Friday the 13th, The Slasher Genre and the Interstitial Gender Space
Heavy breathing. Laughter floats in the air. The twigs snap under your feet. A few feet away, a young girl walks through the woods. She is your next victim. The door cracks and splinters as the lumbering giant crashes through the wood, reaching frantically for the weapon held tightly in your grasp. Plunging the machete through his skull, he cries out, slumps to the ground and lays still. You were his last victim.
In 1975, Laura Mulvey published ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, a formative piece of writing in the world of Feminist film study. Applying the psychoanalytic concepts of cinematic identification and the voyeuristic pleasure that this can bring, she proposed the foundational idea that the mainstream system of film production and audience reception was centred wholly around the male experience. This theory of identification (Mulvey, p. 18) proposes two forms of viewing pleasure: the first, fetishistic scopophilia, arising ‘from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight’, often controlled through the camerawork and cinematography; the second, ego libido, can arise ‘through narcissism and the constitution of the ego’ - here, the audience member finds ‘identification with the image seen’ and believes themselves represented in the character on screen - this is often controlled through the narrative. Mulvey suggested that through both the narrative, and the filmic construction, the male character is presented as the primary locus of focus. Narratively, he is heralded as the ‘active one’ responsible with ‘advancing the story, [and] making things happen' (Mulvey, p. 20), where the female characters are reduced to a ‘passive’ role, simply operating as both an ‘erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium’ (Mulvey, p. 19) - often, the reductive role held by the female characters only serves to reinforce the male audience’s voyeuristic power, as ‘the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude’. Cinematically, this is reinforced through filmic methods Mulvey has coined as the ‘Male Gaze’ - shots of female bodies are regularly broken up with fetishistic intention, assigning the cinematographic focus to her legs, face or breasts, so they can be ‘simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact’. Together, both the camerawork and narrative serve to create a ‘symbolic order which articulates desire’ (Mulvey, p. 18), and it is within these ‘cinematic codes and their relationship to formative external structures’ that ‘mainstream film’ (Mulvey, p. 25) works to reinforce the masculine power at work within both the filmic and real world.
The slasher film offers little comfort to this interpretation. If the gender-binary theory of Mulvey is to be believed, the male audience (who regularly find their ego swollen by the bravado of their male counterpart on display) are left to identify with the ‘comic ineptitude and failure’ (Clover, p. 38) of their would-be saviours in a masochistic display of ‘ineffectual’ incompetence, or, rather sadistically, the vicious killers responsible for the murder and torture of their supposed ‘erotic objects’. Likewise, the women in the audience (which, crucially, Mulvey never really accounts for) find new ‘active’ characters of their own to identify with, in the triumphant Final Girls. Thus, at first glance, the slasher film in its ‘wider critical divergence [from] the more slick and systematic mainstream genres’ (Rieser, p. 375), may appear to challenge the gender-binary norms of Mulvey and offer a new, feminist icon to empower the women in the audience watching their heroine dispatch the aggressive, once-omnipotent and now-impotent male antagonist.
In reality, the slasher film is less clear. Oxymoronically, it can be argued as both progressive and regressive, certainly psychoanalytically repressive, and in every murderous event, highly aggressive. The subject of much debate throughout its filmic history, the figure of both the slasher and the Final Girl are emblematic of the complicated gender representations found within horror, and, as a result of the freedom lent by inexplicit interpretations, have been argued to represent a progressive view on both gender and identification, and, opposingly, have been accused of reinforcing the binary simplicity of mainstream Hollywood, through their portrayal of a decidedly ‘heterosexual and homophobic masculinity’ (Rieser, p. 389).
Irrelevant of their stance, most interpretations of the slasher and the Final Girl (and indeed, the origin of her name itself) can be traced to Carol Clover’s essay ‘Her Body, Himself’ (1992), an equally formative text in the study of the horror film, as it is in challenging contemporary feminist understanding. Offering up the slasher genre as an answer to Mulvey’s call for non-mainstream cinema, Clover explores the gendered representations of the male killer and the female hero that survives to effectively dispatch him. And, of course, the trend of these gendered roles are historically maintained and reinforced with little deviation. A clear progenitor of the ‘established’ slasher genre, Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) can be seen to exhibit these exact trends: Norman Bates, the male killer, which Clover (p. 27) characterises as in some form of ‘gender distress’, here brought on by his matricide and the guilt which causes him to integrate Mother’s own sadistic, misogynistic personality into his own; and his string of victims, which, whilst examples are found in both genders, his complex ‘oedipal psychosis is such that only female victims will do’ (p. 34), and much like the killer in Dressed to Kill (1980), he must eliminate any woman who arouses him. Similarly, within the Friday the 13th franchise (1980 - 2009), we can see a continuation of this timeworn set-up. Though the original Friday the 13th (1980) twists this formula, ‘making the killer a mother who has internalised her dead son, rather than the other way around’ (Kendrick, p. 324), urging her to kill young, sexually-active women, the subsequent string of sequels, beginning with Friday the 13th: Part II (1981), saw the central killer, Jason Vorhees, murder young women in revenge of his dispatched mother with the same ‘fury [that] is unmistakably sexual in both roots and expression’ (p. 42) that plagued Norman and indeed, plagues most slasher antagonists.
However, despite these explicit gendered representations, supposedly outwardly male and outwardly female, Clover (p. 22) instead argues that the slasher genre offers a more free expression of character and gender, where ‘masculinity and femininity are more states of mind than body’. This freedom, and thus, the ‘fluidity of engaged perspective’ it provides, is in keeping with the ‘psychoanalytical model’ Mulvey applies, allowing the role of ‘threat and victim’, and subsequently the role of villain and saviour, to ‘coexist in the same unconscious, regardless of the anatomical sex’ (p. 47), much like how ‘attacker and attacked are expressions of the same self in nightmares’ (p. 12). Therefore, instead of seeing the physical bodies of male and female as holding the role of hero and victim, we can see these roles as being inherently gendered themselves, irrelevant of what bodies are occupying them. As Clover (p. 59) puts it, ‘those who save themselves are male, and those who are saved by others are female’.
Presumably, this psychological distinction (though, not explicitly represented) would allow a male audience member to see themselves as the hero, regardless of the gender of their onscreen surrogate. However, by that same logic, this wholly denies the female audience a heroic surrogate of their own to supposedly identify with, undoing any outward (and actor-cast) representation of progressive feminine heroines that the Final Girl appears to embody. The slasher film makes explicit this bodily confusion, doubling down on the denial of positive female surrogates, by endowing the Final Girl with male traits that help to intentionally disguise her femininity. This helps to negate any disconnect the male audience may (and is expected to) feel in watching their female surrogate.
It is worth nothing that the Final Girl is not the only woman present in the film. In fact, there is a significant number that follows the archetypal ‘mainstream’ representation - that is, women who exist only as ‘erotic objects’ for the male audience to voyeuristically view, consistently on the receiving end of the expected fetishised, broken-up shots, and left with little-to-no active presence in the narrative story. Interestingly, in a deviation from Mulvey’s heroic, active male-surrogates who hold the gaze of the male audience, these fetishised shots are often under the control and point-of-view of the diegetically voyeuristic horror villain - here, in the slasher genre, the archetypal female characters exist as both erotic objects, and the sadistic object of murderous intent. This integration of mainstream film practice reinforces ‘accusations of misogyny against the films’, proving the assumption that the slasher and his ‘controlling gaze is inherently masculine’ (Kendrick, p. 321), and therefore little has actually changed, but is also an indicator of the similarities between the passivity of these female characters, and the lack of care and respect they are placed under - their ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ which Mulvey (p. 19) characterises, is of the same quality as their to-be-killed-ness; in other words, their value as erotic ‘spectacle’ is equivalent to their value as violent ‘spectacle’.
The Final Girl is delineated from these passive, objectified women by purposeful design. Narratively she is characterised with ‘smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters’, unquestionably occupying the ‘active’ role and forwarding the story - when she defeats the slasher, she occupies the role of creating the spectacle he once did. Here, she is allied with the ‘very boys she fears or rejects, not to speak of the killer himself’ (p. 40) - an alliance that is solidified during the climax through its psychoanalytical application of phallic power and imagery. Accepting the villain (who we could assume the male audience is identifying with throughout) as unquestionably male, we can determine that the Final Girl’s appropriation of his phallic weapon, as seen with Trish during the climax of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984), allows the male audience member to ignore the Final Girls’ feminine body and identify themselves with this newly male-gendered character. In picking up and utilising his weapon, she has ‘manned herself’, acquiring ‘a shared masculinity, materialised in all those phallic symbols’ (p. 49), simultaneously unmanning the oppressor so the transition in surrogate-identification is as smooth as possible. Psychoanalytically, ‘women in representation can signify castration’ (Mulvey, p. 25), and in the freedom of the slasher film and its inherent gore, this castration is made explicit.
Not to suggest that the Final Girl doesn’t also exhibit the traits found within the objectified women. Her ‘sexual reluctance’ may set her apart from the other girls' one-note characterisation, but she is still cast as a conventionally attractive actress, and photographed through the male gaze, and therefore ‘still exists to support desire within the film’ - critically, the audience does not ‘experience her desire but only the desire of the monster for her’ (Rieser, p. 377). Even psychoanalytically, she is lacking ‘the ultimate signifier of masculinity, by holding virtually no institutional or social power’ (p. 378), simply a signifier or ‘female figure in a male mould rather than a heroine pursuing a feminine subjective trajectory’. Similarly, although she is phallicised and subsequently masculinised through her appropriation of violence and acquisition of a weapon as the film draws to a conclusion, she is still ‘explicitly feminised [by] undergoing the agonising trials of victimhood’ (Kendrick, p. 321) that is seen in all feminine victims throughout the genre. This dichotomy is representative of both worlds - holding the active responsibility of the ‘male protagonist’ and the eroticised look of the ‘female object’, the audience is ‘masculinised by and through the very figure by and through whom we were earlier feminised’ (Clover, p. 59), and for the male audience, the ‘structures of male competency and sexuality’ (p. 51) are not disturbed by the Final Girl’s simultaneous satisfying femininity and active masculinity.
Irrelevant of her gender, the degree to which the Final Girl can be categorised as a hero, and thus, the extent of her deviation from her objectified counterparts is clearly under debate. Her supposed ‘success’ is ‘severely limited’ - she often only succeeds in escaping with her life, and even on occasions when she dispatches the villain, she is brought back to die in the sequel. Victory is short-lived or restricted, and through the inevitable pain of faux-success, ‘woman is equated with victimhood’ (Rieser, p. 377), a sentiment that reinforces those same misogynist beliefs and negative production practices. Despite operating as a supposed protagonist, she sees little expansion or change in her characterisation outside of a growth of traumatic stress and pain.
So, the slasher film determines to present the final girl as a male-audience surrogate, where does it place the Slasher themselves? This gender confusion is not restricted to the Final Girls only. Even on the rare occasion when a villain or monster is an explicitly gendered female, they are similarly endowed with male attributes. Indeed, the twist of the original Friday the 13th is built entirely on the assumption that the villain on a killing spree is a man, though, once Pamela Vorhees is revealed to be the woman she is, she is immediately decapitated and removed from the story, simply reduced to another female victim, by the newly-masculinised heroine. If ‘there is something about the victim function that wants manifestation in a female, and something about the monster and hero functions that wants expression in a male’, this stylistic decision to withhold Pamela’s identity throughout (outside of building mystery and tension) would clearly reflect this. Though Clover (p. 12) may consider the male villain as unquestionably male until the moment of submissive defeat, engaged as they are in ‘feminine postures at the moment of the extremity’, Rieser has a different determination.
Mulvey’s theory of the ‘male gaze’ has been re-evaluated from many perspectives, not least in its reluctance to acknowledge the homosexual perspective, and the reinforcement it places on the gender binary system. Though Clover articulates the slasher as a divergence from the mainstream form which also serves to reinforce this system (which, in some respects, it is), her own theoretical argument is guilty of the same charge - by applying the traits of masculinity and femininity in direct opposition with their equivalent genders, this serves to highlight the binary further, restricting the understanding of what femininity, and indeed, masculinity, can be. A more inclusive perspective would accept that a woman is permitted to incorporate these traits whilst still remaining firmly in the grounds of the female gender.
These binary reinforcements are seemingly built on the supposition that gender is understood through a single binary model, a sliding scale of masculinity and femininity, and not the two-dimensional field that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1995) proposes. (Of course, Sedgwick’s model wasn’t proposed until after Mulvey and Clover wrote their arguments, so their own reinforcement is perhaps indicative of the result of building off the common contemporary understanding, more so than malice or intentionally lacking inclusivity). Sedgwick’s model determines that these ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits are actually widely distributed across both genders, acting as their own independent variables - here, ‘a lack of femininity does not in and of itself signify a high degree of masculinity and vice versa’ (Rieser, p. 381). This two-dimensional field is all-inclusive, and though it contains the traditional forms of masculinity and femininity, it is within the interstitial, non-binary characterisation that Rieser places both the Slasher and the Final Girl.
This interstitial realm is one of ‘categorical incompleteness’, but crucial to Rieser’s (p. 380) argument is the 'gender deviance or sexual deviance’ these characters take from the
‘hegemonic masculine [and indeed, feminine] ideal’ by occupying this realm. For the male villain, this deviation marks him as ‘a defective, abnormal, perhaps non-masculine man, a male queer figure, in short, but not a woman’ as previously decided. Historically, that deviance from the ‘conventional catalogue of masculine etiquette’ was read as femininity due to lack of other available gendered readings on the binary sliding model - that which is not masculine in the definitions of the patriarchal gender system, must be feminine, because what else could it be?
That the male ‘queer’ figure is presented as monstrous for ‘challenging the neat symmetry of the binary gender system and the naturalisation of gender as sex’ (p. 381), and the female is accepted and hailed as a hero for her own slidings from the confines of “traditional” femininity suggests that patriarchy ‘under certain circumstances allows female figures a degree of masculinity, whereas femininity in men is either funny or horrific’ (p. 380). If anything, the slasher shows that ‘the somewhat masculine woman is no longer declared as queer and therefore monstrous’ (p. 383), but only under ‘exceptional circumstances’, such as threats to health and wellbeing - whereas the male is ‘irrevocably outside the grasp of the binary gender system’ (p. 381) and beyond saving or converting. The Final Girl is equally ‘forced to enter this realm of ambiguity’, by the ‘aggressive moves of the monster’, who is voluntarily occupying this space, and therefore far more guilty of intentional non-hegemonic activity.
Rieser even suggests that this interstitial realm is the grounds for their true battle, where both the Final Girl and Monstrous Villain are fighting for alignment with the binary ideal, ‘competing for clarification’ and an exit from the ‘polymorphous and confused underground of non-hegemonic gender spaces’ (p. 382). For this battle to be a narrative success, in her violent, final act, the woman must remove the threat to hegemonic masculinity, in the form of the ‘queer’ monster. Subsequently, she can then freely dispel her own urges to deviate, and as the audience surrogate, dispel any of their own they held. With this monster removed, the status quo is returned to - the femininity she holds (and always held) is reinstated, and any ‘traditionally’ masculine traits are either left behind or absorbed by the male audience when they align with her, regaining their ‘imaginary control’ and omnipotent power, and leaving ‘both the monster and the woman behind’ (p. 389) as they exit the film and the theatre.
Assuming, once more, from the position of a male audience member, this male figure is ‘monstrous precisely because of their closeness, rather than their distance from the (fears of the) implied spectator’ - queerness in men is a much more dangerous and frightening threat to that audience than the integration of their traits into their female friends and family, by nature of its personal invasiveness and immediacy. By dispatching this character to positively conclude the story, and by making them the villain in the first place, the male audience member, who has been ‘temporarily and thrillingly been allowed into the field of ambiguity’ is ‘reassured’ and left to understand ‘that this gender-bending sphere is uninhabitable’ (p. 389). By the conclusion, ‘heterosexuality and the sex/gender system it maintains are reinstated’ (p. 388), whilst divergence of any kind from the hegemonic masculine binary is homophobically ‘othered’ and made to seem villainous. Subsequently, despite originally appearing to divert from the traditional, gender-conforming and reinforcing norms of the mainstream Hollywood film, the slasher could be argued as actually serving to similarly reinforce this ideology of hegemonic masculinity through the villainization of anything seen outside of this gender binary, despite its exciting venturing into the interstitial realm of non-traditional masculine and feminine gender and sex roles.
The slasher film has a long lasting legacy. Though it found its creative and productive peak during the 1980s, it found establishment as a subgenre of its own, becoming the subject of many critical reimaginings, remakes and reinterpretations. Due to their cheap production methods, universal marketing (the mix of exploitation, horror, ‘teen romance trend’ and ‘tough heroine’) welcoming ‘female, as well as male, youth’ (Nowell, p. 131), the immediate visceral reaction the increasingly realistic gore-effects inspire, and the simple, copy-paste narratives that focus on the granting of repetitive spectacle, they are frequently a commercial and economical success, despite the critic’s cries of derivative drivel - the ridiculous realm of numbered sequels once more points to this. Whilst the filmic content itself may signify misogynistic, homophobic and regressive views, this is buried beneath complex psychoanalysis, and as identified, it may appear, on the surface level, to present a rather progressive view of all genders and their representations. This potentially makes the films dangerous, as the bolstering of the traditional views is hidden behind the facade of simple entertainment, but also allows ignorance for the willing viewer - if they champion the surface level, and read their own interpretations, they can reinvent the meaning of the explicit visuals to suit their own preference - invoking a ‘brief cultural moment that could imagine the hero as a woman’ (Hayt, p. 135). Because it offers a toying and exploratory foray into this interstitial realm, providing a voice and face to the “monstrous” other, this may account for the films relative popularity, and more crucially, the star power behind the slasher icons themselves, especially within cult, queer and feminist cultures (Rieser, p. 380). Certainly, it is not contrary to suggest that the subgenre finds its pop cultural success in the slasher villains first and foremost, and the ability in the variant audience members to ignore the subtext and root for the villain, creatively dispatching these reinforcers of the status quo in their victims, may call to the modern sensibilities and attitudes towards the understandings of gender and sex, providing a positive reinterpretation of a foundationally misogynistic, homophobic and regressive genre.
Reference List
Literature
Carol, J. C. (1992) Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Mulvey, L. (1975) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in Mulvey, L. (ed.), Visual and Other Pleasures. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp. 14 - 26.
Kendrick, J. (2017) ‘Slasher Films and Gore in the 1980s’ in Benshoff, H. (ed.), A Companion to the Horror Film. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 310 - 328.
Nowell, R. (2011) ‘"There's More Than One Way to Lose Your Heart": The American Film Industry, Early Teen Slasher Films, and Female Youth’, Cinema Journal, Vol. 51, No. 1, pp. 115 - 140.
Rieser, K. (2001) ‘Masculinity and Monstrosity: Characterization and Identification in the Slasher Film’, Men and Masculinities, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 370 - 392.
Hayt, A. (2016) ‘Moving past the trauma: feminist criticism and transformations of the slasher genre’ in Hole, K. (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Cinema & Gender. London: Routledge, pp. 131 - 140.
Sedgwick, E. K. (1995) ‘Gosh, Boy George, you must be awfully secure in your masculinity’ in M. Berger, B. Wallis, and S. Watson (ed.) Constructing Masculinity. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 11 - 20.
Filmography
Psycho, 1960. [Film]. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. US: Universal Pictures.
Dressed to Kill, 1980. [Film]. Directed by Brian De Palma. US: American International Pictures.
Friday the 13th, 1980. [Film]. Directed by Sean S. Cunningham. US: Paramount Pictures.
Friday the 13th: Part II, 1981. [Film]. Directed by Steve Miner. US: Paramount Pictures.
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, 1984. [Film]. Directed by Joseph Zito. US: Paramount Pictures.
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