
So they live because they’re smart and can put off their raging hormones for after the monster is killed.
In Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis does survive because she’s a virgin, but it’s really the only one.
In Friday the 13th, Jason’s mother is angry because her son drowned because the other counselors were having sex, but the virgin victory is never hinted at. The main character does not have sex on screen, but that’s it. Sex is considered bad because it allows Jason’s mother to get the drop on people.
In Nightmare on Elm Street the main character is not said to be a virgin, but again, she just doesn’t have sex on screen.
In The Evil Dead, Ash is not virginal, but he’s less of a horndog than his other friends. And of course, by Army of Darkness he’s a full-on casanova and he lives anyway.
I’m sure you could easily keep going.
I think it remains true that if you show your bare tits in a horror movie, you’re doomed.
Which is why it’s very rare nowadays for any bare tits to show up in a mainstream horror movie. Scream killed this cliche as well.
The hidden moralism of the 80’s horror genre is long past because the values of the people making the films has changed. Many of these movies illustrated in a rather ham handed manner that engaging in “risky” behavior has serious repercussions, the people who do drugs, or drink, or have sex are the people who end up fairing badly in those movies because that’s the underlying theme. The people who somehow manage to remain straight see all of the “horrors” that happen to close friends (and while addiction and teen pregnancy are horrible enough, they choose to use murder as the “horror”) but manage to survive to adulthood.
Many of the filmmakers active in the early to mid 80’s were of age during the late 60’s and had seen some of those horrors, plus the ones experianced by either being in or being around the Viet Nam war. Those influences plus the tendancy of 60’s era folks to be rather preachy got you extreme gore plus a strong moral message.
Filmmakers who came afterwards grew up watching those films, which is where you get lampoons like Scream.
True for mainstream. Still remains fairly common in the kind of straight to DVD crap that my wife and I watch on VOD when we’re unwinding on Friday night after the kid is in bed.
Strange little morality tales. Smoke dope,have sex be a jerk ,go skinny dipping and you will get killed. Jason acts for god punishing the evil doers.
Absolutely correct. If you’re a woman, it’s actually on-screen nudity that gets you killed, even if you’re never shown having sex. You can be innocently taking a shower, for example.
I think you shouldn’t overemphasize the 80s morality, though. I went to these movies in high school, and in those days a good American teenage girl was expected to bury her face in her dates chest whenever the killer struck. Which, if you were a teenage male, is kind of like what you wanted to happen when you had seen 30 seconds of noice boobs.
Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws contends that this convention has nothing to do with moralizing. The teen-slasher-horror subgenre, when introduced, was aimed at an audience largely consisting of marginalized prepubescent and pubescent boys, who would not identify with a strong male hero, but identified well with marginalized female survivors. Such an identification is threatened by onscreen sex with males, so the survivor didn’t have any.
Should I start another thread to disuss this theme in TV crime dramas? 'Cause everyone who has sex on Law-n-Order or CSI-whatever dies or goes to prison.
I love that someone else has read this book. It’s utterly fascinating (though i’ve always wanted to know what she thinks of homoerotic horror like the Texas Chain Saw Massacre remake). It’s worth noting that Clover calls this the Final girl phenomenon, which partially explains why blatantly sexist slashers will have a woman defeat the killer.
Rube is right, though. For the most part, self-reflective flicks like Scream have rendered the slut/virgin phenomenon way too obvious, but shitty horror makers don’t seem to have noticed. The shorthand (girl takes off her top = will soon be dead) is just too convenient.
It has nothing to do with morality. It’s just a story hook* to get the plot rolling. The whole point of the story is helpless innocent kid vs predatory monster. The story pretty much depends on them being a couple of scared kids on their own in some remote spot, away from grown ups, and no one to help them. There’s a limited number of excuses for that in plot terms, and sex is the most plausible.
Plus there’s the whole bit about disaster falling just when they’ve found true love, it increases the sense of horror.
*on the car door
That is fascinating. I feel like I might have read an excerpt of that in film class, but I’m shortlisting it as my next book to read. (It will make a nice change in pace as I’m currently in the midst of Susan Brownmiller’s “Against Our Will.”)
Anyway, as I stated in the OP, I’m not super familiar with the slasher genre–though I do like horror in general. And looking at the films I have seen of late, like Saw, sex doesn’t seem to play a huge role. I guess when I saw Halloween, I was struck by just how obvious it was. The virginal and chaste looking Jamie Lee being the only one to survive. Somehow, that creeped me out a lot more than the rest of the movie.
If you’re familiar with Freud (as your user name suggests), slashers and horror movies take on whole new meanings. Try watching A Nightmare on Elm Street after reading up on Freudian dream theory. You might also want to check out the writings of Julia Kristeva, Robin Wood, Barbara Creed and Cynthia Freeland.
The very book I was thinking of myself – and I’m also delighted to find I’m not the only one who’s read it.
I will (slightly) disagree with Clover on one point, however. I don’t think it’s the case that the (young, male) audience couldn’t identify with a strong male hero (they manage well enough when it’s an action movie) but rather that the structure of a slasher/stalker movie wouldn’t work with one.
It seems to me that the thrills of the genre largely rely on the audience identification character spending large parts of the film running and hiding, in fear for his/her life: something very hard to do with your classic “strong male hero” while maintaining audience identification – he either looks a fool or a coward. I won’t say it couldn’t be done, even in the early 80s, but it would be a tough sell, and – let’s face it – the makers of these films weren’t primarily in the business of challenging sexual stereotypes, and re-defining gender role models.
Grissom is still running the unit after having sex with Lady Heather. 
Grissom did Lady Heather? Darn, I should have known I was going to miss something when I stopped watching.