Dawn Keetley
Directed by Dallas Jackson and written by Jackson and Ken Rance, Thriller (2018) is steeped in the slasher tradition. Jackson has been quite up front, in interviews, about the films that have influenced him. “I have a passion for genre movies,” Jackson says, “especially . . . ’80s horror movies like Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Prom Night, [and] Motel Hell.” He points out that, “As I got older, I realized the lack of diversity in these movies both in front of and behind the camera. This led me to consider what a horror movie like Halloween would look like and feel like in an ‘urban environment’” (Collis). Jackson has emphasized in particular the lasting influence of 1980’s Prom Night (Paul Lynch): “Prom Night for me was like, something I remembered because it started out as kids playing, but went a step too far. I love the idea of this haunting them throughout their pre-teen and then teenage years. I just loved that idea and that’s obviously something I borrowed for Thriller; the idea that something would haunt you and affect you in a way that would change your life” (Reeves).
Borrowing from and re-imagining classic slashers, then, Jackson has self-consciously crafted, in Thriller, a film about the “haunting” presence of the past that features an exclusively non-white cast in an “urban environment”—specifically, Compton in south-central Los Angeles county. Drawing particularly on Prom Night, Thriller brilliantly embodies a slasher that is specifically about urban Black teens’ entrapment.[i]
The slasher as deterministic form
Both in practice and as critics have described it, the slasher is above all else about constraint, about the fact that the fates of the characters—all them—are determined. Critics Vera Dika and Carol Clover have both mapped out the conventions of the slasher, and while the subgenre has certainly evolved and troubled the boundaries of those conventions, they have remained remarkably durable for fifty years. In a 2015 article exploring the permutations of the trope of the Final Girl over time, Angela Weaver and her co-researchers concluded that slashers “display a homogenous view of the world . . . that appears to have changed little over the 30 years from which our sample was drawn” (44). One could argue that in the slasher, then, form reinforces theme: just as the diegetic events of the slasher reveal the characters to be subject to a powerful ‘fate’, so too does the form of the slasher exert a tenacious hold on its characters.[ii]
So, what is it about the form of the slasher that’s particularly determinative? There are three central characters in the slasher: the killer, the victim (typically an undifferentiated mass), and the Final Girl. All of them are trapped; all of them are unfree. Clover argues, for instance, that the killer is “propelled by psychosexual fury” (27), a condition that is rooted in his childhood: he is “in the grip of boyhood” (28; emphasis mine), unable to break free. Dika’s description of the two-part temporal structure of the slasher amplifies the notion that the killer is “in the grip” of the past. The slasher structure she argues, is predicated on an early “trauma” that drives the killer to madness (93). He then returns to the scene of the trauma to repeat it in the present. The fact that so many slashers take place on holidays or times of ritual only emphasizes the fact that the killer, embodiment of trauma, will return over and over (Dika 91-96). He is trapped, in other words, in both place and time.
The killer’s trauma, of course, grips not only himself but everyone. The victims of the film are in their turn “caught” by the “relentless and controlling gaze” of the killer; they are the “helpless objects of the film” (Dika 90). And while the “heroine” (Dika 89) or “Final Girl” (Clover 35) survives—because that’s her nature—she is, as Dika insightfully points out, not free. The heroine’s triumph “does not liberate her,” Dika asserts. “On one level she is not free because she has come to a new stage of awareness. Through the course of the film she has come to face the reality of death and violence. . . . In many stalker films, however, this lack of freedom is more directly represented”—not least, for instance, because the killer is still alive (Dika 94-5). The victims die because of the inexorable compulsion of the killer—and the Final Girl must live with that compulsion, with the abiding threat of death.
In short then, the slasher is both a philosophical and aesthetic exercise in the exploration of freedom and fate. On one side are free will and choice; on the other side are determinism and entrapment. And the balance is so heavily weighted toward the latter that any glimpse of freedom is evanescent at best.
Thriller and Fate
Jackson’s Thriller follows Prom Night in beginning with a childhood prank gone wrong. A group of children lure outsider Chauncey Page into an abandoned house with the intent of terrifying him. In fear and anger, he causes one of the kids, Amani, to fall to her death. The group allows Chauncey to take all the blame for the accident, hiding their own culpability. He is sent into juvenile detention and they move on with their lives. The film then jumps to four year later, as Chauncey (Jason Woods) is released and as the now-high-school students get ready for Homecoming. One by one, the teens who were at the scene of Amani’s death start dying as a mysterious black-hooded killer prowls the neighborhood.
Although everyone thinks Chauncey is responsible (again), the killer actually turns out to be Derrick (Luke Tennie)—who was Amani’s boyfriend at the time of her death. This twist tracks the surprise ending of Prom Night, in which the brother of the girl killed in the beginning of the film turns out to be the killer. As in Prom Night, an early death serves as the trauma that deforms the killer’s life, driving him to revenge and madness.
Unlike in Prom Night, however, an accidental death caused by a group of children is not the only founding trauma of the narrative. One of the things that makes Thriller such an interesting entry in the slasher subgenre is that it overlays this individual trauma with the more collective one of being Black in America.[iii]
The trauma of being Black in America
As in Prom Night, Derrick’s fate is shaped in part by the early death of a girl he loves. But that’s not all that shapes his fate. One of the moments when Derrick’s trauma—his other trauma—becomes apparent is in a direct echo of a scene from another classic slasher, John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). One of the iconic scenes of Carpenter’s film is when heroine Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is absently staring out the window when she sees, for the first time, the force that will inexorably destroy her friends and permanently damage and twist her own life: Michael Myers.
Laurie sees Michael Myers from her classroom window
As Laurie sees Myers, her teacher is talking about fate:
“You see, fate caught up with several lives here. No matter what course of actions Collins took, he was destined to his own fate. His own day of reckoning with himself. The idea is that destiny is a very real, concrete thing that every person has to deal with.”
The teacher then calls on Laurie, who is asked to distinguish two writers’ conceptions of fate. Laurie answers clearly—adding that while one writer connected fate to religion, another claimed fate was “like a natural element like earth, air, fire and water.” The teacher approves, elaborating that “In Samuels’ writing, fate is immovable. Like a mountain. It stands where man passes away. Fate never changes.” In Halloween, Michael Myers is fate and, like Collins, Laurie is “destined to her own fate.”
Thriller also gives us a classroom scene, one in which, as in Halloween, killer, victims, and survivors are all present. Whereas in Halloween, however, the scene is framed by a philosophical conversation, Thriller offers no sense of what is going on in this classroom; there is no philosophical/religious framework in which to situate what happens to the characters. The teacher, Ms. Cruz (Valery M. Ortiz) is not seen teaching; she returns papers whose content we don’t see and then the class is dismissed. On the whiteboard behind her are a miscellaneous assortment of marks—the phrase “The Roaring Twenties,” a sketch of a human body, and a three-dimensional object. Whatever else might be there is indistinct, obscure.
Derrick and Ms. Cruz talk about Derrick’s future
In Halloween, the teacher discourses, and Laurie listens and participates. In Thriller, after the class is dismissed, Derrick stays behind (Ms. Cruz is concerned about the drop in his grades), and he tells her the statistics that he claims will determine his fate, not as a human but as a Black man:
How about these percentages? The number one cause of death among young Black men from 15 to 34? Murder. 93 percent of murder victims are killed by someone who shares their race, and according to the CDC, last year, young Black men from 15 to 34 were ten times more likely to die of murder than whites of the same age group.
Ms. Cruz responds, “So what? You’re gonna tank your entire senior year and let the ills of the world determine your fate?” Derrick replies, with finality, “My point – my fate has already been decided for me.”
Like Laurie, Derrick’s fate is represented as determined—but his is the quite specific determined destiny of the Black man in urban America. It is determined by the brute facts of the street; it is not a matter of abstract philosophy taught and learned in a classroom. And Derrick’s fate is not the idiosyncratic, spectacular, and ultimately inexplicable fate of Laurie Strode; it is a mundane, banal fate—easier to fall into than to fight your way out of.
Sezín Koehler has rightly made the point that this scene “could have used some finessing and nuance.”[iv] But the point of the slasher is that the fate of every character is determined—and Thriller is actually pretty adept at using that fact, at layering the forces that determine Derrick, and at offering a provocative gloss on—and alternative to—the kind of “fate” that Laurie Strode confronts in her middle-class, white suburb.
Derrick turns out to be not only a victim but the killer. Unlike the killer in Prom Night, whose sister was killed in the founding childhood prank, it is not just the trauma of childhood experience—and childhood loss—that drives Derrick to kill, but the ongoing trauma of being a Black man in America. Both events deliver him to his fate: his life is doubly determined. In this way, Thriller expands the two-part temporal structure of the slasher film. It is not just the past trauma that reverberates in the present lives of the young community (the death of Amani), but the ongoing present trauma (racism).
Notes
[i] For a discussion of urban and suburban spaces, the slasher, and race, see Means Coleman, 147-50.
[ii] See Gwyneth Peaty’s essay on fate in the Halloween franchise in this special issue. And see Colby Johnson’s essay for an exploration of a similar sense of entrapment pervasive specifically in the new ‘cyber-slasher’ subgenre that they define as generating the “heteronomy of the main characters.”
[iii] See Williams, Printz, and DeLapp, “Assessing.”
[iv] Koehler’s “‘Thriller’” is the best essay out there on the film.
Works Cited
Clover, Carol J. Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton University Press, 1992.
Collis, Clark. “Watch a Scene from the New Slasher Film Thriller.” Entertainment Weekly, 12 April 2019.
Dika, Vera. “The Stalker Film, 1978-1980.” American Horrors: Essays on the Modern Horror Film, edited by Gregory A. Waller, University of Illinois Press, 1987, pp. 86-101.
Koehler, Sezín. “‘Thriller’ Is a Fun High-School Slasher Homage, with a Twist.” Black Girl Nerds [n.d.].
Means Coleman, Robin R. Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present. Routledge, 2011.
Reeves, Rachel. “Thriller Director Dallas Jackson Talks Horror, Inspiration and Working with RZA.” Nightmare on Film Street, 16 May 2019.
Weaver, Angela D. et al. “Embodying the Moral Code? Thirty Years of Final Girls in Slasher Films.” Psychology of Popular Media Culture, vol. 4, no. 1 (2015): 31-46.
Williams, M. T., D. M. B. Printz, and R. C. T. DeLapp. “Assessing Racial Trauma with the Trauma Symptoms of Discrimination Scale.” Psychology of Violence, vol. 8, no. 6 (2018): 735-47.
