Back in August, I had the opportunity to take part in something really special, the Slasher Studies Summer Camp, as organized by Daniel Sheppard and Wickham Clayton.
I have long been fascinated with academic readings of horror films (of which there are a great deal) and some of the seminal texts have focused on the Slasher subgenre. This conference (online and free to attend—one nice thing to come from the pandemic), featuring three days of paper presentations (more than 40, most of which I was able to watch), keynote speakers, and industry guests, sought to delve into some of the rich research and analysis currently being undertaken by a very international coterie of scholars.
And it was amazing.
I was continually struck by its live-ness, by the instant community, by the fact that, sans-pandemic, had this taken place at a physical university in England, there is no way I ever would have been able to attend.
I’m sure I’ll probably return to some of these papers in these pages, but today, I just want to highlight a few that really struck me at the time.
Tools of the Trade: A Statistical Analysis of Slasher Hardware
This paper, written and presented by Marc Olivier offered something that I think can be lacking in cultural analysis: numbers. This quantitative analysis mapped out, based on a very large sample of slasher films, exactly which items have been used how many time by what kind of person to kill what kind of person. I hope this is going to be published as I think it is really useful fuel for focusing analysis. He described a ‘chainsaw effect,’ wherein some items carry an outsized impression of their use. Notably, chainsaws have barely killed anyone at all in the vast corpus of the genre.
The numbers really destabilize some expectations about who the killers are, who the victims are, and what the character of the slasher film is.
While there is a great deal of theorizing about what is intended by creators or perceived by viewers, I think it’s pretty rare to get this kind of hard data. Kudos. I plan to pick up his book, linked to above.
“There are certain rules that one must abide by: An Examination of the Problematic Relationship Between Conservative Morality and the Slasher Film”
Every since Carol J. Clover coined the term ‘final girl’ in her essay, “Her Body, Himself,” there has been a fixed cultural idea of who and what this character was, which has flavored much of how the genre is perceived. The final girl is a “good girl” who doesn’t drink, who doesn’t do drugs, and who doesn’t have sex. This is in obvious opposition to her friends who do, and who subsequently don’t survive the film.
And in turn, this establishes a rather conservative viewpoint of the genre: sex = death.
This is just what the author, John Kavanagh, set out to disprove. Presenting a sizable collection of exceptions to this pattern, drawn from many films, he laid out the thesis that really the most likely victims are not those who ‘misbehave,’ but simply those who are distracted (which is very much how John Carpenter described the difference between Laurie and her friends in Halloween, a film which really helped establish the slasher tropes), and that final girls are even very likely to have transgressed when it comes to drugs, alcohol, or sex.
Personally, I found his tone to be kind of defensive, a fan protecting the honor of the genre, but I think fair points were made. The title draws from a key scene in Scream in which Randy lays out the “rules” of surviving a horror movie, a scene in which he explicitly presents the sex-death equation, a scene which serves as an object lesson in how the genre has accepted and now reifies said formula.
But did that formula really exist, or do we all just perceive it because we’ve been told that it’s there? Did Clover, or probably more to the point, others who selectively read Clover, ignoring her larger concerns, create this trope, rather than the film makers of the first Slasher cycle of the late 70s-early 80s?
It is food for thought.
The Metamodern Slasher Film
Dr. Steve Jones, the first keynote speaker presented an analysis of many cycles of the genre. First there was the original cycle in the early 80s; then it became more supernatural and perhaps silly in the late 80s; in the mid 90s, there was a cycle of ironic, self aware, ‘postmodern’ slashers; and most recently, starting in the 2000s/2010s, there has been a cycle of what he terms the “Metamodern Slasher,” following Mas’ud Zavarzadeh.
Whereas the postmodern slashers made fun of the tropes of the genre (the above mentioned speech by Randy in Scream or Jason in Jason X killing two holographic campers after they enthuse how much they “love having pre-marital sex,” the metamodern brings a new sincerity to the genre, while often still having a playful awareness of those tropes.
Some examples might include Happy Death Day and its sequel, The Final Girls, The Cabin in the Woods, or Freaky. All of these are very funny takes on slashers/horror-in-general, which deliver some legitimate violence/gore, but also have real heart.
Jones discussed how, whereas the 90s were a time of ironic detachment, our present moment is very sincere. Youth culture today, i.a., takes things seriously, takes offense easily, is focused on fighting climate change before it’s too late, and is very keyed into issues of social justice.
This sincerity is notably present in many recent slashers.
All of this really rings true for me and I really like all of the films that he cited, or that others proposed as fitting the pattern. I appreciate it when death means something in a horror film, when there is room for mourning, for weight. And a lot of these really land comedically.
But this is this other thing I wonder about: As this cycle continues and we get more and more slashers featuring well drawn, believable characters who we feel for, who we root for, as there is more of an earnest heart to the proceedings, as the sub-genre becomes more ‘humane,’ does it suffer a loss as well? Many of these films feature gore and some have solid jump scares, but none are what I’d consider ‘hard.’ They may startle me and they may make me cry or laugh, but they don’t horrify.
Maybe that’s ok, but it’s a trend I notice.
And to be fair, this is nothing new. The postmodern slasher cycle of the mid 90s-mid 2000s was slick and sometimes well produced, but also, with its recognizable casts of TV pretty young stars, never felt hard, never felt all that horrific. As described already, the slashers of the later 80s/early 90s, with Freddy killing teens with a Nintendo power glove, or Leprechauns in space, got pretty goofy. And some of the first cycle were such instant cash-ins on a financially successful craze, that they instantly fell into self-parody.
At least, e.g., Freaky is a good movie. But I wouldn’t want to lose the meanness, and the menace of something being made by someone with at least a touch of ill intent.
Still, Jones’s presentation was captivating and I certainly want to follow him in the future.