It’sno surprise to fans of horror, science fiction, murder mysteries and otherliterary-cinematic arenas normally dismissed as poor relations of the grandRealist narrative that those “lesser” genres often get at truths missed bymainstream fiction. They can register attitudes and anxieties with greateraccuracy than the prestige players.
Thatrealization stands behind several essays in the new edition of The Dread ofDifference: Gender and the Horror Film (University of Texas Press), edited byBarry Keith Grant. Especially interesting is Carol J. Clover’s analysis of thelowest of one of those lower genres, slasher films, the degenerate cousin ofhorror. Although Clover’s academic credentials, as professor of film andmedieval studies at Berkeley, might seem an odd combination, hermillennium-straddling interests suit her well for the task, given the grisly natureof medieval life and lore and the movies she examines.
Clover’sessay, “Her Body, Herself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” begins by stating thepaucity of serious writing on her subject, which has “lain by and large beyondthe purview of respectable criticism”—true enough of many lesser slashers, butless so of “major” pictures in the field such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre(1974). Alfred Hitchcock is, of course, the genre’s acknowledged if inadvertentfather for directing Psycho (1960). Hitchcock’s picture established many of thesubgenre’s conventions—not only the knife wielding assailant, but theattacker’s arrested sexual and social development. Norman Bates, like manysuccessors, was fixated on mom and lived in a decayed mansion (sometimessubstituted by a labyrinth). His victim was a sexually transgressive woman, therecipient of his sexual frustration. The blade (sometimes substituted by otherflesh-tearing implements) was compensation for his impotency. One of Clover’smany interesting asides concerns the “pre-technological” weapons used by the derangedmales. They are ogres on a primal level, ripping at flesh like wild beasts.Guns are for wimps.
Feministcommentary on slasher films usually dwells on women as victim and the scenariosas revealing the status of women under patriarchy in extremis; perhaps thesubgenre’s rise has to do with increasing male anxiety over the increasedassertion of women and their emergence in the workplace? Clover doesn’tentirely disagree but opens new perspectives and endows old arguments withgreater nuance.
Herpoint of departure is identifying and exploring the recurring character shecalls the Final Girl. Among the women preyed on by the slasher, the Final Girlstands out as levelheaded, resourceful. Since the ‘70s, the Final Girl hasgrown from relatively passive survivor to active combatant. The intervention ofa male rescuer is no longer required; in fact, the men who try to help (cops,fathers) are inept and usually die,
TheFinal Girl might mirror the ascent of professional women, but there is anotherdimension revealed by their androgynous names, like Stevie or Marti, and bymale attributes that put her in line with monster-slayers identified for manymillennia as male heroes. Slasher films “are texts in which the categories masculineand feminine, traditionally embodied in male and female, are collapsed into oneand the same character—a character who is anatomically female”—with whom thepredominantly male audience can relate.
“HerBody, Herself” is of several thought-provoking essays collected in The Dread ofDifference.
