Johanna Isaacson
I first watched The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) decades ago, with too-high, too-pure expectations. As a devout horror fan and a dedicated feminist, I freaked when I learned Rita Mae Brown wrote the script. On top of that, the film was the first slasher to be directed by a woman, Amy Holden Jones. Surely, this was a feminist classic I had somehow missed.
Anyone who has studied second wave feminism or queer history will have encountered Rita Mae Brown, the author of Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), a groundbreaking queer bildungsroman. Although her politics grew tepid over time, during the seventies Brown was one of the most visible, charismatic, and defiant defenders of lesbian rights. She was known to call out homophobia in mainstream feminist organizations, such as NOW, and sexism in the nascent Gay Liberation Front. Eventually, in response to this lack of radicality and inclusivity in existent political groups, she helped form the lesbian separatist Furies Collective.
I didn’t quite know how the conventions of an eighties slasher movie could reflect these politics, but I was eager to find out. So, I was puzzled when the Slumber Party Massacre turned out to be what I would have expected from a male writer and director. The film was filled with scantily clad high school girls who are, one by one, penetrated by a sick serial killer’s unsubtle phallic weapon.
Later, I learned that Brown wrote the film as a satire, but that, when adapting the script, Jones was pressured to deliver a straight slasher. This reflects Roger Corman’s (RIP!) mixed blessing to feminist horror buffs. He was more willing than any other producer of his time to hire women directors and creators, but with the stipulation that the final product must appeal to the male gaze. Humanoids from the Deep (1980) director Barbara Peeters struggled with Corman’s oversight, as she felt coerced to add a rape scene to her film. On the other hand, eight percent of the directors Corman hired were women, an unheard-of ratio at the time.
Recently, I was granted the thrilling opportunity to appear on the podcast Underground History, hosted by Chelsea Rose, for a chat with Suzanne Keilly, the screenwriter for the 2021 version of Slumber Party Massacre (which is also directed by a woman, Danishka Esterhazy). To prepare, I revisited the original film. This time around, I enjoyed it immensely.
Slumber Party Massacre, 1982
The film centers on Trish Devereaux (Michelle Michaels), an eighteen-year-old grappling with imminent adulthood, as depicted in the opening scene in which she throws away her childhood dolls. With her parents out of town, she organizes one last nostalgic slumber party with her friends from the girls’ basketball team. She also attempts to invite “the new girl,” Valerie (Robin Stille), but is prevented by her snobby friend, Diane (Gina Mari). An early murder, as well as jump scares throughout the film’s first few scenes, anticipate that the party will be attacked by Russ Thorn (Michael Villella), a serial killer who slaughters his victims with a long drill that he often holds between his legs. With this set up, it is made clear that the girls will spend the film wearing lingerie and fighting off this phallus-wielding predator.
On my second viewing, I was less drawn to the mandatory cheesecake shots, and more to the unusual feminist and queer elements of the film. For instance, in an early scene, one of the high school boys, Jeff (David Millbern), flirts with a phone repair woman clad in an elaborate tool belt. In response to his flustered antics, she reacts calmly and competently, subverting gendered stereotypes of both handiness and “hysteria.” Later, when the girls’ androgynous basketball coach, Rachel Jana (Pamela Roylance), arrives at her home, she is faced with a fake-out scare of a drill penetrating her front door from the inside. This turns out to be a butch woman friend who happens to have the keys to her house, and who has come by to provide a peephole in Coach Jana’s, ahem, entryway. As if we weren’t provided with enough clues to the women’s sexuality, the scene includes gratuitous references to cats.
In addition to providing lesbian camp, these scenes of women operating tools can also be seen as comments on women’s creativity. While Thorn wields his drill to destroy, the women in Slumber Party Massacre use tools to defend themselves and to repair. A key turning point in the film, which shows the young women transforming from victims to agential warriors, depicts Valerie in front of a wall of tools, selecting her weapon.
Perhaps this presence of service women and other women with tools is a humorous nod to the fact that, defying an almost complete male monopoly on eighties horror film production, women made this film. The lack of non-cis male technicians and bosses in the industry constrained what could be done with these skills, but still the film consistently alludes to a female gaze and female pleasure.
Once one gets over the camera’s lingering gaze on women’s bodies, Slumber Party Massacre’s many feminist touches shine through. In fact, even the leering gaze on nudity is somewhat minimal, if “top heavy.” Jones efficiently dispenses with the naked bedroom and shower scenes in the film’s first ten minutes, as if trying to get them out of the way. Other than that, there will be just one more nude scene, when the girls are changing during their party, and in that scene the camera’s intrusive gaze will be explicitly thematized by comparison to the voyeuristic boys spying through the window. (Sidenote, nudity can be awesome in horror movies, but some of the shots in Slumber Party Massacre seem particularly uninventive, intended to placate Corman’s demand, rather than provide polymorphous pleasure to a range of gendered gazes. No shade intended on boobs!).
Unlike many films of the era, Slumber Party Massacre also consistently passes the Bechdel test. Trish and her friends rarely talk about boys, and when they do, it is often to make fun of Diane, who abandons the party to make out with her boyfriend. Other than that, most of the girls’ talk is about basketball. They are detail oriented in their description of various plays and show expertise and curiosity about the sport, at one point calling their coach to confirm a description of a particularly interesting play.
Far from showing “boy crazy” or passive women, Slumber Party Massacre’s vision of sexuality undermines violent masculine rape culture and exhibits queer undertones. Only Diane shows an inordinate need to impress boys, and she is not only ridiculed by the other girls but is an early kill.
While sexist slashers emphasize women’s status as objects to-be-looked-at, Slumber Party Massacre constructs its female characters as agential. The film’s action centers around women talking and coordinating to defend themselves and each other. Rather than be punished for looking, as Linda Williams argues is conventional in horror films, the women in Slumber Party Massacre frequently gaze, if not at a basketball game, then at an objectified male body, as when Valerie and her sister ogle men in Playgirl magazine.
The film is most consistently feminist in its satire of masculine violence. It is very difficult for anyone with a sense of humor to take Thorn seriously. His weapon of choice is not only long and phallic, but “the drill” is explicitly named as a surrogate for sexual penetration. The viewer’s gaze does not, however, linger on his kills. Instead, spectatorial satisfaction is most palpable when the final girls “castrate” Thorn. (And indeed, the fact that there are plural final girls is another feminist touch, as Chelsea Rose points out in our interview).
Also contributing to the film’s feminism are many fake-out jump scares drawing attention to Thorn’s lack of uniqueness as an intrusive male. In fact, Thorn’s invasive behavior does not seem to be the exception, but the rule of masculinity. Thorn’s spying gaze is echoed by the teenage boys who show up to the party, uninvited, to surveil the girls. Even creepier is David Contant, the older neighbor who enters the house uninvited and lurks around Trish, who is clearly made uncomfortable by his presence, but must be polite because he is “the adult.”
Overall, the combination of the lurid male gaze and feminist themes in this film make it a thrilling ride, where the conventions of the slasher are adhered to, but the viewer still doesn’t quite know what to expect.
Slumber Party Massacre, 2021
Wisely, the 2021 version of Slumber Party Massacre pays homage to the original by teasing out the original film’s feminist, queer themes, rather than providing a “straight” remake. A prelude depicts the defeat of Russ Thorn (Rob Van Vuuren) by Trish Devereux (Schelaine Bennett), now a lone final girl, who is left with internal and external scars. This faux-climactic scene is a tribute to the original film, including the same character names and scenario but deviating from the plot.
Another notable departure from the 1982 version is that Trish and her daughter, Dana (Hanna Gonera), who will be the film’s protagonist, are Black. This recasting can be seen as a comment on the original, which includes only one Black character, Jackie (Andree Honore). Although she is included in the group of girls at the slumber party, her construction as a character seems to follow the formula outlined by Robin R. Means Colman and Mark H. Harris in The Black Guy Dies First (Simon and Schuster, 2023). While white characters in horror movies are granted personality types, they argue, Black characters are often distinguished simply by their blackness (Although Jackie is given one of the funniest gags in the film, when she stress-eats a pizza off of a corpse).
In the 2021 version of Slumber Party Massacre, Dana is a complex character whose primary relationships are with her mother and her friends. Her budding romance with Maeve (Frances Sholto-Douglas) brings out the covert queer themes in the original as well.
Another divergence from the original is that all the young women who participate in the fateful slumber party know exactly what film they’re in. As in other meta-horror films such as Cabin in the Woods (2011), The Final Girls (2015), and the Scream franchise, in Slumber Party Massacre 2021, slasher conventions are embraced, but also knowingly manipulated by the film’s characters.
This self-awareness allows for the full flourishing of feminist satire that was curtailed in the original film, as the sexist tropes of the genre are held up for display and analysis. I won’t fully spoil this film, but let’s just say that when we see a misogynist slasher convention in Slumber Party Massacre 2021, things are not what they seem.
One highlight of this parody is the invention of a parallel group of young men who have rented a cabin near that of the girls. Unlike the young women, who have a serious mission, the boys are there because of a true-crime podcast. Imagining themselves as canny adventurers, they cluelessly walk into Thorn’s clutches.
Like the teenage boys in the original Slumber Party Massacre, this group of young men are macho, sexist, and shallow, both intruding on women and dismissing them. Delightfully, another layer of satire is added as they are subject to a subversively gender-reversed camera gaze.
In the film’s funniest scene, these well-built young men are shown in a shirtless, slow-motion pillow fight while the girls look on from a nearby window. In this sexy melee, the self-proclaimed heterosexual guys ecstatically spray each other with beer, bump chests, and adorn themselves with feathers, bringing to mind feminist artist Barbara Kruger’s untitled work commenting on the queer repression at the heart of homosocial exclusivity as such—“You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men.”
In addition to this campy queering of the original Slumber Party Massacre, which was so unfairly de-queered and defanged in its time, the 2021 film’s depiction of inherited trauma between mother and daughter gives the film emotional heft. This came up in the discussion I had with screenwriter Suzanne Keilly, who revealed that the film’s focus on intergenerational relationships was not just a device, but an ongoing theme in her writing, showing that the film is not just a parody but a personal vision.
Not only does the fraught mother-daughter bond between Trish and Dana anchor the film but it points to the deeper reasons one might revisit a movie decades after its time. In this case, the remake itself not only traces inherited trauma but the legacy passed down from one generation of creative women to the next. Slumber Party Massacre was the first slasher movie directed by a woman (let alone directed and written by women) and its contradictions reflect the massive burden of male domination under which its creators labored. The 2021 remake is both tribute and act of repair, as reflected in its exploration of a daughter’s legacy from and debt to her mother.
As Carol Clover argues in Men, Women, and Chainsaws, the fact that women are killed by men in slasher films doesn’t reduce this genre to an expression of misogyny. Audiences did not only leer at the women in these films, they saw their own vulnerability, ambivalence, and survival instincts in the figure of the “final girl.” When Clover wrote about this identification in 1992, she focused on male spectatorship. However, as the 2021 Slumber Party Massacre suggests, future “repair women” lurked in these 80s’ slasher audiences—creatively watching, picking up tools, and preparing to craft their own narratives of terror and triumph.
Related: Check out Horror Homeroom Conversations episode on Slumber Party Massacre and Rebecca Booth’s “Slashers, Sex and Sisterhood in Slumber Party Massacre.”
Johanna Isaacson writes academic and popular pieces on horror and politics. She is a professor of English at Modesto Junior College and a founding editor of Blind Field Journal. She is the author of Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror (2022) from Common Notions Press and The Ballerina and the Bull (2016) from Repeater Books. She is currently working on a book on What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, to be published by DieDieBooks. She runs the Facebook group, Anti-capitalist feminists who like horror films.
