The Role of Women in Slasher Films

DISCLAIMER: I know that there are great slasher films with strong female characters who survive without help from a man, however, this essay focuses on female characters in the three films discussed.  Some of the ideas are generalizations that definitely do not apply to other slasher films.   In addition, this may contain spoilers for the following films: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), and Wes Craven’s Scream (1996).

     From the first silent films, gender differences have always existed on screen.  No other genre shows gender differences stronger than in horror films.  Women of horror have always had a very different role than their male co-stars. In the horror genre, men have traditionally had one of two roles: the protector or the victimizer.  The protector (the boyfriend, police officer, etc.) serves as a chivalrous guardian of the female characters, while the victimizer (the monster or serial killer) is a source of terror for the often overly-hysterical, bloodied women.  The women in horror films are almost always portrayed as the powerless victim, but have more recently been shown as power-houses of feminism.  The goal of this analysis is to explore the themes of gender, sexuality, and spectatorship in modern horror films, focusing specifically on slasher films. 

     Slasher films make up a distinct subgenre of horror.  The most basic difference between slasher films and other horror films is the killer's identity; in a slasher film, the murderer is, for the most part, human (as opposed to a monster or alien) who often comes from a troubled, disturbed family.  The killer stalks and murders a string of victims, who are typically sexually active, beautiful teenage girls and their boyfriends.  Instead of using a more humane weapon, such as a gun, slasher film killers use a more violent method such as a knife, machete, or chainsaw.  The film's location is an unfamiliar place, such as a vacation spot, summer camp, seedy motel, or decrepit mansion.  All of these elements combine to form a terrifying narrative of a doomed victim and her psychotic killer.

Horror-of-horrors: The Evolution of the Slasher Film

     Many critics tend to overlook slasher films as having genuine artistic merit because of the sub-genre's close likeness to pornography.  Horror and pornography are the only two genres specifically devoted to the arousal of bodily sensation.  Low-end horror and pornography are sensation genres; they appeal to deeply-embedded, subconscious sexual feelings in the audience, a majority of which is male.  The audience perpetuates a sadistic male gaze while watching attractive women being chased, tortured, and brutally murdered in slasher films.

     The audience is captivated by the women being assaulted on the screen and gets sadistic pleasure out of being undetected viewers of her murder.  The males in the audience identify with the killer, not the victim.  This is not to say that all fans of horror movies are secretly psychopaths who actually want to brutalize women; their sadistic urges are not acted upon and most times, the men are unaware that these urges even exist.

"Exploring the blackness of the subconscious man!" Psycho (1960) 

     Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) is widely regarded as the first slasher film, though it would more accurately be described as a psychological thriller that was an inspiration for many later slasher films.  Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is a psychopath with split personality disorder.  Unable to deal with his mother's death, he assumes her identity by speaking in her voice and wearing her clothes.  The main female character in the film is Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), an attractive young woman who flees Phoenix after embezzling $40,000 from her employer.  The film opens with a scene of Marion and her boyfriend, Sam Loomis (John Gavin), kissing and talking in a hotel room bed.  Marion is wearing only a slip and her bra, which was taboo for the conservative time period.  Immediately, the audience forms an attachment to Marion's feminine body.  Hitchcock designated this brand of spectator experience as feminine, enabling even male audience members to relate to Marion's femininity.

     After leaving Phoenix, Marion stops at the Bates Motel, where she meets Norman Bates, a friendly yet socially inept and somewhat effeminate young man in charge of looking after the motel.  They talk for a while, and Marion decides to take a shower and retire for the evening.  The shower scene is the most infamous scene in Psycho, and one of the most famous in horror cinema.  After Marion leaves Norman's office, he removes a painting from the wall to reveal a peep hole.  The view switches to first-person. Through the peep hole, we see Marion undressing for her shower.  She is wearing black underwear and a black bra. Marion is seen from Norman's perspective; aroused, he covers up the peep hole.

     We then see Marion in the shower.  The camera focuses on the shower head as if the audience was Marion, looking up at it.  The angle switches to a view of the shower curtain from the inside, as if we were in the shower with her.  Through the shower curtain, one can see the door open and a dark figure enter the room.  The shower curtain is suddenly pulled back, revealing an older woman's silhouette, knife in hand.  Marion is brutally stabbed approximately ten times.  Our voyeuristic connection with Marion's body ends suddenly at the moment of its greatest intensity: the knife’s slashing at her naked flesh. The scene flashes to frames of her screaming mouth, her agonized face, her torso next to a gleaming knife, and finally pans to the spiral of dark blood disappearing in the shower drain.  Finally, we see her face, unnaturally compressed against the tile floor, eyes wide open in terror.  The camera then pans to a newspaper which Marion had wrapped the stolen money in, suggesting that she deserved her bloody fate.

     Of course, we later find out that Norman, acting as his mother, killed Marion.  Because Norman was ashamed that he was aroused by Marion, his mother had to kill her.  At the end of the film, a psychologist gives a detailed analysis of Norman's psychotic behavior.  He argues that Norman became his mother, out of guilt for killing her and her lover ten years earlier.  "At times, he could be both personalities, carry on conversations. At other times, the mother half took over completely. Now he was never all Norman, but he was often only Mother."

     The revolutionary plot of Psycho inspired many horror movies that followed.  Though not exact remakes, the films took elements from Psycho and incorporated them in new ways.  One such movie is John Carpenter's independent classic, Halloween (1978).

"The Night HE Came Home!" Halloween (1978)

     John Carpenter's Halloween is the archetype of modern day slasher films.  To discuss how women are portrayed in this film, one needs to discuss the murder scenes.  The first one takes place on Halloween night in 1963, when Michael (then six years old) sees his older sister, Judith (who is supposed to be babysitting him) and her unnamed boyfriend kissing on the couch.  The scene is shot from Michael's point of view in first-person perspective.  We see, from Michael's eyes, his hand grab a knife from the kitchen drawer and walk upstairs towards his sister's bedroom where she and her boyfriend are presumably having sex.  A few minutes later, the boyfriend walks downstairs, leaving his girlfriend alone; Michael continues up the stairs to his sister's room.  He puts on a Halloween mask that is lying on the floor, and enters his sister's room where she is sitting in front of her vanity, topless, brushing her hair and humming.  He plunges the knife repeatedly into his sister's naked body, killing her.  She falls to the floor, her bare breasts covered in blood.

     The image of Judith's murder fuses sex and violence, not only because Judith recently had sex, but also because of the sexual arousal that the audience experiences from viewing Judith's naked body.  There is a voyeuristic aspect as well.  Just as young Michael was not supposed to see his sister without clothes on, the audience feels that it should not have seen her either.  Because the scene is in first-person perspective during the murder, the audience sees through Michael's eyes.  When Judith exclaims, "Michael!" and covers herself when she sees him, she looks directly in the camera, as if at the audience.  Since Michael is wearing a mask and the scene is shown through two eye holes, the audience also hides behind the mask.

     Michael is committed to a psychiatric hospital where is under the care of psychiatrist Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance).  Dr. Loomis' name pays homage to Sam Loomis in Psycho. Fifteen years later, just before Halloween, Dr. Loomis and his nurse are traveling to the psychiatric hospital.  They see a group of patients wandering around and become concerned as to why they are not being watched.  Dr. Loomis directs the nurse to wait in the car, and goes to check the gate up ahead.  All of a sudden, Michael (Tony Moran), now 21 years old, jumps on the car and grabs the nurse's hair through the driver's side window.  Losing control of the car, she struggles to get away.  She cowers to the passenger side of the car and we see Michael's hand coming up behind her to smash the glass.  She runs from the car and Michael drives away, headed for his hometown.  Dr. Loomis finally comes to her side, but is more concerned with Michael's disappearance than the physical and mental well-being of the nurse.  In this scene, the nurse is clearly a submissive victim.  She submits to Dr. Loomis, who has both professional and social authority over her.

     After his escape from the psychiatric hospital, Michael returns to Haddonfield and targets a group of teenagers.  This group becomes the archetype for future slasher film victims.  Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is the virginal, goodie-two shoes of the group, who never seems to get a date because, as she says, she's too smart.  Lynda van der Klok (P.J. Soles) is the promiscuous one who is more concerned with boys than school, remarking that she always forgets all of her school books and does not have time for homework.  Annie Brackett (Nancy Loomis) is the sheriff's daughter, but she smokes pot while driving and remarks that she already has a place where she can "do that," meaning: have sex.

     The first girl that Michael kills when he escapes from the hospital is Annie, who is babysitting across the street from Laurie one night.  Annie is on the phone with Laurie when she spills something on her clothes.  She takes off her shirt and pants as Michael watches through the back door.  This is shot from Michael's point of view, as in the beginning of the film when Michael murders his sister.  Annie goes into the garage, which is detached from the house, to wash her clothes.  She hears something and asks, "Hello? Who's there?"  The door locks.  We see Annie try pulling on the doorknob and banging on the door, with Michael's reflection in the background.  This builds the suspense as the audience knows that Annie is going to be killed before the night is over.

     Michael gets sight of Annie again when she leaves to pick up her boyfriend.  She gets into the car and notices condensation on the window.  Michael, sitting in the back seat, reaches forward and violently grabs her throat.  Annie screams and struggles to break free, but is unable to; with one swift movement, Michael slits her throat and she dies, lying on the steering wheel.

     The next victim is Bob Simms (John Michael Graham), Lynda's boyfriend.  The couple arrive at the house where Annie is babysitting, hoping to find a place where they can have sex.  When they see that no one is home, they start making out on the couch, similar to Michael's sister and her boyfriend 15 years earlier.  They find an empty bedroom and start having sex, after which Linda lights a cigarette.  Bob goes downstairs to get a beer and finds Michael waiting for him.  Michael, showing extreme strength, lifts Bob up by his throat and stabs him into the cabinet.  He then goes upstairs to find Lynda.  When Michael appears wearing Bob's glasses, with a sheet over his body like a ghost (it is Halloween, after all!), Lynda is unaware of the danger she is in.  She exposes her breasts, saying, "Do you see anything you like?"  This is another example of the promiscuity that Michael despises.  She calls Laurie, who answers the phone just in time to hear her being strangled with the telephone cord. 

     Laurie goes across the street to look for Annie.  As she walks across the street, the camera shows the house from Laurie's point of view.  She calls out to her friends and enters when she hears no response.  She goes into a bedroom and sees Annie laid out on the bed with Judith Myers' missing headstone at the head of the bed.  She discovers the other two bodies just as Michael appears and tries to grab her; she falls down the stairs but manages to escape by breaking a window. 

     Laurie is the "final girl" in Halloween because she is, to use her words, "too smart" for boys and too smart to die.  Laurie is pure at heart; while Annie and Lynda think about their boyfriends, sex, and drugs, she seems to be more concerned with her education and her future.  Laurie's friends do not have the valor to fight back against Michael, but she does.  In the scene where she erroneously thinks she is safely locked inside the house, Michael enters through a window and attacks her.  She stabs him with a knitting needle, escapes to an upstairs closet where she stabs him again with a bent hanger, and finally the knife he used to kill her friends, yet he still pursues her.  Dr. Loomis arrives just in time to shoot Michael multiple times, causing him to fall from of the second-story balcony.

            Most of the action in Halloween takes place in 1978, when the film was made.   Some critics believe that Laurie Strode and her group of friends become Michael Myers' targets because they represent the downfall of society in America in the 1970's.  Sexual promiscuity, drug and alcohol use, social and political apathy, and a general lack of morality were all problems that adults believed were arising in young people during this time.

"Now everybody is a victim and everybody is a suspect!" Scream (1996)

     In the 1980s, most slasher movies were seen as clichéd and dull.  Filmmakers recycled the same plot and the slasher subgenre had lost credibility, even for horror film.  To breathe new life into the medium, Wes Craven (The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) among many others), directed writer Kevin Williamson's Scream (1996).  This film revitalized the slasher film while taking a lighthearted approach to the genre's essential elements. While many hardcore horror fans felt that Scream was a mainstream insult to the genre, critics praised the film as its savior.

     The cast of Scream is not unlike the cast of earlier slasher films.  The film focuses on a group of teenagers, most of whom are dating one another.  The first scene opens with the murders of Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) and her boyfriend Steve Orth (Kevin Patrick Walls).  While home alone and waiting for her boyfriend to show up, Casey receives a series of prank phone calls from someone who claims he's dialed the wrong number.  He asks her if she has a boyfriend, to which she replies, "Hmm, no."  This suggests that Casey is promiscuous like other female characters in slasher films. Chatter quickly escalates into terror when Casey realizes that the person on the other line can see her.  After answering some trivia questions wrong, Steve and Casey are both brutally murdered and gutted.  The early murder of Barrymore's character, who is presumed to be a main character since she is the only character on the theater posters, parallels Marion's murder in Psycho.  Both characters are presumed to be the heroines since they are present in the beginning of the film; their murders spark the events that drive the plot of the film.

     The rest of the film focuses on discerning the killer amongst a group of friends: Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), the virginal character whose mother was recently raped and murdered; her boyfriend Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich); Tatum Riley (Rose McGowan), a chesty loudmouth; her boyfriend Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard), the jokester of the group; and Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy), the only single one, who happens to be a horror movie fanatic.

     Sidney and Tatum, the two remaining female teenage characters in the film, are the complete opposite.  The first time we see Sidney, she is doing homework on her computer.  Her boyfriend Billy sneaks in through her window, and we learn that they have been dating for two years and haven't had sex yet.  Her clothes are plain; she usually wears jeans and loose-fitting shirts.  Tatum on the other hand, is much less interested in school.  She is not a virgin and she dresses in mini skirts, tight sweaters, and go-go boots.  Her hair is dyed platinum blonde and she has a large chest.  Tatum is the stereotypical dead girl of slasher films, while Sidney is the "final girl."  When Tatum ultimately meets her untimely death in a garage door, while getting a beer for Stu (reminiscent of Bob's death in Halloween), the audience is less than surprised.

     The makers of Scream pay homage to slasher films by laying out ground rules for surviving a horror movie during a party scene.  Randy, the horror movie buff, lays them out while they're all watching Halloween.  "There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie.  For instance: number one, you can never have sex." At this point everyone jeers him and throws popcorn at him, and Stu remarks "I'd be a dead man!" Randy continues, "Big no-no! Sex equals death! Number two, never drink or do drugs [crowd jeers again], the sin factor, the sin is an extension of number one.  And number three, never, ever, ever under any circumstances say 'I'll be right back', ‘cause you won't be back…  Push the laws and you end up dead, okay?  I'll see you in the kitchen with a knife."  The scene also pokes fun at the act of watching horror movies: the girls don't understand what the big deal is, and all of the guys want to know, "When are we going to see Jamie Lee's breasts?!"

     Though Sidney does end up losing her virginity to Billy, she is the final girl of Scream because she fights back.  Sidney's character is seen as weak at first, but she grows more resilient as the movie continues.  When Stu and Billy are finally revealed as the killers at the end of the film, Sidney and her rival Gale Weathers  (Courteney Cox), a nosey reporter who wrote a libelous book about Sidney's mother's murder, team up to defeat them.  Deputy Dewey, the "protector," is unable to protect them after he gets stabbed.  This shows a more active approach to being the final girl (or final girls in this case), as opposed to the passive defense in movies such as Halloween.  In earlier slasher films, the final girl survived mostly from coincidence or the help of someone else; Scream revolutionized the genre by showing a strong female character who takes an active role in her survival – at least until the sequel.

Suggestions for further reading:

Clover, Carol J.  Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1992.

Grant, Barry K., ed. The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Austin: University of Austin Press, 1996.

Mulvey, Laura.  “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”  Feminist Film Theory. Sue Thornham, ed.  New York: NYU Press, 1999. Mulvey’s article is a foundation of film studies and feminist film studies and is really interesting because it reveals WHY we love movies.