So, for the last few weeks, I’ve been focusing on the Slasher (particularly in its early 80s heyday) and its recurring protagonist, the Final Girl. But somehow, I’ve not yet devoted a post to just digging into one film. So, today, it’s time to remedy that with a discussion of a very special little movie, rather ahead of its time, which somehow threads the needle of not only balancing comedy and horror, but even more impressively, managing to be at once scary, deeply ironic, and heartfelt. It is at the same time a classic slasher, with tension and scares and brutality and gratuitous nudity, and a very sly deconstruction of that classic slasher, an occasionally hilarious, violent and gory, utterly feminist text, made during the height of the first slasher craze more than a decade before slashers would become anywhere near this self-reflexive. I’m talking, of course, of The Slumber Party Massacre. I mentioned it recently in my run down of under-appreciated Final Girls, but it deserves more attention than that. I don’t know if I can get into what makes this such a unique movie without spoiling it, so if this sounds like it might be up your alley, go check it out first. I’m pretty sure it’s on at least Shudder and Tubi.
The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)
Based on a screenplay by author, Rita Mae Brown, Amy Holden Jones’s film succeeds, possibly accidentally, as both a straightforward body count flick and as a meta-commentary on the same. Financed by Roger Corman and distributed by his New World Pictures, first time director (she had previously been an editor) Jones had to work within a strict set of guidelines. Notably, the picture had to be short (longer films mean more reels and more canisters, and that all costs money), and there had to be plentiful nudity. This movie runs a tight 76 minutes and basically starts with one of the protagonists taking her top off. Balance that with the fact that it was written by Brown as a feminist parody of the then wildly popular Slasher formula, but Jones rewrote it, intending to film it straight, and you have a recipe for an odd, magical chimera of a film.
The plot is as simple as can be. Trish, a high school senior, throws a slumber party with three of her friends to nostalgically relive childhood one last time before adulthood necessarily takes them their separate ways (I assume that their primary school slumber parties hadn’t included so many joints and beers and boys, but that’s kind of the point – the girls have already changed and that’s a genie that won’t be put back in the bottle). Trish wants to invite her neighbor, new girl, Valerie, but is too late in doing so and, feeling excluded, Valerie stays home to take care of her kid sister, Courtney (the three of them will eventually end up as the triumvirate final girl). Unbeknownst to all, an escaped murderer, Russ Thorn and his drill (with both an improbably long bit and an impossibly well-charged battery), is lurking about and will, by night’s end, claim 9 victims before the remaining girls manage to overcome him. Very simple – but that simplicity creates space for play.
First, the film is playful as a by-the-numbers Slasher. Jones offers up a smorgasbord of false scares, one after another. Cats jump out of cupboards, carpenters drill holes through front doors just as someone is coming home, the camera implies a killer-pov psycho cam, sneaking up on a girl walking alone, only to have her flip the seeming assailant and discover that it’s just her hapless boyfriend. All of these and more come hard and fast following two initial kill scenes that firmly establish the brutal threat that Thorn represents.
But even when there is an actual attack, there is often a simultaneous comic undertone which makes for a strangely effective juxtaposition. For example, early in the film, we meet an attractive female phone company line worker, fixing something at the high school. Some boys lamely try chatting her up and then walk away. As they do so, an arm shoots out of the open door of her van, pulling her in. As the boys go off, amicably chatting, we see her screaming through her rear window before cutting to within the van where she’s bloodily drilled by Thorn. The violence of it is startling and severe – this is a horror movie and it does feel like it. However, the very moment that the arm snaps her into the vehicle, you can almost hear a “yoink,” and the obliviousness of the boys strolling away happily while she screams behind them has a whiff of the comic. Somehow, the fact this reads as funny doesn’t detract from the horror which lands seconds later, and similarly, the brutality of the attack doesn’t make the comedy feel heartless and cruel. It just is funny and then it is horrific.
Similarly, there is a great sequence in the climax (which seems to prefigure Butch on the way out of the pawn shop in Pulp Fiction) when the remaining girls are trying to fend off this psycho and Valerie finds herself in a basement workshop, desperately seeking a viable weapon. She picks up some small scissors – no good. She grabs a drill, but the bit is small and dinky. She finds a circular saw and runs the blade – great – this looks deadly, so she runs up the stairs only to have it yanked out of her hand because the extension cord isn’t long enough. Finally, she notices the giant machete that’s been in front of her all along. All of this intercuts with scenes of others, in terror, trying to survive the killer. It is intense, and exciting, and grim, but Valerie’s progression through potential tools is really a hoot.
But when the film wants to be scary, it is. Early on, when everyone is leaving school, one girl has to return to retrieve a book. The phone company worker dead in a dumpster, Thorn follows her in. There is a shot from above as she’s walking through the empty school gym to her locker that is really isolating. Visually, she seems so alone and small, so exposed in such a big space. She doesn’t know yet that there is a killer (though we do) and the combination of all this really contributes to an atmosphere of dread. The chase and kill that follow are capably shot and do not lack in tension, but this moment really stands out.
Where the film shines, however, and what makes it so memorable compared with its early 80s brethren, is its knowing relationship to its own tropes – the self-aware way that it fulfills the expectations of both its producers and viewers, and its subversion of those same expectations. I think it takes two approaches to this: being so on-the-nose that it becomes ironically ludicrous and directly, textually presenting gender roles counter to how one might expect. The latter is a bit simpler, so I’ll detail it first.
For all that it is filled with the requisite boobs and bloodletting of teenage girls, this is rather a women’s picture. Almost every speaking role is female – and this extends well past the main group of girls attending the party, presenting women in roles that would almost always be filled with men. We have the female phone company worker, doing manual labor; there is the girls’ coach (who tries to save the day later); and when the coach gets home, her handywoman is taking care of some home improvement. Furthermore, all of the main girls are athletes and we meet most of them at a basketball game, filmed to highlight their athletic prowess rather than just being an excuse to ogle them as they bounce up and down. The film passes the Bechdel Test in practically every scene, even when the girls are naked (which is not uncommon). They all have personalities and names and relationships and interests (especially sports, something often coded as a topic for boys to obsess over). And the girls are in control. There’s a funny exchange between the same two boys who had unsuccessfully hit on the phone worker as they decide to crash the slumber party:
Let’s go by and scare the girls tonight. But we’re not invited. Just a baby scare. I mean, you know how girls love to scream. I don’t know. What’s the worst that can happen? I mean, so they get mad at us. They could beat the shit out of us. That’s right, we did flunk gym. Three times.
The men in this movie are in no way presented as braver, tougher, or more capable than the girls, and if anything, many are less so. At the same time, they’re also not set up exclusively as jerks, foils for the girls to play against. The next door neighbor wants to be helpful and supportive (he also wants to hunt snails with a meat clever by moonlight), and the teen boys are horny pranksters, but they’re also kind of sweet and really try to do the right, heroic thing, even if it doesn’t work out for them. In the end, the girls (three of them surviving, in a surprising spin on the ‘final girl’ trope) have to fight together to save themselves.
But of course, there is one key male figure, Russ Thorn, the killer, and he brings us to the other, more fascinating way that the film plays with expectations. In Thorn, the Freudian read on the Slasher killer (a sexually frustrated male sublimating libidinous desire into violence to compensate for his impotence) is consciously, explicitly, unambiguously on display. His weapon of choice is a giant, phallic drill, sometimes seen dangling between his legs. He is not at all cool – no enigmatic shape lurking in the darkness, no force of unspeakable evil beyond comprehension, no dark avenger striking out at those who have somehow transgressed in revenge for a past crime – he is just some guy. A crazy guy. A guy who wants to “drill” these young ladies. He doesn’t speak until the final scene, but when he does, it is obviously meant to suggest a common rapist: “You’re pretty – all of you are very pretty – I love you. It takes a lot of love for a person to do this. You know you want it. You love it.” This is all we get for his motivation. Nothing enigmatic – so obvious that it would be funny if it weren’t depressingly familiar.
Of course, in the end, Valerie uses her machete to chop his absurdly long drill bit in half, castrating him with such over-the-top symbolism that it flavors the primal scream of her attack with a kind of knowing laughter, but without undercutting the weight of the situation. Moments later, after the fight is finally done, the three survivors weep and shake and stare into the middle distance, horrified by loss that can never be repaired, by the extremity of the actions they have taken to survive. The momentary laugh does not rob the moment of its resonance. In this, the film has delivered the Slasher playbook to a tee, but the extent to which it so perfectly plays out the metaphor feels like a knowing wink – we know what we are watching – we know what the rules are – we know what this means (I don’t think it goes so far as to question these tropes – it is just showing what we expect to see, but it makes sure that we understand how to read what we’re watching). It never needs to communicate this textually, but the self-aware commentary is present nonetheless.
No scene in the film better plays with, and strikingly, draws attention to expectations by exceeding them, than after the basketball game at the beginning when the girls hit the showers (Corman famously declared that there should always be a shower scene in the first ten minutes – he was in the business of selling tickets). As the girls tell jokes and talk about the game they just played, the party they’re going to later, the respective merits of watching football or baseball on TV, and which player did what in the ballgame last night, a steady tracking shot slowly moves from one girl’s behind up to another’s breasts, to another’s back, before opening up to a wider shot to see all three as they soap themselves up and then zooming in again, down to that girl’s behind and up again as she turns, to catch her breasts, over to another’s back, before there’s an edit. The directness of the camera’s gaze draws attention to itself and its intention. It is showing what you’ve come to see, right – are you not satisfied? Never mind the fact that there’s nothing remotely sexual about the scene – though the camera’s gaze is direct, they aren’t filmed in a ‘sexy’ way, there is no sensual music to highlight voyeuristic pleasure, and they are discussing such quotidian, boring, normal things that friends might chat about. Is the camera audibly sighing, wondering if we can move onto something else yet? It almost feels like a thesis for the whole film. But as I’ve already alluded to, somehow this ironic awareness, this distance, doesn’t kill the scares – doesn’t diminish the film’s effect as an effective exploitation, B-movie, low-budget horror film.
As I understand, critics at the time savaged Jones, accusing her of some kind of gender betrayal by so exploitatively filming female flesh and subjecting it to such violence. She has, over the years, lashed out at this, noting that, “nobody complains that Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, and Ron Howard made exploitation pictures, but when a woman tries, she gets called a hypocrite and a turncoat. That’s B.S.” She’s not wrong there, but I think she could go further. With the degree to which it is genuinely woman-centered; features a real-world, familiar threat in its clearly metaphoric rapist, while belittling Thorn in his phallic overcompensation; with its ironic, comic treatment of the audience’s desire to see boobies; with its female manual workers and athletes; and its constant presentation of women who get to be actual characters with friends and hopes and conversations about something other than men –all while never quite waving a “this is the message” banner, while in fact being a successful, suspenseful, playful, well made horror flick, I think it’s an absolute feminist meta-slasher masterpiece.
