Fine, here’s my entire thesis paper

I’ve had a few viewers of my YouTube channel inquire (very flatteringly) if they can read the thesis paper I’ve made reference to in a few videos. Not sure why any of you would want to read 10,000 words of undergraduate academic writing, but I appreciate it.

The background to this project is that during a period of intense burnout brought on by making a truly terrible short film in the penultimate year of my film program, I turned to free-with-ads streaming service Tubi for comfort and distraction. Throughout the summer of 2022, I watched dozens of vintage horror B movies hosted by the platform. I found a few hidden gems like The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), Night of the Comet (1984), and Uncle Sam (1996) in addition to a great many stinkers like Microwave Massacre (1979), Paganini Horror (1989), and The Dead Pit (1989).

When I returned to school for the 2022-23 year, I had nothing but this particular period and aesthetic on my mind. I had even written a screenplay over the summer for a short inspired by the films I’d been immersing myself in. Though I originally meant to direct this short, it soon became clear that the burnout was still eating at me, and for my own wellbeing, I decided that I could not make a film. In a way, I got the best of both worlds, as some classmates ended up producing my screenplay while I wrote a paper for my own grade.

I eventually narrowed down my area of interest to the slasher film, a subgenre with a surprisingly vast sea of existing scholarship. In the interest of boldly going where no man had gone before, I chose to focus on female-directed slasher films from the classic period, a topic seemingly heretofore unexamined.

Did you know British people call an undergraduate thesis a “dissertation”? Freaks.

FINALLY, GIRLS: GENDER IN FEMALE-DIRECTED SLASHER CINEMA

Representations of Gender in Female-Directed Slasher Cinema

Despite its outwardly lowbrow reputation, the slasher film has been the subject of extensive academic study, especially in relation to representations of gender within the genre. Compared to many other horror subgenres, the archetypical slasher formula displays particularly overt gender discourse and psychosexual symbolism. However, amidst the numerous, generative discussions of gender within these films, there appears to be something of a gap in scholarship when it comes to the generic impact of slasher films directed by women. While the classic era of the slasher genre, spanning from roughly the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, boasts admittedly few female-directed entries, several do exist and in fact contain notable subversions of the gender-based generic conventions typical of most slasher films. This paper aims to explore a few noteworthy classic-era slasher films directed by women through the lens of the slasher-specific conventions and gender dynamics previously defined by various scholars, with the ultimate goal of investigating the ways in which these films differ from their male-directed counterparts in their representations of gender. After establishing a foundation of the existing scholarship on gender in the slasher genre, I will present three films as case studies: Amy Holden Jones’s The Slumber Party Massacre (1982), Roberta Findlay’s Blood Sisters (1987), and Kristine Peterson’s Deadly Dreams (1988). The structure of these chapters will first identify the ways in which the respective films adhere to generic conventions before identifying the ways in which they deviate.

I have attempted to select films that were relatively mainstream, or at least widely-distributed, at the time of their release, include significant gender play or relevant representations of gender, and most faithfully represent the slasher genre. There are, of course, some challenges and limitations that come with this material. As mentioned above, there are only a handful of mainstream classic-era slashers helmed by women, meaning that some titles are fairly obscure. Unfortunately, some lesser-known films in this subgenre have suffered inadequate preservation or been lost altogether, meaning that it was necessary to overlook certain material due to the virtual impossibility of finding watchable copies (for example, the films of Doris Wishman.) There is also the issue of time and place. Though this paper focuses exclusively on the initial wave of slasher films, the genre experienced a post-modern revival in the 1990s and is still seeing innovative revisions to this day. This is to say nothing of slasher and slasher-adjacent cinema outside of North America. There are undoubtedly numerous examples of relevant non-Western films directed by women that are equally deserving of analysis. I have chosen the very limited scope of late 20th century American cinema for the purposes of brevity and analytical consistency within this paper; however, it should go without saying that the study of female-directed slasher cinema is ripe for further exploration. With these constraints in mind, it is necessary to begin with a comprehensive overview of the formative existing writing on gender in the slasher film.

Chapter one: Review of Literature

The relevant literature on gender in slasher cinema can help to define this category of film, as well as the recurring gender dynamics therewithin. Most integral to my analysis are two in-depth dissections of the genre by Carol J. Clover and Vera Dika, respectively. However, Robin Wood’s early analysis of the slasher film provides a contemporary take, and Janet Staiger’s more recent writing on the lack of closure in most slasher endings fleshes out a genre convention first identified by Dika. Finally, Richard Nowell’s response to the common assumption that the slasher audience is primarily male offers a counterpoint to Clover’s work, as well as unique evidence of the involvement of women since the early days of the genre. These works combined create a holistic analytical framework for the discussion of representations of gender in the slasher genre.

One of the earliest writers to address gender in the slasher film was Robin Wood, who broached the topic in the 1983 American Film article ‘Beauty Bests the Beast’, albeit without using the ‘slasher’ label. Wood details both the disturbing ways in which the genre perpetuates capitalist and patriarchal ideals through violence against women, as well as the subversions that do exist in the genre, often overlooked by mainstream “journalist-critics incapable of distinguishing between different uses of the same generic material” (1983, 64). Wood identifies two primary categories of slasher film: the “violence-against-women” film and the “teenie-kill-pic” (1983, 63). One notable difference in representations of gender in these two types of film, Wood notes, is that while in the ‘teenie-kill-pic’, the teen victims are typically punished for their sexual promiscuity, in the ‘violence-against-women’ film, the women are punished for the very act of being women.

However, Wood points to certain examples of slasher films, such as Brian DePalma’s Dressed to Kill (1980), Armand Mastroianni’s He Knows You’re Alone (1980), and most notably Ken Wiederhorn’s Eyes of a Stranger (1981), as films that attempt to question and subvert the established representations of gender within the genre. This takes shape namely in subversions of the ‘look’. For example, Wood challenges the popular assertion that the use of first-person camera in slasher films is to invite sadistic identification with male killers, instead arguing that it serves to conceal the identity of the killer, as well as to maintain the quasi-supernatural menace of the antagonist. These theories have merit, and Wood’s essay is of particular interest, having been written in the midst of the genre’s peak popularity. However, I believe that to attempt to draw a generic distinction between the “teenie-kill-pic” and “violence-against-women” film is somewhat counterproductive; there is too much overlap between the films in these two categories to meaningfully necessitate two separate subgenres. That being said, Wood was one of the first scholars to attempt to define the genre, and this article predates the wider usage of the term “slasher” or “stalker” to connote such films. It is thus presumable that the relevant descriptive tools were not fully formed at this time, and Wood’s writing certainly lays a foundation for future writers to hone the language of the genre’s definition.

Another formative, contemporaneous piece of scholarship on this subject is Vera Dika’s essay The Stalker Film, 1978-81. Dika’s work aims to define the genre, which she dubs the “stalker film”, as well as to position it within its cultural and historical contexts. According to Dika, the ‘stalker’ film is defined by its replicability, the dynamics between the various categories of characters, and its formation of a set of binary oppositions. In regard to the narrative, these films “portray the struggle between a killer, who stalks and kills a group of young people, and a central character, usually a woman, who emerges from the group to subdue him” (1987, 87). Dika also identifies a two-part structure to these films: A ‘past event’, usually some sort of trauma resulting in the killer’s derangement, and a retribution of sorts wherein the killer punishes the group of young people for their real or perceived guilt in the past event. Imperatively, at the end of this narrative, “the heroine survives but is not free” (1987, 94). The killer is typically a masculine, loosely-defined figure, depersonalized by a mask or visual obscurity. The viewer rarely sees this figure, and the stalker film’s frequent employment of first-person shots from the point of view of the antagonist allows the viewer to identify with his look, but not with his personhood—the lack of reverse shots deny him humanity—thus absolving the viewer of the moral consequences of the killer’s actions. Conversely, the viewer identifies with the heroine, an active character with the most screen time of the cast. The killer and heroine are distinct in that they are able to ‘see’ and to use violence; they are subjects, whereas the killer’s other victims are mere objects. The ‘victims,’ as Dika defines them, are young people who are positioned as sexual objects, who do not understand the killer’s threat, and whose actions do not affect the plot. Unlike many other scholars of the slasher or stalker genre, Dika stresses that the typical promiscuity of the victims versus the relative sexual inactivity of the heroine is not necessarily a moralistic judgment of these characters, but a result of the heroine’s narrative agency; her active role prevents her from being a sexual object. Furthermore, the binary oppositions at play in the average stalker film that Dika identifies are: Valued/devalued (heroine/victims), strong/weak (heroine and killer/community), ingroup/outgroup (young community/old community), normal/abnormal (young community/killer), and ego/id (heroine/killer).

Finally, the stalker film is uniquely American, usually taking place in a nebulous, isolated representation of middle-class America—“…simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, but yet distinctly American” (1987, 93). Dika argues that the underlying themes and sentiments of the stalker film are a result of American Reagan-era social ideals. By 1980, the year of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, America was experiencing a return to conservatism and social repression, a reversal of 1960s attitudes, as well as the idea that radical new ideals were necessary to set the country on track. According to Dika, stalker films expressed these sentiments through the sexual and social restraint of the heroine, the killer being a revenge-seeking remnant of the past, and their rejection of 1960s ideals like sexual freedom and nonviolence.

But perhaps even more influential, and ultimately the most formative piece of writing in the conception of this paper, is Carol J. Clover’s ‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film’. Originally published in a 1987 issue of Representations and later reprinted in Clover’s Men Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, the essay identifies various recurring archetypes and narrative conventions in slasher films of the 1970s and 80s that result in gender discourse unique to the subgenre. First, Clover breaks down the genre’s essential elements: the ‘Killer’, the ‘Terrible Place’, the ‘Victims’, and the ‘Final Girl’. Clover posits that the Killer is typically a sexually disturbed and/or gender-confused man, the Terrible Place is the film’s terrorized setting, often a house or tunnel, the Victims are typically sexual transgressors and can be male or female, but are “most often and most conspicuously girl” (1992, 33), and the ‘Final Girl’ is a somewhat boyish, sexually inactive female ‘victim-hero’ who either defeats or successfully evades the killer by the end of the film.

Clover’s assessment of the relationship between the killer and Final Girl is of particular interest. She asserts that the killer is typically some sort of feminine male character, monstrous and usually virginal or sexually impotent, despite the overtly phallic nature of his murder weapon. Conversely, the Final Girl is in various ways masculine. She is not sexually promiscuous like her doomed female peers, is less interested in conventionally feminine pursuits, and takes an active role in combatting the killer. This culminates in a sort of gendered power exchange: the Final Girl symbolically castrates the killer, often penetrating him with a phallic weapon, effectively ‘masculinizing’ herself and ‘feminizing’ the villain.

Finally, Clover presents a theory as to how young male audiences identify with the young female protagonists of slasher films. In the introductory chapter of Men Women and Chainsaws, Clover presents her own anecdotal evidence that the primary audience for the slasher film is comprised of adolescent males (1992, 7). She goes on to explain the theory of ‘cross-gender identification’ in ‘Her Body, Himself’. Clover hypothesizes that the masculinized Final Girl offers a conduit for male viewers of slasher films to safely enact a masochistic fantasy and identify with the experience of abject terror without the narrative threatening their masculinity, sexual orientation, or perceived place in society.

However, as influential as Clover’s analysis has been on the study of the slasher genre, its popularity has resulted in the work attracting a fair amount of criticism. Several scholars have taken issue with some of Clover’s findings, or simply presented different theories from the outset. In ‘The Slasher, the Final Girl, and the Anti-Denouement’, Janet Staiger’s chapter in Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film, Staiger points out inconsistencies in Clover’s definition of the slasher formula. Staiger uses three extensive charts to break down whether the major slasher releases from 1960 to 1991 consistently adhere to Clover’s generic traits, and concludes that many do not. However, she does ultimately agree with many of Clover’s findings, including cross-gender identification, but also argues that slasher films frequently resist closure (the ‘anti-denouement’) to maintain a perpetual adolescence and “avoid the scenario of final death” (2015, 226), as opposed to the childhood-to-adulthood, feminine-to-masculine narrative Clover had previously put forward as the psychoanalytic crux of the slasher (1992, 50).

Furthermore, Richard Nowell argues in ‘“There’s More Than One Way to Lose Your Heart”: The American Film Industry, Early Teen Slasher Films, and Female Youth’ that Clover (and many other critics)’s assessment of slasher audiences as primarily male is not necessarily supported by historical data. Nowell presents a swath of strong evidence that various industry trends resulted in many of the most iconic slasher films of the late 1970s to early 1980s successfully marketing specifically and intentionally to female audiences. According to Nowell, one contributing factor was the effort of industry insiders to market horror to mature female audiences following the success of Rosemary’s Baby (1968), leading to the increased success of films liked William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1974), Dan Curtis’s Burnt Offerings (1976), and Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976). Following this, when United Artists’ marketing of Carrie (1976) to teen girls with its taglines (“If only they knew she had the power”), poster, and trailer contributed to unprecedented financial success, other studios appropriated elements of the film itself and its marketing to sell films like Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980) to young female audiences.

Nowell also cites the growing popularity of ‘date movies’ in the 1970s, low-budget romance-adjacent films marketed to both male and female teenage audiences; specifically, the popular strategy was to include taglines that appealed to boys and imagery that appealed to girls (2011, 123). The peak popularity of the lighthearted date film coincided with the rapid increase in slasher films in the late 1970s, motivating studios to meld the two genres. Nowell lists Paul Lynch’s Prom Night (1980) and George Mihalka’s My Bloody Valentine (1981) as two films with explicitly female-oriented marketing; the promotional material of these films focused on heterosexual courting, fashion and beauty, and traditionally feminine social rituals.

Additionally, Nowell goes so far as to challenge Clover’s theory that the Final Girl is present for the male viewer’s identification, arguing instead that the advent of the Final Girl was motivated by producers’ desire to attract female audiences. In fairness to Clover, she does not claim that female audiences are incapable or uninterested in identifying with the Final Girl archetype, and seems to leave this question somewhat unresolved: “Do females respond to the text (the literal) and males to the subtext (the figurative)?... Does the Final Girl mean “girl” to her female viewers and “boy” to her male viewers?” (1992, 54). Clover also admits explicitly in the introductory chapter of Men Women and Chainsaws an enormous bias concerning her interest in the male audience for horror films, such that she virtually ignored other types of viewer for the purposes of her analysis (1992, 7). Furthermore, the source of Clover’s evidence for her assumption that the majority of slasher viewers are male is an aggregate of data from video store rentals, whereas Nowell’s research is based in box office results. It is feasible that the demographics of these films in the cinema at the time of release may have been quite different from those in video stores several years later. However, this does not excuse such an oversight; it is clear from Nowell’s research that contrary to Clover’s assumptions, there were in fact ample female audiences for slasher films, at the very least during the subgenre’s peak from 1978 to 1981.

For my own part, I am inclined to agree with the issues the aforementioned authors have raised with Clover’s work. I must add that I also find it strange that both Clover and Robin Wood cite Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) as one of the most formative films in the advent of the slasher genre, but neglect to mention another 1974 film that was arguably more demonstrative of and influential on the archetypical slasher film: Bob Clark’s Black Christmas. Though Texas Chainsaw was undeniably influential on American horror cinema in general, and certainly helped develop the Final Girl archetype, its inclusion of certain horror elements relatively atypical of slashers (graverobbing, cannibalism), as well as the presence of an entire family of visible antagonists as opposed to one obfuscated killer, makes it arguably less identifiable as a textbook slasher. Black Christmas, on the other hand, notably innovated the use of first-person point of view cinematography for slasher villains before its much more well-known inclusion in Halloween (1978). Black Christmas also has a more slasher-typical use of locations (one house as the ‘terrible place’ as opposed to multiple locations) and focuses on a sorority, something that would become something of a cliché within the genre (see Hell Night (1981), The House on Sorority Row (1982), The Initiation (1984), Sorority House Massacre (1986), and Blood Sisters (1987), one of the films discussed in this paper). Nevertheless, Clover’s ‘Her Body, Himself’ is ultimately the most comprehensive breakdown of gender dynamics in the slasher genre for the purposes of my writing, and thus will make up a large part of the framework for analyzing the presence or absence of conventional representations of gender in my chosen films.

Having now discussed some of the most significant relevant writing on this subject, it is necessary to establish a comprehensive definition of the genre, or at least a summary of the slasher conventions I will reference going forward. In their most concise descriptions, the above writers respectively define slasher films (in part) as: “gruesome low-budget horror movies centered on psychopathic killers” (1983, 63), “films characterized by the presence of a psychotic killer usually involved in a multiplicity of murders”, “the struggle between a killer, who stalks and kills a group of young people, and a central character, usually a woman, who emerges from this group to subdue him” (1987, 85, 87), and “the immensely generative story of a psycho-killer who slashes to death a string of mostly female victims, one by one, until he is himself subdued or killed, usually by the one girl who has survived” (1992, 21). For my analytic purposes, and the sake of holism, I have compiled a list of the slasher conventions that these three scholars seem to, at least in some combination, approve of:

1. A psychotic, depersonalized killer disturbed (usually sexually) and/or motivated by a past event (Dika, Clover)

2. Some type of phallic and/or physically intimate weapon (Wood, Dika, Clover)

3. An empowered female protagonist (Final Girl) who emerges as sole survivor (Wood, Dika, Clover)

4. A doomed, isolating location as primary setting (Dika, Clover)

5. Non-protagonist victims are young people, often sexually promiscuous (Wood, Dika, Clover)

Another trait not necessarily agreed upon by the previous three scholars but still ubiquitous to the genre:

6. An ambiguous ending implying that the threat is still present (Staiger, Dika)

While these conventions are not exhaustive, they are the major traits necessary for the identification of a slasher film. It is also important to note that each film does not need to exhibit every single one of these traits to qualify as a slasher film, and containing exceptions to these ‘rules’ does not necessarily exclude a film from the genre or from the analysis of the writers above (far be it from me to follow Adam Rockoff’s lead in his slasher history Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film 1978-1986, in which Rockoff dismisses virtually all gender-based readings of the genre on the grounds that certain slasher films do not feature one woman as the sole survivor (2002, 13).) Therefore, this list is simply a malleable framework, to be combined with other aspects of the above authors’ work in addition to my own observations on the genre.

The combined writings of Wood, Dika, Clover, Staiger, and Nowell create a comprehensive summary of the slasher film that can be used to analyze any film in the genre. The inclusion of literature spanning multiple decades, from the ‘golden age’ of the slasher to more recently in the mid-2010s, ensures a relatively balanced assessment. However, as useful as these frameworks are for further investigation of the subgenre, it is also apparent that the aforementioned texts do not explore the niche of slasher cinema directed by women. This is not inherently a shortcoming, but does reveal a gap in study justifying the existence of this paper. Ultimately, the previously established writing provides a strong foundation of generic analysis on which to dissect the following female-directed slasher films.

Chapter two: ‘Takes a lot of love for a person to do this’: Amy Holden Jones’ The Slumber Party Massacre

Within the slasher subgenre, The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) offers a particularly rich tapestry of gender discourse. Despite adhering quite clearly to some of Clover and Dika’s identified slasher traits, mainly the blatant phallic symbolism of the film’s murder weapon and a classically defined Final Girl, the film also strays from slasher conventions in its subversive depictions of certain female and male characters.

The Slumber Party Massacre follows a group of school friends; Trish, Kim, Jackie, and Diane, who find their titular slumber party crashed by escaped mass murderer Russ Thorn. Thorn sets out to murder all who cross his path with a giant drill bit, eventually leaving only Trish and her neighbor Valerie to attempt to put an end to the violence.

Writer Rita Mae Brown originally penned the script of The Slumber Party Massacre as an intended parody of the then-burgeoning slasher genre. However, in an interview published in Chris Nashawty’s Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses: Roger Corman, director Amy Holden Jones explains that she made the decision to produce the script in earnest (2013, 187), resulting in an entry to the genre that is at times conventional and at others outwardly comedic. Brown’s legacy as a radical lesbian feminist activist also puts the script into perspective; we would be remiss not to connect her political roots with elements of the film’s depiction of women and gender dynamics.

But beyond Brown’s influence, the film was the debut directorial venture of Amy Holden Jones, previously exclusively a film editor. Though The Slumber Party Massacre would be Jones’s only directorial foray into the horror genre, she would go on to achieve the most mainstream success of the three directors covered in this paper, with writing and directing credits on several high budget, well-received films. Though Jones’s influence on the film is perhaps less outwardly sensational in nature than Brown’s, Jones claims to have done significant rewrites of the original script, which producer Roger Corman had previously discarded (2013, 185-188). Additionally, much of Jones’s other film work, particularly her screenwriting, does center on complex female characters and relationships (Love Letters (1984), Mystic Pizza (1988), The Rich Man’s Wife (1996)). It is plausible that the collective input of the two female creatives responsible for The Slumber Party Massacre resulted in a film displaying representations of gender and sexuality relatively unconventional for the slasher genre.

Firstly, it is necessary to acknowledge the ways in which the film does adhere to the familiar conventions of the subgenre. Let us refer to our established formulaic elements:

1. A psychotic, depersonalized killer disturbed (usually sexually) and/or motivated by a past event

2. Some type of phallic and/or physically intimate weapon

3. An empowered female protagonist who emerges as sole survivor

4. A doomed, isolating location as primary setting

5. Non-protagonist victims are young people, often sexually promiscuous

6. An ambiguous ending implying that the threat is still present

Many of these traits are generally accurate to The Slumber Party Massacre. Though the viewer is not privy to the history or specifics of drill-wielding Russ Thorn’s derangement, when he does express his motivations, they are overtly psychosexual. Additionally, despite his appearing on screen from early in the film, the viewer never gains entry into Thorn’s inner world; he is not granted humanization or personalization. Many of the film’s murder victims are teenagers, and the teen victims are indeed at least implicitly promiscuous. The weapon is, of course, a huge drill, certainly falling under the parameters for close-proximity weapons that provide a more intimate assault than firearms or other long-range weapons. Finally, in the character of Valerie, the film ultimately displays a clear example of the Final Girl archetype.

There are also certain recurring psychoanalytic tropes that Clover identifies as staples of the slasher film that are as ubiquitous in The Slumber Party Massacre as in any other example of the genre. One is the phallic symbology of the murder weapon. This convention is present to the point of parody in the film. In one telling scene, Thorn murders Diane (the most outwardly sexually active and thus the first in the friend group to die) in Trish’s garage. After a brief struggle, Diane cowers beneath Thorn, framed below him as his drill bit descends between his legs to deliver the final blow. The phallic implications of the drill only become more blatant as the film goes on. Eventually, having murdered each of the other party guests, Thorn delivers a brief manifesto to Trish: “All of you are very pretty. I love you. Takes a lot of love for a person to do this. You know you want it. You want it.” His justifications for his murderous actions ring very similar to common victim-blaming justifications of sexual violence. This also supports Clover’s assertion that sex and violence in slasher films are essentially substitutes for one another, “…the one as much a substitute for and a prelude to the other as the teenage horror film is a substitute for and a prelude to the “adult” film.” (1992, 29) Finally, in the ultimate showdown between Thorn and Valerie, Valerie arms herself with a machete (her own phallic symbol) and severs the length of his drill bit before penetrating him with the knife. One of Clover’s primary conclusions about slashers is that they must involve a symbolic castration of the masculine villain and a symbolic phallicization of the feminine victim-hero (1992, 50). This paradigm is on incredibly overt display in The Slumber Party Massacre.

On a related note, Valerie’s status as Final Girl is also well-defined. Not only does she eventually arm herself with the phallic symbol of a large knife, but from the outset she seems to exist in a different category than her female peers. She excels at sports but is something of a social outcast. She is less interested in sex and seemingly not interested in boys at all (Val’s lack of any male objects of desire combined with some significant looks exchanged between her and Trish makes for more than a little lesbian subtext in the film.) Interestingly, early in the film, Trish does invite her to the party, but Val chooses not to attend, ostensibly due to her feelings of social discomfort around the girls, whom she has overheard gossiping about her. As the film progresses, it would seem that it is in part this very refusal to participate in the slumber party that saves her, as if this conventionally feminine ritual in itself, similarly to sexual activity or feminine passivity, spells doom for the other girls.

Conversely, there are also notable departures from slasher conventions in the film. The first example of this is the film’s subversion of certain aspects of traditional femininity. Despite the apparent surface-level performance of conventional femininity—stylish, sexually active female characters, a girls’ slumber party as the central premise—as well as surface-level appeals to the male spectator’s viewing pleasure—mainly gratuitous female nudity—the girls’ personalities and the actual content of the dialogue tell a different story. An early scene depicts an entire class of girls showering in the locker room after basketball practice. The camera lingers sensually on various parts of the girls’ bodies, par for the course in the slasher genre. However, during these shots, the girls are discussing their favorite baseball players. This theme continues as the film goes on; at various points throughout the party, the girls argue over the previous night’s baseball scores, eventually calling their gym teacher to help settle their disagreement. Focusing so much on the conventionally masculine pastime of sports-viewing creates a noteworthy contrast; though the male viewer may gain visual pleasure from the objectified images of these women, within the diegesis, these characters are simply people, androgynous in their personalities and uninterested in the spectator’s experience.

Furthermore, the film features several peripheral female characters that exhibit far more transgressive gender expression. One example is Thorn’s first victim, a telephone repairwoman eventually murdered in her own van outside of the high school. This character does quickly become an object of desire for two male teenage characters, but it is relevant to note that the repairwoman does not die due to the typical ‘female’ reasons (sexual promiscuity or the killer’s anti-woman vendetta) but for a more archetypically ‘male’ reason: simply being an obstacle in the killer’s path. A more consistent example is the aforementioned gym teacher, Coach Jana. The segment of the film that follows Jana to her home bears a host of seeming lesbian in-jokes. The tracksuit-sporting Jana, already in a conventionally masculine profession, lives alone with her cat, and upon arriving home is startled by her friend, a butch, flannel-wearing female carpenter who is coincidentally using a giant drill bit to install a peephole in Jana’s door. The mere inclusion of such a figure as the carpenter (interestingly, wielding the film’s most blatantly phallic symbol) presents a type of womanhood completely separate from the acceptable female archetypes usually present in these films (the Final Girl may be symbolically masculinized by the end of the average slasher, but she is typically still superficially acceptable to male heterosexual sensibilities). The unconventional female supporting cast of The Slumber Party Massacre constitutes a significantly subversive depiction within the wider context of the genre.

Finally, the film’s treatment of its male characters is also somewhat unconventional for the slasher genre. Clover argues that in the majority of slasher films, although men and women are often killed indiscriminately, male deaths do not receive the same gratuitous treatment. The death sequences involving men are less likely to linger on body parts and show graphic detail, and more likely to be filmed from a distance and include obscuring elements like fog (1992, 35). However, one of the death scenes in The Slumber Party Massacre stands out as a stark departure from this pattern. Having come to understand that Thorn is stalking them, the group of friends send their two male classmates (who arrived earlier to crash the party), Jeff and Neil, out of the house to seek help. While Jeff’s death sequence is quick and systematic, Neil’s is arguably the most physically intimate in the film. Neil, armed with a kitchen knife, bangs on Valerie’s door and pleads for help, but she does not hear him over the loud slasher film she is watching. Thorn catches Neil, they wrestle bodily, and Thorn ultimately takes Neil’s knife and uses it to stab him repeatedly. The difference in physical intimacy is clear; in prior killing scenes Thorn uses his drill bit to kill characters in a sexually coded but ultimately physically removed fashion. In fact, in the first several death scenes in the film, the killing blow occurs off-screen. Significantly, it is Jeff’s brief death scene in which we first actually see Thorn’s drill bit enter a character’s body (it is also the last time, as the three deaths that follow are 1. A stabbing with a knife, 2. A character merely having their throat slit by Thorn’s drill bit, and 3. Another knife death.) Following this, while attacking Neil, he wrestles with the boy and even bites him to make him drop the knife, both more physically involved than any other death thus far.

Lastly, the substitution of weapon is significant. At this point in the film, it is clear that men are fair game to be drilled; Thorn has already killed Trish’s male neighbor and Jeff with the drill bit, so the use of the knife is not part of a wider pattern of men being off-limits to the central phallic symbol of the film. There is simply something different about the murder of Neil. The scene places him in the ‘damsel’ position, pleading in vain to be rescued by the Final Girl. His murder scene also includes shots from his point of view as Thorn stabs him, something that Clover assigns primarily to the archetypically female victim. This scene in particular, as well as the aforementioned subversions of conventional representations of femininity in the slasher genre, point to a categorically unique construction of gender dynamics within The Slumber Party Massacre.

The Slumber Party Massacre is one of the foremost classic slasher films directed by women, not only for its mainstream status and ultimate proliferation of a franchise, but its wholly unique treatment of gender and sexuality, especially so early in the landscape of slasher cinema. Its inclusion of atypical female characters and unusually homoerotic male death sequences set it apart from many other entries to the genre and denotes a more nuanced approach to the depiction of gender in the slasher film.

Chapter three: “Who wouldn’t go crazy locked up in a house like this?” Roberta Findlay’s Blood Sisters

Despite director Roberta Findlay’s repeated assertions that her films are not intentionally feminist or cognizant of gender discourse, there is much of interest in the representations of gender present in Blood Sisters (1987). While the film does contain a sexually disturbed villain with a motivating ‘past event’, as well as an ambiguous ending, there is also a unique focus on female visual pleasure and a subversion of the female ‘look’ as it typically exists in horror cinema, making for a significant departure from certain slasher gender conventions.

Blood Sisters follows a group of prospective sorority sisters challenged to spend a night in a supposedly haunted brothel as part of their initiation. Once there, the girls find themselves plagued by supernatural visions while a mysterious figure stalks and kills them one by one.

Within the sparse context of female-directed horror of the 1980s, Roberta Findlay is a prolific figure. Throughout the late 1960s to mid-1970s, Findlay established a prominent presence in sexploitation filmmaking along with her husband Michael Findlay, providing camerawork on such films as The Kiss of Her Flesh (1968), Invasion of the Blood Farmers (1974), Shriek of the Mutilated (1974), and Snuff (1976). Findlay’s own directing career began mainly after the couple’s separation (Nastasi, 2017). Following Michael’s untimely death in a helicopter accident in 1977, Findlay made a series of pornographic films (often under male pseudonyms) before eventually directing several horror films. In addition to Blood Sisters, Findlay’s horror titles include The Oracle (1985), Tenement (1985), Lurkers (1987), and Prime Evil (1988). Findlay was reportedly not particularly interested, or at least not particularly intentional in making explicitly feminist films or attracting feminist interpretations of her work, saying of her pornographic film A Woman’s Torment, “I guess I had feelings at the time, and they inevitably wind up in the film—but it’s not a conscious attempt to change society or bond with my sisters, as they used to say to people” (Nastasi, 2017). However, there are elements of her films, especially within Blood Sisters, that display significant generic subversion in regard to representations of gender.

Certain archetypical slasher elements are indeed on display in Blood Sisters. By the end of the film, one of the most obvious is the presence of a sexually disturbed and gender-confused villain. The film opens with a scene depicting the killer’s motivating ‘past event’, an interaction between the male killer (as a child) and another, female, child. He asks the little girl to show him her body (“I’ll give you a candy if you show me”) before she admonishes him and calls him a pervert, specifically citing his sex worker mother and lack of a father. The boy returns to his home, a brothel, and murders one of the sex workers with a shotgun (though it is somewhat unclear, this woman is likely the boy’s mother.) The rest of the action takes place thirteen years later. The figure stalking the sorority sisters in the brothel is eventually revealed to be Ross, one of the sister’s boyfriends, the now-grown boy from the opening scene. Ross wears women’s clothing while performing the murders; this is presumably, in the Psycho (1960) tradition, linked to his matricide. After revealing himself, he also discloses that his mother locked him away as a child to keep his existence a secret. It would then seem that Ross’s sexual disturbance results from childhood sexual repression and the traumatizing exposure to his mother’s hypersexual work environment. Both his sexual disturbance and his antagonistic relationship with his mother adhere to preestablished slasher conventions, especially those posited by Clover.

The setting and context of the film’s events are also recognizable within the slasher tradition. The brothel in which most of the film takes place is thoroughly isolated and contains the traumatic memories of the killer’s past event. As per Dika’s characterization of the slasher setting, the film does not identify the specific location of the events, only setting the action in a vaguely middle-class American locale. Findlay emphasizes the importance of the brothel as ‘terrible place’ by using numerous exterior shots of the house, including in the opening and closing scenes of the film. The imposing images of the house bookending the film communicate its inescapable nature. The film also centers on a sorority, which, as mentioned in my literature review, is a recurring scenario in the slasher genre. This was popularized by films like Black Christmas (1974), Hell Night (1981) and Sorority House Massacre (1986), which is likely what led to the trope’s usage in Blood Sisters. The sorority trend reflects the slasher’s tendency to utilize settings that necessitate groups of young people gathering together (summer camp, slumber party, prom night, popular holidays.) The sorority, however, is a uniquely female environment. I would hypothesize that the motivation for the slasher’s frequent exploitation of this setting is mainly its convenient scenarios for female terror and compromising positions (nudity, sex scenes, sensational initiation rituals). However, its use could also denote a focus on female camaraderie and sisterhood, especially coming from the perspective of a female filmmaker.

Additionally, the film contains a straightforward example of the ambiguous slasher ending stressed by Dika and Staiger. After Ross has killed most of the girls, Alice, who left to seek help earlier in the film, returns with the police. They find no evidence of the killings, leading Alice to laugh in relief in the sorority’s van. However, she quickly realizes that the bodies of her friends are piled in the back of the vehicle, as Ross’s hand reaches around to kill her as well. The film closes on one final long shot of the brothel. Alice is not free, and the threat of the terrible place itself still looms. The non-killer characters are also at least outwardly archetypical, with the film centering on a group of sexually active young people. However, the relative passivity of these characters, as well as the construction of a Final Girl is not necessarily clear-cut, something I will address in the latter part of this chapter.

The first notable deviation from conventional slasher traits in Blood Sisters concerns the film’s emphasis on female sexuality and visual pleasure. At the time of the film’s release, a short review in Variety noted, “There is plenty of nudity and softcore sex (including the requisite lesbian scene) but no scares and little of interest” (1987). However, the film’s treatment of nudity and sex are in actuality rather atypical for the genre. Many classic-era slasher films feature gratuitous nudity and sexual content. The motivations for this are arguable; while sex does serve as one functional aspect of the slasher narrative (promiscuity as precursor to death), it presumably also stems from the commercially motivated combination of the horror film with the date film, as summarized by Richard Nowell (2011, 125). And for all of Nowell’s evidence that studios were aware of the female market for slasher films during their peak popularity, it is also true that the majority of sex and nudity in high-profile slashers seems to be present for the male spectator’s viewing pleasure. Blood Sisters subverts this standard, primarily in the two sex scenes between sorority sisters and their boyfriends. The first of these, between Linda and her boyfriend Ross (not yet exposed as killer), begins with Ross playfully donning Linda’s lingerie in an attempt to get her attention. Conversely, Linda wears a men’s button-up shirt. While in hindsight, this serves partially to foreshadow Ross’s crossdressing killer avatar, the subversion of the couple’s gender dynamic still makes for an atypical sex scene. Furthermore, when Linda joins Ross in bed (notably climbing on top of him), emotional music begins to play, while Linda’s body is angled away from the camera for the remainder of the scene.

A similar scene comes later in the film, this time between Ellen and her boyfriend in the brothel. Again, romantic music plays, and though Ellen briefly exposes her breasts in the beginning of the scene, the majority of her nudity is obscured from the viewer for the remainder. Instead, she is thoroughly covered by a sheet or dressing gown in every shot. The focus of these two scenes appears to be less on the titillating potential of the female characters’ naked bodies but instead on the romantic fantasy between the sets of lovers, arguably a more traditionally feminine ideal.

I would also disagree slightly with Variety’s designation of the “requisite lesbian scene.” In fact, the inclusion of the potentially lesbian character Cara constitutes one of the film’s other subversions of sex in slasher films. Explicit homoeroticism is already somewhat scarce in classic slashers (though A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 and the aforementioned Slumber Party Massacre contain considerable subtext), but Cara’s voyeuristic participation in her lesbian fantasy is even more noteworthy. Cara, who has been the subject of subtle homophobic digs from her fellow sisters earlier in the film, eventually stumbles across a garter belonging to one of the brothel’s former residents. Upon touching it, she sees a ghostly vision of a lesbian tryst between sex workers in a mirror. This subverts classic constructions of the cinematic gaze by posing a woman as active voyeur gaining visual pleasure from the scene before her.

In fact, this is one of the most radical facets of the gender play in Blood Sisters, its subversion of cinematic ‘looks.’ In Linda Williams’s essay ‘When the Woman Looks’, Williams presents theories relating to the construction of the female look in horror cinema. Williams writes that “…there is a sense in which the woman’s look at the monster is more than simply a punishment for looking or a narcissistic fascination with the distortion of her own image in the mirror that patriarchy holds up to her; it is also a recognition of their similar status as potent threats to a vulnerable male power.” (1996, 23) Though this quote is in reference to classic monster films, there is analytical potential in applying this theory to Blood Sisters. First and foremost, the role of ‘monster’ in the film is a complex one, as there are two separate entities at play: Ross, the unhinged human murderer, and the female ghosts of the sex workers. It is worth noting that the supernatural presence is never actually depicted as an unambiguously malevolent force. The sorority girls experience visions at the hands of these ghosts, but the only harm that befalls them comes from Ross. Whether Ross is under supernatural influence is unclear, but it is equally if not more likely that his derangement is purely psychological and is in fact cause, not effect, of the ghostly presence in the house (his matricide at the beginning of the film ostensibly marks the beginning of the haunting.) Despite Ross thus being the antagonist, I would argue that instead of assuming Ross to be the ‘monster’ in Williams’s equation, he represents the “vulnerable male power”, while the brothel ghosts fill the role of the monsters, the “potent threats.”

This manifests partially in the fact that the sorority girls view the majority of their paranormal visions in mirrors, supporting Williams’s assertion that cinematic monsters offer distorted reflections of the female characters that regard them (1996, 22). This is also observable in the characters’ respective capacities for sight. As stated above, Ross’s ‘past event’ consists of him asking a girl child to “show him some.” She punishes him for his desire to see, explicitly calling him perverted. He reacts by punishing the women of the brothel; however, his more meaningful punishment comes later, when he stalks the sorority. Here, he is explicitly punishing the girls for seeing. They are able to view what he so desperately wanted to see as a child; the ghosts put on voyeuristic shows for the girls, displaying nudity and sexual acts. Williams argues that in classic horror cinema “and in the more recent “psychopathic” forms of the genre” (1996, 18), women are typically punished for looking. However, in Blood Sisters, Ross does not punish the female characters merely for their ability to see, but for his very inability to see. The women possess a power (sight) that he does not, just as the sex workers possessed a potency (sexual prowess) that he did not.

This also connects back to Vera Dika’s writing on the slasher genre. By Dika’s parameters, the Final Girl and killer possess an agency, an ability to see and use violence, that the other ‘victim’ characters do not. This is not true of Blood Sisters, in which the non-Final Girl characters are very much capable of sight, both in regard to the supernatural elements and, by the end of the film, the threat of the killer. Furthermore, strikingly, no true Final Girl emerges in Blood Sisters. For the first half of the film, it seems as though Cara is the most likely candidate for the role of victim-hero. She is able to sense the supernaturality of the brothel before anyone else (‘sight’) and is implied to be a lesbian, differentiating herself from her heterosexually active peers. However, she dies midway through the film. It then seems near the end of the film that Ross’s girlfriend, Linda, will become Final Girl, but she too succumbs to Ross. Finally, Alice, the pledge who went to seek help, returns with the police, but ultimately dies in the girls’ van, after which the film abruptly ends. As opposed to the typical slasher dynamic of Final Girl and other victims, Blood Sisters blurs the lines between these two categories, effectively equalizing the female characters. If one assumes, in the mode of Wood and Clover, a moralistic motivation behind the typical separation of these two archetypes, this functions as an arguably feminist retooling. Regardless of sexual history or performance of femininity, there is no one victim-hero; these are all women, all victim, and all hero.

While superficially, Blood Sisters may seem to be simply a crude assortment of well-trodden slasher tropes, the film actually contains significant subversions of typical gender-based slasher conventions. The unusual framing of sexual content, and especially the use of sight, looks, and reflections in regard to gender make for a highly unique entry to the slasher genre, likely at least in part due to its female perspective. As Findlay’s work in particular, stemming from exploitation and pornographic cinema, exists mainly outside the realm of academic appraisal, I hope that this analysis may prompt further critical study of not only Blood Sisters specifically, but Findlay’s filmography in general.

Chapter four: “I love a good old fashioned woman.” Kristine Peterson’s Deadly Dreams

Of the three films forming the basis of this paper, Deadly Dreams (1988) is perhaps the least representative of archetypical slasher conventions. The film blurs the lines between protagonist and antagonist, employs a blend of horror-thriller genre elements, and lacks some of the most recognizable slasher hallmarks. However, its reliance on certain shock and suspense techniques pioneered by the slasher genre, as well as its careful subversion of several specific gender-based slasher tropes help to justify its presence in this conversation.

Deadly Dreams follows Alex, a college student plagued by violent dreams after witnessing the traumatic murder of his parents as a young boy. His visions intensify shortly after beginning a new romantic relationship, making him question the line between dream and reality.

Director Kristine Peterson began her career working mainly as an assistant director and second unit director on many horror and science fiction films throughout the 1980s, eventually making her directorial debut with Deadly Dreams. Peterson’s greatest commercial success as a director would come in the early 1990s, first with Body Chemistry (1990), which launched a multi-film franchise, and later with Critters 3 (1991), notable for featuring the acting debut of Leonardo DiCaprio. Peterson did not script any of her films; the screenplay for Deadly Dreams comes from Thom Babbes (who also appears in the film as protagonist Alex’s friend Danny.) However, Peterson’s influence is visible and significant, with much of the film’s symbolism coming from visual staging and composition.

Deadly Dreams does adhere to certain slasher conventions, although even those present in the film contain some deviations from the norm. One of these somewhat gray areas concerns the pattern of deaths and victims within the film. The film does feature multiple graphic kill scenes in classic slasher style. However, the majority of these are in fact dream sequences on the part of the protagonist, and usually involve the same victim, the protagonist. While this does beg the question of whether unreal, imagined death sequences are generically equivalent to real, consequential slasher deaths, the overall suspense-shock impact of such scenes is in many ways the same.

In addition to this, the first death sequence in the film introduces another hallmark of the slasher genre: the ‘past event’ motivating or explaining the killer’s actions. The opening scene depicts a flashback to the death of protagonist Alex’s parents. The family’s idyllic Christmas is interrupted by a distraught phone call from the wife of Norman Perkins (no doubt a nod to Anthony Perkins’s Norman Bates from Psycho), an employee that Alex’s father has recently terminated. Following this, Perkins himself arrives at the door wearing a wolfskin mask and kills Alex’s parents with a shotgun before pursuing Alex through the woods. This serves as a clear past event motivating the events of the film, however, its narrative function is somewhat unconventional. Perkins himself died immediately after committing the murders, but Alex continues to have visions of the man in the wolf mask throughout the film. For the majority of the film, the focus is not on the killer’s identity or motivations, but on Alex’s mental state and ability to distinguish dreams from reality. In this sense, the past event is much more informative of the protagonist than the killer. In most slasher films, the past event serves as a motivation or explanation for the antagonist’s actions. In Deadly Dreams, the past event serves as an explanation for the protagonist’s actions and psyche. That being said, after a twist revealing that it was Alex’s brother, Jack, and girlfriend, Maggie, who engineered Alex’s gaslighting in a plot to steal his inheritance, a second twist in the final minute of the film reveals that Maggie in fact set up both brothers, as she is secretly Perkins’s daughter. This means that the film does retroactively adhere to the convention of the past event-motivated murderer.

Another, related area of interest is the killer’s weapon. The primary stalking antagonist of the film is the aforementioned facsimile of Perkins, a hunter wearing a wolfskin mask. The killer’s weapon of choice is a hunting rifle, something decidedly non-typical for the slasher genre, in which more physically intimate weapons, usually those capable of ‘slashing,’ reign supreme. However, despite the unusual use of a gun as the primary weapon, there are still distinctly phallic undertones to this instrument. The choice of a long, physically imposing firearm like a rifle as opposed to a smaller gun asserts this phallic power. Furthermore, in Alex’s dreams depicting his own death, despite carrying the gun, the hunter usually delivers the killing blow with a hunting knife, slitting Alex’s throat or stabbing him from under his bed. This is much more typical of the genre and serves to make Alex’s ‘death’ scenes more visceral and personal than the shotgun murders of his parents. The other resulting effect of this choice is the feminization of the protagonist, one aspect of the film’s deviation from slasher conventions.

Despite some flirtation with established slasher tropes, as previously stated, Deadly Dreams is arguably the least-defined slasher discussed in this paper. The most visible and striking deviation from the average slasher film is the unusual presence of a male protagonist. While not altogether unheard of, this is far from typical for the genre, which usually relies on some sort of female presence to act as Final Girl. Not only does Deadly Dreams employ a male protagonist, but I would also argue that the film completely inverts Clover’s hypothesized slasher gender dynamic. At its core, Clover’s model involves a masculinized female protagonist, some sort of boyish, non-sexually active girl, and a feminized male antagonist, some sort of impotent or ultimately symbolically castrated man. Instead, Deadly Dreams features a feminized male protagonist and a masculinized female antagonist. Alex is not only conventionally feminine in certain superficial ways—his long hair, artistic sensibilities, and softspoken nature—but also in a larger sense in his narrative function. He spends the entire film in various states of peril, whether being terrorized by the hunter, plagued by dreams, or the victim of gaslighting, itself originally characterized as a female trouble inflicted by a male perpetrator in its namesake play, Gas Light (1938). Conversely, Alex’s girlfriend Maggie is the ultimate antagonist, taking on the conventionally masculine role of slasher killer. This also complicates and subverts the Final Girl archetype. Our male protagonist does not survive the film and thus does not function merely as a gender-swapped substitute for a Final Girl character. Our female antagonist, however, is the sole survivor of the film, while also having had significant screen time and only having been revealed as villain in a late twist. This lends Final Girl attributes to the antagonist of the film, blurring the lines between female victim-hero and slasher villain and essentially creating a new category of character, a villain-hero.

The film also employs some significant subversions of the phallic symbolism often rampant in the slasher genre. As mentioned above, the hunting rifle does take on some phallic symbolism, but this does not entirely negate the unconventional use of a gun as primary murder weapon. In contrast to the archetypical slasher weapon, the knife, a firearm represents a different type of power and potency. This contrast reflects the film’s depictions of gender difference. In general, similarly to Blood Sisters, the psychosexual symbolism of Deadly Dreams focuses more on a potent female threat than a phallic male threat. The most striking illustrations of this idea come in a sequence after Alex and Maggie sleep together for the first time. That night, Alex dreams of several knives stabbing up from his mattress, eventually killing him. One knife rises right between his thighs, near his crotch, in a blatant threat of castration. Upon waking up from this dream and seeing another vision of the hunter, Alex cowers in the corner of the room beneath a large poster of a leaping dancer, positioning him directly between the dancer’s legs.

Framed in a wide shot as Alex curls in on himself, this both foreshadows Maggie’s ultimate control of him (she is herself a dancer) and emphasizes Alex’s powerlessness in the face of triumphant, potent female power. In contrast to the typical slasher narrative that requires the protagonist to arm themselves with a phallic symbol and castrate the antagonist, Deadly Dreams sees a male protagonist and a male secondary antagonist (Alex’s brother) succumb completely to a victorious female antagonist, who is in no way castrated by the end of the film. If anything, Maggie gains power and potency by taking it from the male characters. By the end of the film, both Alex and Jack are not only dead, but were completely debilitated by psychological torment before their deaths due to Maggie’s manipulation—after killing Alex, Jack in turn becomes plagued by nightmares. Unlike most slasher films, there is no triumphant moment (symbolic castration), at least not in the traditional slasher sense, before the anti-denouement, partially due to the film’s obfuscation of protagonist/antagonist and male/female boundaries.

However, there is a different sort of triumph resulting from the female antagonist’s victory, which is indicative of the film’s incorporation of elements of other genres. While slasher elements provide most of the horror in the film, the depiction of the film’s female antagonist is more recognizably influenced by film noir, and in some ways acts as a proto-example of the erotic thriller genre that would explode in the early 1990s. Maggie as antagonist is particularly reminiscent of the femme fatale archetype ubiquitous to film noir. This makes for a subversive female character, especially in regard to her sexuality, compared to most other entries in the slasher genre. Janey Place, in her essay ‘Women in Film Noir’, notes that in spite of the ultimately misogynistic motivations of the genre, it is notable that film noir offers one of the only classic cinematic movements in which female characters possess agency and intelligence, and “…derive power, not weakness, from their sexuality.” (1998, 47.) This is certainly true of the character of Maggie, who has an unusual amount of narrative control as the mastermind of multiple plots to manipulate the male characters. This presents a significant counterpoint to the typical depictions of both women and sexuality in the slasher genre. As outlined previously, slasher cinema has a tendency to punish characters, particularly women, for engaging in sexual activity. In a stark contrast, the female villain-hero of Deadly Dreams succeeds not in spite of but essentially because of her sexual power, having successfully manipulated two men at least partially through seduction. This change in the symbolic power and consequences of female sexuality denotes significant generic difference between Deadly Dreams and other, more straightforward examples of the slasher genre.

It is also useful to consider these tropes within their temporal context. Kate Stables observed a revival of the femme fatale archetype in American films of the 1990s in ‘The Postmodern Always Rings Twice: Constructing the Femme Fatale in 90s Cinema’, mainly in the rise of the ‘erotic thriller’ hybrid genre. Stables even coins the term ‘slasher-noir’ to refer to films such as Poison Ivy (1992), Single White Female (1992), and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992) (1998, 164). Maggie does display many of the traits Stables attributes to the 1990s femme fatale, including, notably, “…the most fascinating new feature of the femme fatale… her ability to avoid textual suppression, to win on her own terms.” (1998, 171). Given Deadly Dreams’s rather awkward place in the timeline of the slasher genre—well after the genre’s peak and well before its post-modern revival—the film’s blend of genres make it just as much a precursor to the early ‘90s erotic thriller as it is a late and loosely-defined addition to the slasher genre. While the erotic thriller films of this period are not always particularly sympathetic to women’s interests, the use of the genre’s empowered female love-interest-antagonist in Deadly Dreams contributes to the film’s generally complex treatment of gender that may be due in part to the female point of view it reflects.

Ultimately, Deadly Dreams displays several subversions of classic gender-based slasher conventions and symbolism. This manifests partially in the gender dynamics between the protagonist and antagonist, as well as in its appropriation of the femme fatale archetype largely not typical of the slasher genre. The film denotes a period of transition between popular horror and thriller genres in Hollywood, and in turn, the evolving gender discourse within these genres. In this sense, it is appropriate to end this case study with Deadly Dreams, as it exists at the tail end of the classic slasher era and reflects this fact through generic innovation, thus inviting exploration of this topic beyond the classic period and into the world of the post-modern slasher.

Conclusion

It is clear that despite the relative rarity of the classic-era female-directed slasher, those that exist do indeed contain fascinating subversions of generic conventions regarding gender. The Slumber Party Massacre demonstrates an early self-awareness for the recurring gender discourse in the genre, Blood Sisters plays with classic horror constructions of gaze, and Deadly Dreams completely inverts classic slasher gender dynamics in addition to showing foresight for the impending evolution of representations of gender in the horror-thriller genre. We are fortunate to exist at such a point in time in the landscape of film criticism for subgenres such as the slasher film to have attracted as much scholarly attention as they have thus far. The aesthetics and artistry of so-called ‘low’ varieties of film and other media—be it horror, pornography, fanfiction, etc.—seem to be gaining more and more mainstream legitimacy, something that I believe is overwhelmingly a net positive. However, within the formative, fruitful discussions on gender in slasher cinema that have already taken place, it is imperative to consider the impact of female filmmakers on both individual films and the genre as a whole. In discussions of gender in any type of cinema, it is at best reductive and at worst dangerous not to consider the contributions of the women therewithin. As discussed in the opening of this paper, a brief study of a few American films from the initial wave of the slasher genre is hardly a comprehensive examination, and much more research is necessary to even begin to scratch the surface of this topic. In future, it may be particularly productive to explore more recent slasher films directed by women, as well as those from around the world, in order to gain context for different regional and temporal interpretations of the genre and its gender-based conventions. I hope that my research has created at minimum a basic entry point for more investigation into the similarities and differences in representations of gender in slasher films made by women.

Works Cited

Clover, C. (1992). ‘Her Body, Himself’, in Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, pp. 21-64.

Dika, V. (1987). ‘The Stalker Film, 1978-81’, in American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, pp. 86-101.

Findlay, R. (2017). ‘Flavorwire Interview: Exploitation and Adult Cinema Icon Roberta Findlay on Making “Cheap” Movies, Getting Arrested with John Holmes, and Times Square’s X-Rated Past’. Interviewed by Alison Nastasi, Flavorwire, 29 August.

Hamilton, P. 1938. Gas Light. Unknown director. dir. Richmond Theatre, London. First performance: 5 December 1938.

Nashawaty, C. (2013). Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candy Stripe Nurses: Roger Corman. New York, New York: Abrams Books.

Nowell, R. (2011). ‘”There’s More Than One Way to Lose Your Heart”: The American Film Industry, Early Teen Slasher Films, and Female Youth’, Cinema Journal, 51(1), pp. 115-140.

Place, J. (1998). ‘Women in Film Noir’, in Kaplan, E.A. (ed.) Women in film noir. London: British Film Institute, pp. 47-68.

Rockoff, A. (2002). Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978-1986. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company.

Stables, K. (1998). ‘The Postmodern Always Rings Twice: Constructing the Femme Fatale in 90s Cinema’, in Kaplan, E.A. (ed.) Women in film noir. London: British Film Institute, pp. 164-182.

Staiger, J. (2015). ‘The Slasher, the Final Girl and the Anti-Denouement’, in Clayton, W. (ed.) Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film. London: Palgrave Macmillian, pp. 213-229.

Variety Staff (uncredited author). (1987). ‘Horror by-the-numbers’. Review of Blood Sisters, by Roberta Findlay. Variety, 17 June 1987, pp. 21.

Williams, L. (1996). ‘When the Woman Looks’, in Grant, B.K. (ed.) The Dread of Difference: Gender and the horror film. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 17-36.

Wood, R. (1983). ‘Beauty Bests the Beast’, American Film, 8(10), pp. 63-65.

Filmography

Black Christmas. (1974). [Film]. Directed by Bob Clark. USA: Film Funding Ltd.

Blood Sisters. (1987). [Film]. Directed by Roberta Findlay. USA: Reeltime Distributing Corporation.

Body Chemistry. (1990). [Film]. Directed by Kristine Peterson. USA: Concorde Pictures.

Burnt Offerings. (1976). [Film]. Directed by Dan Curtis. USA: Produzioni Europee Associati.

Carrie. (1976). [Film]. Directed by Brian DePalma. USA: Red Bank Films.

Critters 3. (1991). [Film]. Directed by Kristine Peterson. USA: Sho Films.

Deadly Dreams. (1988). [Film]. Directed by Kristine Peterson. USA: Concorde Pictures.

Dressed to Kill. (1980). [Film]. Directed by Brian DePalma. USA: Cinema 77.

The Exorcist. (1973). [Film]. Directed by William Friedkin. USA: Hoya Productions.

Eyes of a Stranger. (1981). [Film]. Directed by Ken Wiederhorn. USA: Georgetown Productions Inc.

Friday the 13th. (1980). [Film]. Directed by Sean S. Cunningham. USA: Georgetown Productions Inc.

Halloween. (1978). [Film]. Directed by John Carpenter. USA: Compass International Pictures.

The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. (1992). [Film]. Directed by Curtis Hanson. USA: Hollywood Pictures.

He Knows You’re Alone. (1980). [Film]. Directed by Armand Mastroianni. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Hell Night. (1981). [Film]. Directed by Tom DeSimone. USA: Compass International Pictures.

The House on Sorority Row. (1982). [Film]. Directed by Mark Rosman. USA: VAE Productions.

The Initiation. (1984). [Film]. Directed by Larry Stewart. USA: Georgian Bay Productions.

Invasion of the Blood Farmers. (1972). [Film]. Directed by Michael Findlay. USA: The Farmer Company.

The Kiss of Her Flesh. (1968). [Film]. Directed by Michael Findlay. USA: American Film Dist.

Love Letters. (1983). [Film]. Directed by Amy Holden Jones. USA: Millenium.

Lurkers. (1987). [Film]. Directed by Roberta Findlay. USA: Reeltime Distributing Corporation.

My Bloody Valentine. (1981). [Film]. Directed by George Mihalka. Canada: Canadian Film Development Corporation.

Mystic Pizza. (1988). [Film]. Directed by Donald Petrie. USA: Night Life Inc.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. (1985). [Film]. Directed by Jack Sholder. USA: New Line Cinema.

The Omen. (1976). [Film]. Directed by Richard Donner. USA: Mace Neufeld Productions.

The Oracle. (1985). [Film]. Directed by Roberta Findlay. USA: Reeltime Distributing Corporation.

Poison Ivy. (1992). [Film]. Directed by Katt Shea. USA: MG Entertainment.

Prime Evil. (1988). [Film]. Directed by Roberta Findlay. USA: Reeltime Distributing Corporation.

Prom Night. (1980). [Film]. Directed by Paul Lynch. Canada: Simcom Productions.

Psycho. (1960). [Film]. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. USA: Shamley Productions.

The Rich Man’s Wife. (1996). [Film]. Directed by Amy Holden Jones. USA: Hollywood Pictures.

Rosemary’s Baby. (1968). [Film]. Directed by Roman Polanski. USA: William Castle Enterprises.

Shriek of the Mutilated. (1974). [Film]. Directed by Michael Findlay. USA: Ed Adlum and Mike Findlay Productions.

Single White Female. (1992). [Film] Directed by Barbet Schroeder. USA: Columbia Pictures.

The Slumber Party Massacre. (1982). [Film]. Directed by Amy Holden Jones. USA: Santa Fe Productions.

Snuff. (1975). [Film] Directed by Michael Findlay. USA: August Films.

Sorority House Massacre. (1986). [Film]. Directed by Carol Frank. USA: Concorde Pictures.

Tenement. (1985). [Film]. Directed by Roberta Findlay. USA: Laurel Films.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. (1974). [Film]. Directed by Tobe Hooper. USA: Vortex.

A Woman’s Torment. (1977). [Film]. Directed by Roberta Findlay. USA: D.F.S. Enterprises.