Slasher films have become especially self-referential since the 1990s, with fans, critics, and filmmakers expressing an increasing awareness of the rules and tropes that govern this once popular horror subgenre (Petridis 2019). Following Bailey (1999) and others, this pre-formed panel approaches genres as traditions of formulas (55), conventions that evolve and mutate over time (108); a “structural balance of repetition and variation, rigidity and flexibility, familiarity and innovation” (Klein 2010, 3). In this regard, genre conventions function not just as recurring elements but as standards for the production of new horror iterations and transformations. The following three papers investigate two tropes classically associated with the slasher subgenre -- the monster and the “final girl” -- and challenge the moral landscape (built on a rigid good/evil dualism) that traditionally gives birth to each. Our collective goal is to discern the manner in which issues of gender and sexuality, ethics and the politics of representation, characterization and identification, and audience-reception contribute to the fluidity of the tropes listed above. The first paper examines the creative limits of a popular franchise, how a single slasher premise, metanarrative, and monster transmutate throughout cross-media platforms. The second paper analyzes two recent slasher-comedies in order to reevaluate that which traditionally empowers the final girl of slasher convention: gender fluidity. The last paper investigates how contemporary horror challenges and defies the rigid dichotomy between good and evil in favor of a new, and rarely investigated, moral liminality. Despite slashers reaching their peak in the decade following the mid-1970s, our panel suggests that a potential resurgence is underway.
"Essence" of a Franchise: An Examination of Friday the 13th and Jason Voorhees
The Friday the 13th series is principally defined as a dysfunctional family drama that spills into a body-count oriented slasher narrative, featuring elaborate and/or graphic killings of alterous (sexually-expressive) subjects, perpetrated (mostly) by a White, male, queer, slow-moving, mask-wearing mute-brute (Jason Voorhees). This paper examines three recent challenges to the story structures, monster constructions, and metanarratives of traditional slashers. Within Friday the 13th: The Game (2017), an online survival-horror game, this traditional 90-minute slasher is adapted into asymmetric gameplay (eight counselors versus one super-powered Jason), with the stall-kill-escape contest condensed into twenty minutes. Within Vincente DiSanti’s Never Hike Alone(2017), a 54-minute fan film where Jason stalks a single, unsuspecting, male, thru-hiking vlogger, the traditional movie killing spree involving (roughly) a dozen sexually active youths is completely removed. Within Janie Lee’s webzine Camp Counselor Jason (2020), the traditional character, appearance, and function of Jason is reimagined in the form of a demisexual and queer “himbo,” the new protector deity of Camp Crystal Lake. This franchise draws from a complex fluidity of family resemblances, with Jason serving as the most sufficient of conditions. The structural elements of series entries (official or fan-made) are pliable. In the video game, for instance, because Jason is controlled by a human player killing counselors based on skill, choice, and chance, the tomboyish, girl-next-door counselor need not survive the match – just as the Black jock need not die early. The “final girl” metanarrative is explicitly absent from all three cases, a likely effort to refresh the formulaic conventions of the series and subgenre.
- William Chavez (University of California, Santa Barbara, US)
The Friday the 13th series is principally defined as a dysfunctional family drama that spills into a body-count oriented slasher narrative, featuring elaborate and/or graphic killings of alterous (sexually-expressive) subjects, perpetrated (mostly) by a White, male, queer, slow-moving, mask-wearing mute-brute (Jason Voorhees). This paper examines three recent challenges to the story structures, monster constructions, and metanarratives of traditional slashers. Within Friday the 13th: The Game (2017), an online survival-horror game, this traditional 90-minute slasher is adapted into asymmetric gameplay (eight counselors versus one super-powered Jason), with the stall-kill-escape contest condensed into twenty minutes. Within Vincente DiSanti’s Never Hike Alone(2017), a 54-minute fan film where Jason stalks a single, unsuspecting, male, thru-hiking vlogger, the traditional movie killing spree involving (roughly) a dozen sexually active youths is completely removed. Within Janie Lee’s webzine Camp Counselor Jason (2020), the traditional character, appearance, and function of Jason is reimagined in the form of a demisexual and queer “himbo,” the new protector deity of Camp Crystal Lake. This franchise draws from a complex fluidity of family resemblances, with Jason serving as the most sufficient of conditions. The structural elements of series entries (official or fan-made) are pliable. In the video game, for instance, because Jason is controlled by a human player killing counselors based on skill, choice, and chance, the tomboyish, girl-next-door counselor need not survive the match – just as the Black jock need not die early. The “final girl” metanarrative is explicitly absent from all three cases, a likely effort to refresh the formulaic conventions of the series and subgenre.
"I am a fucking piece": Revaluations of the Final Girl Trope in Contemporary Film
Breakthrough insights in queer theory and transgender studies have provided blueprints for horror scholars to reconceive long-held academic and cultural assumptions about the genre. One trope overdue for reconceptualization is Carol Clover’s “final girl.” Originally described in her 1992 Men, Women, and Chain Saws, Clover’s conceptualization is firmly embedded—as her title implies—in her circa 1990s understanding of a strict male-female binary. As such, it does not and could not do justice to the complexity of the final girl’s actual place in horror—a subject empowered through gender fluidity. Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) easily shifts between feminine- and masculine-coded behaviors, as she both chooses to retreat from the Xenomorph rather than fight it head-on, but is also able to quickly make life-and-death decisions without deferring to the men around her. In contrast to the more butch heroines of later films (especially her more action-oriented treatment in James Cameron’s 1986 Aliens), more recent incarnations of the final girl in slasher-comedies, like Tree (Jessica Rothe) in Happy Death Day (Christopher Landon, 2017) or Millie (Kathryn Newton) in Freaky (Landon, 2020), more fully reflect the original gender fluidity of final girls like Ripley. Beyond the male neoliberal fantasies of masculine encoded “feminist” heroes that appear in the prequels and sequels of original final girl classics (Scott’s 2012 Prometheus or David Gordon Green’s 2018 Halloween), characters like Tree and Millie easily move back and forth between romantic and action-oriented scenes, reflecting a power that resides within gender fluidity.
- Eric Brinkman (Ohio State University, US)
Breakthrough insights in queer theory and transgender studies have provided blueprints for horror scholars to reconceive long-held academic and cultural assumptions about the genre. One trope overdue for reconceptualization is Carol Clover’s “final girl.” Originally described in her 1992 Men, Women, and Chain Saws, Clover’s conceptualization is firmly embedded—as her title implies—in her circa 1990s understanding of a strict male-female binary. As such, it does not and could not do justice to the complexity of the final girl’s actual place in horror—a subject empowered through gender fluidity. Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) easily shifts between feminine- and masculine-coded behaviors, as she both chooses to retreat from the Xenomorph rather than fight it head-on, but is also able to quickly make life-and-death decisions without deferring to the men around her. In contrast to the more butch heroines of later films (especially her more action-oriented treatment in James Cameron’s 1986 Aliens), more recent incarnations of the final girl in slasher-comedies, like Tree (Jessica Rothe) in Happy Death Day (Christopher Landon, 2017) or Millie (Kathryn Newton) in Freaky (Landon, 2020), more fully reflect the original gender fluidity of final girls like Ripley. Beyond the male neoliberal fantasies of masculine encoded “feminist” heroes that appear in the prequels and sequels of original final girl classics (Scott’s 2012 Prometheus or David Gordon Green’s 2018 Halloween), characters like Tree and Millie easily move back and forth between romantic and action-oriented scenes, reflecting a power that resides within gender fluidity.
Slaughtering Dualisms: The Rise and Fall of Manichaeism in Contemporary Horror Films
If American horror movies are allegorical tales that wish to educate their audiences, their pedagogical strategy is to back us into our most vulnerable corner, from which we peer at fictive beings who embody merciless societal realities and political tensions. From that dark space of fear, we are not simply watching a horror flick: we are witnessing a morality play that lays out the value systems we should abide by. Late 20th-century fear-factory movies have sparked prolific commentary on how to think of the evil villains (men, Others, homosexuals) who kill helpless protagonists (white, feminine, straight). However, little has been said about a recent reformation that has swept this genre. In the 21st century, theaters have released waves of films whose storylines rather stand in a space of liminality, where the ethical framework that so tightly constrained the horror narrative of the past dissolves into a more inclusive, less dualistic landscape. The aim of this paper is to propose a set of historical and political geneses to this recent shift, looking in turn at the U.S.’s current post-9/11 neoliberal fearscape and to the predictions for its dystopian climate-changed future through a set of exemplary films. We must ask: what does this shift imply, especially when taking into consideration the well-worn analytic paths investigating spectatorship and identification? If the contours of, and separation between, good and evil are far from fixed, how do we give meaning to the world and, moreover, to our positionality within it? What does it mean to champion ambiguity in horror movies within a neoliberal framework? We argue that this wave -- one that fluidly and unexpectedly moves between the old battle among destructive and liberal/conservative forces (as in Alien and The Conjuring) and new, forgiving configurations of revenge (see the remakes of Japanese horror films, displaying an army of what David Kalat called “dead wet girls”, or movies such as Mandy and Us) -- aims to redistribute empathy within a fragmented, pluralistic (and soon to collapse) planetary scenario.
- Lisa Avron & Valeria Dani (Cornell University, US)
If American horror movies are allegorical tales that wish to educate their audiences, their pedagogical strategy is to back us into our most vulnerable corner, from which we peer at fictive beings who embody merciless societal realities and political tensions. From that dark space of fear, we are not simply watching a horror flick: we are witnessing a morality play that lays out the value systems we should abide by. Late 20th-century fear-factory movies have sparked prolific commentary on how to think of the evil villains (men, Others, homosexuals) who kill helpless protagonists (white, feminine, straight). However, little has been said about a recent reformation that has swept this genre. In the 21st century, theaters have released waves of films whose storylines rather stand in a space of liminality, where the ethical framework that so tightly constrained the horror narrative of the past dissolves into a more inclusive, less dualistic landscape. The aim of this paper is to propose a set of historical and political geneses to this recent shift, looking in turn at the U.S.’s current post-9/11 neoliberal fearscape and to the predictions for its dystopian climate-changed future through a set of exemplary films. We must ask: what does this shift imply, especially when taking into consideration the well-worn analytic paths investigating spectatorship and identification? If the contours of, and separation between, good and evil are far from fixed, how do we give meaning to the world and, moreover, to our positionality within it? What does it mean to champion ambiguity in horror movies within a neoliberal framework? We argue that this wave -- one that fluidly and unexpectedly moves between the old battle among destructive and liberal/conservative forces (as in Alien and The Conjuring) and new, forgiving configurations of revenge (see the remakes of Japanese horror films, displaying an army of what David Kalat called “dead wet girls”, or movies such as Mandy and Us) -- aims to redistribute empathy within a fragmented, pluralistic (and soon to collapse) planetary scenario.