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Posted on June 25, 2024

The Repair Women of Slumber Party Massacre

Guest Post

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.

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Posted on June 21, 2024

A Killer Perspective: Reconsidering the Neurodivergent Slasher Villain in In a Violent Nature

Guest Post

Cody Parish

WARNING: This essay contains plot spoilers!

The killer’s point-of-view (POV) shot is arguably the most recognizable convention of the slasher film.1 Made famous in the opening sequence of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), the killer’s lurking POV shot has been reproduced in countless subsequent slasher franchises as a means to build suspense. It is noticeably absent, however, from Shudder’s new independent release, In a Violent Nature (Chris Nash, 2024), a slasher movie whose central conceit entails taking the perspective of its killer.2 in her seminal monograph, Men, Women, and Chain Saws (1992, 2015), Carol J. Clover was the first to challenge gendered arguments claiming male and female viewers of the slasher film identify with the male killer and Final Girl, respectively. Instead, Clover argues that viewers identify initially with the slasher killer until more details about the Final Girl are known, at which point viewer identification, prompted by cinematography as much as by narrative development, begins to shift to the Final Girl (45). Of the killer, Clover writes, “[He] is often unseen or barely glimpsed, during the first part of the film, and what we do see, when we finally get a good look, hardly invites immediate or conscious empathy,” noting the killer is typically “masked” or “deformed” (44).

Yet, what distinguishes In a Violent Nature from previous slashers exploring the killer’s perspective, like Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006), is that the film almost exclusively tracks the footsteps of its killer, Johnny (Ry Barrett), who becomes the narrative’s anti-hero as a result, while all other characters including the narrative’s Final Girl receive little backstory or development. The filmmakers strategically employ various cinematographic and narrative techniques to dehumanize and humanize Johnny as the de facto protagonist, oscillating between identificatory distance and proximity. Johnny explicitly embodies an ambivalent tension between revulsion and sympathy, one that has implicitly framed intellectually disabled slasher killers like Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974-2022) franchise and Jason Voorhees of the Friday the 13th (1980-2009) film series. In a Violent Nature thus challenges viewers to reconsider the dread of neurological difference connected to the killer in the slasher film.

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Posted on June 15, 2024

The Outcasts (Robert Wynne-Simmons, 1982) – Newly Restored Irish Folk Horror Film

Guest Post

Bernice M. Murphy

This review contains spoilers

The current “folk horror revival” has sparked a welcome resurgence of interest in lesser-known and previously neglected creative works. One of the most intriguing – and least seen –  is the Irish film The Outcasts, which, “after a short theatrical run, a limited 1983 VHS release, and an airing on Channel 4 in 1984” went unseen until earlier this year, when the Irish Film Institute’s archival team undertook a “challenging” digital restoration project[1]. It was written and directed by Robert Wynne-Simmons, who more famously, also wrote The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). Set in the Irish countryside in the early 1800s, The Outcasts furthers the association with rurality and agriculture which characterizes many significant folk horror narratives. It also subtly draws upon the relationship between folk horror and settler colonialism explored in the likes of Kier-La Janisse’s Woodland’s Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021).

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Posted on June 11, 2024

What’s Actually the Problem with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village?

Guest Post

JDC Burnhil

“Eventually the secret of Those, etc., is revealed. … It’s a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It’s so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don’t know the secret anymore.”

(Roger Ebert, Review of The Village, 2004)

In most tellings of The Rise and Fall of M. Night Shyamalan, The Village (2004) is treated as Where It Started to Go Wrong. The cause, according to these theorists, was the great success the auteur director had had with films that incorporating a “twist,” such as The Sixth Sense (1999) and Unbreakable (2000); the effect was that he got cocky and made a film around a twist without realizing that twist was “witless.”

After studying the film and many viewers’ responses over many years, I’ve come to a different hypothesis. I believe that the dislike expressed for the “twists” (of which there are really three, not just one) is what doctors call “referred pain” – pain that is caused in one location, but felt in another. The actual cause of most viewer dissatisfaction is a set of much subtler missteps – coincidentally, also three in number.

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A man and a woman look down into a manhole to the sewer below.
Posted on June 4, 2024

Are all creature features the same?: Talking The Great Alligator (1979) and Alligator (1980)

Podcast

In today’s episode, it’s creature feature, B-movie summer horror with 1979’s The Great Alligator and 1980s’s Alligator. Despite their very different settings, both films lean into the carnage caused by their snappy, tail-spinning reptilian monsters while simultaneously suggesting that the true villains are more of the two legged variety. But do their eco-critical considerations resonate with today’s audiences? We’re breaking it all down today with spoilers, so stay tuned.

Recommended Reading:

Bould, Mark. The Cinema of John Sayles: Lone Star (Wallflower Press, 2009)

Gambin, Lee. Massacred by Mother Nature: The Natural Horror Film (Midnight Marquee Press, 2012).

Jones, Matthew. “Antagonistic Nature: The Loss of Anthropocentric Authority in Eco-Horror of the 1970s and 80s.” Supernatural Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, Spring/Summer 2021, pp. 33–47.

Mann, Craig. “America, Down the Toilet: Urban Legends, American Society and Alligator,” in Animal Horror Cinema, edited by Katarina Gregersdotter, Johan Hoglund, and Nicklas Hallen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 110-25.

The Great Alligator has just got a 2-disc 4K UHD DVD special release from Severin Films.

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